Gwent - Standalone Game

edit: happened to go back and realized if any new people read this thread, these decks aren't necessarily good or even work anymore. A lot of cards got changed in the last patch. The advice to make one decent deck still stands, just not necessarily these.


If anyone is relatively new, or about to start playing, I highly recommend checking these decks out
Gwent Deck Database: Top Decks · GwentDB (read what he says under the deck, it's more important then the deck itself)
and
Gwent Deck Database: Top Decks · GwentDB

I put together the first one, since I had more of it from what I was already running, and I'm finally on a tear up the ladder. Was just floating around in the 1.5kish newb zone, and then broke 2k within a few hours of putting it together. Kegs started coming in steadily, improved the deck, and am having a blast. Once you get a decent deck together and are winning a decent amount of your ranked games, the rewards really start flowing. It snowballs pretty hard.

So, I'd highly recommend focusing on finishing one of those decks ASAP if you are new. I even milled a few of my starting gold cards once I realized what was important to the deck. The weather deck I was running before was too linear. It needed the opponent to play a lot of stuff early and then for the round to go long. When that happened, I won, when it didn't, I lost. Now, I have some proactive plays and carry over points to mess with my opponent's math.
Just dropped a weather on a row he put his first 2 cards on? He thinks he's gonna pass and end the round early to try and get up on cards, but I've got a resilient ekimmara and a few harpies to start off round 2. So, he's in a 6-10 point deficit already. Combined with the Frightener I put in, it gives me tons of flexibility to get into the 3rd round even/up on cards AND with some carry over strength.

Lots of times, I take round 1 cause they don't wanna fight through the weather effects. I put up a little bit of a fight in round 2, keeping the points close-ish since they can't ever pass until I do (or I can just win the match then), and they end up spending too many resources to have a chance in round 3.

Good idea linking that, I actually used a slightly altered version of the Radovid Armor deck he posted on there, got up to like 3k before I wanted a change and switched to a swarm Foltest. I've mostly hit the wall now around 3.6 as I'm missing a few key golds/silvers and I don't wanna burn any of my scraps with the new cards coming soon, wanna see what decks look like. The season is also ending in a couple weeks and hitting rank 18/19 gives like 17ish kegs and some scraps.

Btw you happen to check out the Gwent Challenger event this weekend? CDPR going all in on the production, holding it in a castle with cosplayers of major Witcher characters hanging around. Not to mention get a free keg as a twitch drop, and a free card depending on which of the players wins the tournament.

No, im not familiar with the competitive stuff yet. I watched that one final between lifecoach and noxious, from awhile back, but i dont even know all the cards yet to watch some of the matches and know whats going on.

Btw, seasons end each month, right? I saw the end of season rewards, that will be very nice to get.

Seasons were 2 months long, but start of the year they are changing to 1 month. During a break in the tournament today they finally showed off the new UI elements, ie redesigned deck builder and no more having to scroll back/forth to see all the cards on things like mulligan. No info on the new game mode, but they again hinted that a lot of the new cards coming out are designed with it in mind, so still likely to be a draft/arena type setup. Oh yeah, seems to be a holiday event coming, so hopefully more free stuff.

Kanglor said:

Seasons were 2 months long, but start of the year they are changing to 1 month. During a break in the tournament today they finally showed off the new UI elements, ie redesigned deck builder and no more having to scroll back/forth to see all the cards on things like mulligan. No info on the new game mode, but they again hinted that a lot of the new cards coming out are designed with it in mind, so still likely to be a draft/arena type setup. Oh yeah, seems to be a holiday event coming, so hopefully more free stuff.

Click to expand...

You got a link for that? The video with the UI elements and such?

I had heard on reddit they were doing that, in a reply to me complaining about the deck builder/collection tabs being separate. It was VERY aggravating to not be able to craft a card in the deck builder, ala hearthstone. Hope that's part of the fix.
Not scrolling for a mulligan is also great. I literally played like 2-3 games in the tutorial before I figured that out, lol. There's no graphic indication it's possible, so I just thought you only got to mulligan from the first few cards of your hand.
All these things are minor, but they make a big difference when added up to a new player's 'impression' of the game. Gwent is great for the hardcore strategy fans, but it needs to pull in the average noob if it's going to be successful.

actually, I found most of the info on reddit, but still looking for a video of the part of the stream they showed it all.

Here ya go, though apparently the mulligan/card select element looks better but was sorta bugged out in the video. Also the posted on reddit that the new row limit is gonna be 9 units.

Man, I've gone down the rabbit hole on this game. I've spent too much on it with that holiday pack they are offering. It's such a good deal, bought it 3 times now :-/
Haven't been this into a game since Magic. I've got the nilfguard spies deck completed, and now it's not quite as dominant as it was. Just my luck lol. Still enjoying playing it, it's very interactive, i'm up to 3.1k in ranked.

I also bought one the holiday packs, and would have bought another one, but I'm somewhat unhappy with how the patch turned out. I understand they wanted to rush the patch out to maximize sales of that pack, but it needed more time to polish and also has some silly balance issues, ie Silver Spies are more easily abused now. Also they ended up mostly killing off 2 of the Skellige archtypes that I was working to build(Greatswords/Veterans) and replaced it with Bear point vomit, it's so boring. I'm certainly not doomsaying the game, it's still very fun, but I wanna see what changes/fixes they bring out after they're back from holidays.

I've been bouncing around 37xx just playing enough to finish dailies, and haven't played many traditional NG Spies decks. I don't think it really got weaker, in fact it got a slight buff with how the Enforcers work now, but Spies might have trouble with all the point vomit decks ruling the meta atm.

yea, it didn't get nerfed at all, it's just other decks have more raw power now. You can still win a lot of games, but it's dependent on drawing things in the right order and/or sequencing everything perfect. i.e. it's a lot harder to play for basically the same power level as things like bear skellige or NG swarm.

Interesting to see the meta has moved pretty quickly, Bears have dropped off a lot, with ST(both Dwarf and Elf variants) and Consume now being dominant from what I've seen on streams. Even tho it's boring as hell, think I am gonna just stick with playing my Bear deck until I get season end rewards. That should be like 17-18 kegs, and I'll hopefully have hoarded up a good amount of scraps and can craft something else.

Oh, interesting. I haven't watched any streams, but at 3.9k it's still a lot of bear decks. I am seeing more scoia'tel, especially since before patch, but it's not one of the top 2.

It's like 40% bears, 25% nilfguard (alchemy/spies/swarm), 15% scoiatel (elves or dwarves), 10% NR (cursed or point spam) and then a few monster decks (eredin weather and consume).

I'm rocking a 68% winrate between NG spies, Scoia dwarves and SK bears. Hit rank 18 last night.

I got lucky with a level up reward (Ciri:Nova), and needed to finish a monster quest, so I made a consume deck around her. It wrecked all the bear decks I came across. Even with the 2x restriction, it's consistent enough if the opponent isn't running any real removal.

Gwent Deck Database: Top Decks · GwentDB

Yea, so your post was dead on. Dwarves took over in the last week lol. I've been running a few variants myself. I've kinda hit a wall at 4-4.1k mmr. I'll get on a little streak to 4.2k, then lose 6 in a row down to 3.9-4k.
I know I'm still making some mistakes, often forgetting about certain cards that exist or not knowing everything an opponent's deck plays. Plus, I don't have the cards for the couple decks that could beat up on dwarves. So, I'm either playing a fair amount of mirrors or a deck that is just a bit underpowered. Just grinding back and forth for more kegs.

I'm still enjoying the game, but I definitely wouldn't recommend someone check the game out right now until all the bugs get worked out. The ambush one was particularly aggravating, ruined the whole point of those cards, but it seems to be fixed as of today. The random disconnects/freezes are the ones pissing me off the most now.

I managed to hit 4k just doing my dailies, still using the Bears decks, but it was with some luck against a few Dwarf decks that were played poorly or just had bad draws. It's clearly the best deck atm, and from watching some of the pro ladder streamers, the only thing that has a favorable match up is mill. Problem is that mill deck is weak against most everything else. Axemen seemed like it could be a counter, but most have now started running Ida to clear weather and they can potentially play her multiple times(Decoy/Hattori).

I'm genuinely interested to see how they address that deck because it does everything so well. It has excellent point vomit, probably only behind Consume/Axemen, but it also has amazing control options with Meditation(maybe best gold in game), Schirru, Tremors, etc. Am with you tho, game is still fun, and I'm looking forward to the new game mode and Thronebreaker when they come out. They know they goofed on this patch, but I expect they'll make tweaks in pretty short order. I'm definitely ready to get my season end kegs to craft another deck, might try something with Monsters.

Ive since gotten over 4.3k using a ciri nova brouver deck. Its really quite sick.
Its got the barclay/hattori/paulie finishers but also an elf engine in dragoon/farseer.
I beat the dwarf decks quite often. Ive got enough of the same cards as them to keep up in short/medium rounds with a bigger finisher in ciri, and can make way more points in a long round.

edit: Gwent Deck Database: Top Decks · GwentDB that's the list. I wouldn't recommend changing anything if you have the option, but it does have some important things to note when you play it, though. Like, I wouldn't replace the vrihedd officers, which was my first reaction till I played with them awhile.

I use GwentUp, pretty sure it's the most popular tracker now, as there's another one that requires some additional software to run.

yea, everyone basically uses GwentUp right now. The other one switched to using Overwolf and it has some other issues right now. Poor guy, he switched to Overwolf since he was paying for server hosting out of pocket with no one donating, they handle those costs, but now no one is willing to use it :-/