[Unpopular opinion] The old Draft mode was the only way to experience Gwent as it has been originally

TL:DR Old draft was great because it was chaotic, unconstructed and and allowed you to escape the reality of the ladder where the only way to win is to completely counter the opponent's unfair combo/cards, or play combos that are even more toxic

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For those who have forgotten, Draft mode used to be different in multiple ways than the draft we have today (I think it is also named differently today) – The main difference was, that it was much much less constructed, instead of picking group of 3 cards, out of 3 choices that have the same theme/synergy/purpose , you would pick every single card, out of 3 choices individually.

I think that the old draft did one thing great, and I really miss about Gwent – it made strong combos rare, most of the time, you would have to pick a card that has no synergy in your deck, and figure out how to make it work (or mulligan it) later

I personally didn't play from Beta, I started around 3 years ago, and I remember the first year or so of playing being more liberal, you could just pop into the deck builder, without having a lock on to a certain archetype, and just pick a leader you want to play, and go through the cards and add the ones you think are fun and would work good with that leader, and that was usually enough to do pretty well at the game.

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Today, when you are playing against premade archetypes, with…. I wrote here a list of broken cards that are must include to have a chance to compete in Gwent, but than I remembered that this community downvotes people who tell them that the cards they play are broken (bruh it's a game, why do you guys get offended this easily), so I will let you imagine the list on your own – if you don't play any of those cards, you simply stand no chance.

These days we all focus on the Aerondight and Nekker meta – they are toxic, don't get me wrong, but the problem was here 2 months ago as well – in Gwent today, most decks don't think, they are auto piloted – without looking at your opponents board, you know that you first need to play that card, to set up that other card, and that other card to keep at round 3 etc etc – we just play to achieve our win condition, while the opponent's playstyle/deck is just background noise, rarely we actually have to pay attention to it and tell it to shut up, but most of the time we build up to the combo and play it, and hope it plays for more points – it used to be different! you had some combos but besides few notable exception, they weren't broken, they felt natural to the flow of the game – game that used to feel more like chess, rather than the War card game (that mindless card game where both players reveal the top card of their deck each time, and the bigger card wins)

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