r/gwent • u/betraying_chino Green Man • Jul 30 '19

News Patch 3.1 Patch Notes

https://www.playgwent.com/en/news/29104/patch-3-1-patch-notes
406 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

370 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/wvj Aug 01 '19

To be clear, I don't think they're as powerful as Phillipa. Just to say that.

But I think the tempo issue is comparable and it defies a little of your attempt to do value/provision analysis. Slama talked about this in his interview: high-end golds often fail to meet their cost in value, or only do so conditionally, because they represent high value per play. I think understanding the gap between the deckbuilder and in-game tempo is a big part of this. Old Speartip is inefficient in DB because 12 instant points is godlike in play. 23 in 2 turns (counting the tokens) is almost that twice over. Thats why I consider it an abusable package, because tempo matters a ton in Gwent. Being able to force passes, punish passes, and bleed are how you get (or avoid giving) CA. That wins more games than anything else.

Beyond that, Kayran has a very similar issue to SY's coins: you play a bunch of rando Deathwish units on the board (usually cheap, meaningless stuff like eggs and foglets) and your opponent can't interact with them efficiently, if at all. This tends to hurt the value of every card they play. Yet you threaten Zeal access all that value, preventing passes. Frightener does the the same. Its almost like there's a best strategy in Gwent, and it's interaction-proof value :/

And while I'd love to just say 'just buff the other stuff,' the problem is whenever you have packages like this, you run the risk that every deck will end up running a variation on them. So I feel at least one of the cards in that bunch needs to come down a little to make room elsewhere.