4Game

Gwent is the first CGC I've played and I'm relatively new to it, 7 months or so of playing. So I don't really have a reference what is balance for a competitive game or not, but I think Gwent has been consistently fun and interesting for me this whole time, In that time I've experienced the rise of different metas and factions, the additions of new cards that can drastically change that all, and the nerfs and buffs that may or may not make a difference in game play. The one constant is people have a displeasure about the game being balanced or not but I don't think there's really any definition of what makes a balanced game.

So what is a balanced game? Is it just being happy that they alter cards or leader abilities to change what the player community thinks is a stale meta? How can a game be balanced when player experience is so different for newbies, for ranked, and for fmmr ladder?

My thoughts are that the abilities of all factions to be competitive has improved greatly since I started playing Gwent, and people are too soon to ask for nerfs to cards rather than buffs to existing ones. I see a lot of people comment on the history of metas and patches in this game and that is interesting to me, but I think that its a lot of history repeating itself. So how do we define what is an acceptable balance? Surely it cant mean that I can play whatever homebrew deck I want on ranked and expect to win games, or expect that a faction and deck doesnt have unfavoured match ups….so what is balance? Maybe player expectations of it are sometimes unreasonable?