Gwent: The Witcher Card Game (Now in PUBLIC beta)

I couldn't find a dedicated thread for this so here goes. Sign up for the beta here. If you don't have a key, check spam etc, gmail had filed mine away under Promotions.

It's basically a modified version of the game you all love from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. And when I say love, I really mean hate, because you've already spent 150 hours in Witcher 3 and can't finish the main storyline because GWENT.

That describes me. Enjoyed W3, havent fininshed, got sidetracked with Gwent then fizzled out.

Looks like the Beta is PC and Xbox only though. Too bad.

Watched a decent LP on it last night. Looks interesting...

As someone who has lost many hours to Gwent, I'm excited! (And ashamed)

I still haven't received an email for the closed beta, and I signed up as soon as this whole thing was announced. Didn't see anything in junk mail, but maybe I missed it.

I got access to the beta this morning right as I got to work. This day has been the longest!

Well I played last night until about 3 hours past when I should've gone to bed, so I guess you could say I enjoyed it.

The best way to describe my time in game so far is 'dabbling'. There's a good game here - I like the mechanics, the card art etc, but the interface seems quite clunky and un-intuitive compared to its biggest competitor... the elephant in the room, Hearthstone. Gwent is definitely less user friendly, but I'm going to keep giving it a shot, mostly on the back of how much I love the Witcher franchise.

My favourite deck so far is probably the monsters. Spawning breedable units then giving them thunderbolt = card advantage!

kergguz wrote:

The best way to describe my time in game so far is 'dabbling'. There's a good game here - I like the mechanics, the card art etc, but the interface seems quite clunky and un-intuitive compared to its biggest competitor... the elephant in the room, Hearthstone. Gwent is definitely less user friendly, but I'm going to keep giving it a shot, mostly on the back of how much I love the Witcher franchise.

My favourite deck so far is probably the monsters. Spawning breedable units then giving them thunderbolt = card advantage!

I was in love with the monster deck, until I learned how to stack the Skellige. Damaged warriors + savage bear + the guy who adds a bonus everytime someone is damaged (I forget the name right now) + war cry + Thunderbolt = OP

I was enjoying the game enough to put some money down, so I bought 40 packs for £35. Just as an aside- I was disappointed to see that the game is just as expensive as Hearthstone, maybe even more so when the exchange rate for crafting/milling cards is taken into account.

I've been playing a monster weather deck and it's pure filth. In 20 games I think I've lost maybe twice. Either the community isn't big enough to develop counters to it (no-one seems to run tech cards like Clear Skies), or it needs a big nerf. At the moment I almost feel bad stomping people, but I put all my mats into building it so I'm gonna damn well play it!

Does anyone know if cards/purchases will carry over from beta to live? This is the only thing stopping me from dropping money right now...

Old Man Pi wrote:

Does anyone know if cards/purchases will carry over from beta to live? This is the only thing stopping me from dropping money right now...

They've said it's not guaranteed, but that you would be suitably compensated should there be any kind of reset.

Not really digging it after the first hour or so. The interface feels clunkier than it should and I'm not really in the mood to start a new collection in a card game. There will still be the singleplayer mode once it's released, right? That's really all I'm interested in at this point.

nako wrote:

The interface feels clunkier than it should .

It definitely needs some work. My worry is that they're mostly balancing cards and hunting glitches, rather than working much on the UI.

I got into this round of closed Beta. Having fun with the game so far. Just making sure to keep my (emotional) investment low. They are doing quite drastic testing/balancing at the moment and cards can get severely changed over night. I'm suspecting that when they learn how some combo works or what people do with it, they nerf it into oblivion to force people to come up with new combos. So there are a lot of raging internet entitlement kiddies that are frothing at the mouth over how their favourite (and often the only) combo was turned from steamrolling-the-leaderboards into irrelevance, and since they deconstructed all other cards just to have this one win-button combo, they are now impotent.

It's actually quite fun game. I find that, if you have deck with a purpose, very rarely does randomness come in to decide the match. The randomness, for me at least so far, seems to just make matches play out differently. Maybe one in ten matches would I feel that the RNG swung the game against or for me.

With that said, I just played my favourite match so far. It was actually tense to the end.

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/NIr5Bmc6yZkiLSugXuEDtC8plZvVwMsqwNyl195MiXCG_e6jsPqhZ8oQd392EoPsFxT79aUy62Ue0ATN0T9HxtPEQ3UPF9y7sL_jCMjoFwJMLfoQ80SfdCLhx9RGKniSIRpgpk77Ucop5RO80NfDisRtmoLlnN3NxrY_BBWRL42xqE9YgSnHF2MAgCPiCqSY142Io7ZSTA6bWnvPv8TD9N30VEhUTuLJV-i5Bnh50JPPtKJZdoCDuYui-DLhycl_JnEFqtBCHmxHLShE7kyUe10rID76Y1H5mGPI9J2r-9CeWDN06oIkj7UmLiZjInznMwpPGs7O4wejYSVl2cRFsD6_VGY79vFKdw1rNrcPk418PzD5y6QqZvJIOHi-ICF1XutX_p1R7PDvUE0tX5v48-7meM943In8-xXfBiQZ9fhAyTewTSxXn6fkUZP9_BBsB0O7snFBBHreB0bUsVomVbEB18okN89k298SNSkqnb3bCmBosMY1A6VokW3ho1DFlRJjwRuN_6p8gplnA3SaJHaV44HgGQ3MSlifdI5PkgbZVFG6C3kV1KSvXri3ghLAXp73D4m1jObAYrP4_kFRXbRSGBYq_OBno-EwBl5vABUAmlfhl-l947OndE0jC76Vq_pg3Vwned9VxSEw5FzXtW14-BzzLSjWP3sKxupOTw=w1283-h901-no)

Yup, played this a bit earlier and it seems like good fun. If you loved Gwent in the Witcher 3, you'll definitely love what they've done here.

If it goes mobile, I'm 100% on board.

Re: RNG
Any game where you shuffle a deck of cards and draw from the top has randomness. That's why we play card games, right? It's fun to draw randomized cards and then try to make them work.

@Rawk

True. But some games rely on randomness as a factor a lot more than others.

Part of the draw with Gwent is to build a deck that works with/around randomness and still achieves its goal. A well designed and built deck will be almost immune to RNG.

MoonDragon wrote:

A well designed and built deck will be almost immune to RNG.

That's what's always drawn me to card games. Can you build a deck that can beat the random? Can you engineer order in chaos?

After 3 years of playing Hearthstone, Team5 seems to believe the answer is a definitive: No, LOL.

I got into the Gwent beta this weekend. I was initially put off by how weird it is, but I came to appreciate it. I'm not sure if it is going to draw me (and my money) away from Hearthstone, but it has a shot. It definitely has a lot less RNG mechanics... but not none. There are some cards, for instance, which will play random spell from your deck. In one of the starter decks that means you could randomly blow up your biggest dude. That was my first loss, after about an hour of winning.

Another game I'm playing right now is Shardbound, which is in Pre-Alpha. So far I think this shows the most promise, but Heartstone still has the edge; in that I can play it on a treadmill from my phone.

I've had my eye on this but no luck getting into the beta yet.

Tyops wrote:

I've had my eye on this but no luck getting into the beta yet.

I played a little but want to wait for the story mode to ease me into it. It's more complex with way more cards than the minigame, so it's a bit overwhelming to jump into and play. Its not particularly hard, but you would need to do some research and studying to figure out how to play properly, and I have too many other games to play to bother.

I'm betting the story mode teaches you the game really well.

Is it PvP or do you play the AI?

Right now it is just PvP, but they are planning Single Player campaigns.

Would love even a bit of single player to help with grinding cards. My starting card pool is barely workable against AI practice.

And no I haven't gotten gud yet.

There is both PvP and AI. But for closed beta, playing against AI gives you no rewards. It's good enough to check how a newly minted deck plays, but that's about it.

Match making is pretty good at lower levels. You generally get put against people of a similar level with similar cards as you. Very rarely did I go against someone who clearly had more than they should (I'm talking about having 4 synergizing gold cards in a perfectly built deck at level 10) at their level.

So when you're level 3, playing one of the starter decks + maybe 3-4 extra cards, you'll be going up against someone who also has a starter deck with maybe 3-4 extra cards.

I'm having a very weird relationship with this game. I loved it at first, then went through a long period of "meh," but today I played for a couple of hours and wanted even more. It is very strange to have that kind of reaction to a game. At least for me. I'm usually a love it or hate it kind of guy.

Got my beta invite yesterday. I'll spend some time looking into this this evening and over the weekend.

Any pitfalls I should avoid?

Don't get attached to a certain deck (or god forbid sell decks just to pad one "winning" one). They are still test balancing and they are doing so in drastic ways.

I have a few closed beta codes if anyone wants them?

I have a few closed beta codes as well. PM me if interested.

I've heard it's possible they might do a wipe and refund any purchases before release :/