In my opinion, Tunnel Drill in its current form is too strong for a 6p card, so I tried to change it a bit to make it more balanced. My reasoning behind the proposed changes:
- Fee cards have de facto zeal on them as long as you have coins. With the Tunnel drill in its current form, you can play Cleaver or some other Crownsplitters, hoard some coins, place the drill between them, and easily kill any key engines your opponent might have and use lined pockets on-demand to get even more coins and drill even more until your opponent has nothing. The main problem is how uninteractive it is. Order/Fee would be like a regular fee, but like with order, the ability would be dormant for a turn, which means that the drill has to survive for a turn before you can use it.
- Cards that have strong abilities tied to order without zeal are usually not very popular (see Vissegerd post nerf). They can easily fall victim to standard 5p removal. This is why I gave drill 3 power + 4 armor. It takes 7 hits to kill with damage so you need to use a larger caliber like rockslide or heatwave or other methods like locks. preparing some damage like raiders+stunning blow works too. 3 power also opens up the possibility to seize it with Sweers/Amnesty and makes it easier to seize with Philippa and it decreases the tempo of this card a little bit.
Overall I think these changes would make the deck more interactive and less unfair to deal with. On the part of the crime deck player, it would make them consider running a purify to remove the lock, running Petri's philter to get zeal. Using Azar Javed to protect it better. Using Whoreson's Freakshow as an alternative that does lower damage but without setup and with Zeal.
For the opponent, it gives them a chance to counter this card in multiple ways.
What do you think?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/maydjr/tunnel_drill_rework_idea/
