retr0spekt1v's thoughts

Review

In my opinion, Gwent is the best digital card game on the market.
I may be biased, because i love the Witcher universe, but let me tell you why I think that.

First of all, Gwent for me has the best art style out of all other digital card games, the art is beautiful, the soundtrack is fitting, and the cards are flaforful.
Secondly, the reward system is very generous. If you play without spending money on the game, with right resource allocation you can have a meta deck in just one day of playing, and you can make other relatively strong decks based on different archetypes.

Well, let's talk about the archetypes. Gwent has six factions (classes), that each have seven different leader abilities. That means you aren't reliant on if your faction is strong or weak in the meta, because each faction has nearly infinite playstyles. For example, Monsters is misleadingly thought to be just a "pointslam" faction for new players. Pointslam means, that the deck has little to no interaction with your opponent's cards. But for example you can play Vampires, an archetype which is focused on putting bleeding on opponent's cards and slowly removing them from the battlefield while gaining power from the blood of the inflicted, or White Frost, which every round damages the most powerful cards of your opponent by summoning the White Frost on their rows, and controls the battlefield by denying placement bonuses by moving your opponent's cards by force. My favourite faction is Syndicate, which has a special resource called coins, similiar to corpses from the Death Knight class from Hearthstone. Because of that, Syndicate is probably the hardest faction to play, but one of the most rewarding to win with. In this faction the coins are used to activate certain bonuses wnen spent on shady services, or when held in your pouch. There are many cards, which can earn you some profit, spend coins to do something, or benefit from your wealth.

Lastly, I will talk about the balance of the game. In 2023 the developers of the game announced the end of support in 2024, meaning there will not be any new cards or balance changes made by the balance team. Normally, that would be the death of a game, but the devs thought of that and added the Balance Council. Basically, every month the community votes on changes made to the cards. The changes are; -1/+1 to power, and -1/+1 to provisions. Each category has 10 slots, in which there are the cards voted by the majority of the community to be changed, so there are 40 changes every month, which keeps the game fresh and rotates the meta.

Gwent may be not officially supported anymore, but i think with it's beautiful art style, generous nature, varied ways to play, and passionate community, it is still worth to try.