Gwent is entering Open Beta on the PS4, Xbox One and the PC. If you haven't tried it yet and want to, soon you will be able to play without waiting in line for CD Projekt Red to give you a code.

For people who played the Closed Beta, your collection in the game is going to reset but you're getting a free copy of Witcher 2 if you log into your GOG account before May 29th.

Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/gwent-closed-beta-testers-are-getting-free-copies-of-the-witcher-2-wild-hunt/

So, uh, anyone have opinions on this? I guess I might as well download it and try it out. Curious what other people think though.

@noobsmog: I played hearthstone for 2 years and the game is a breath of fresh air. It's very different in that you don't attack your opponent in the same way hearthstone does things and instead focus on building your board or reducing their board. You also have to win at least 2/3 games before you can win a match; so you have to manage your resources every game. For example, if you win the first game by dropping all your cards on the board, the board will be wiped clean except for deathrattles effects that leave stuff behind. Then you're going to have a problem for games 2 and 3 since you're out of resources. RNG plays less of a factor in this game than Hearthstone. That's why Lifecoach (Pro Hearthstone Player) almost switched to this game.

The rewards are also very generous. I believe you can win 1-2 packs per day very easily. And the interesting part is that you get to have some choice in one of the cards you get from a pack. In sum, the game is prettty goood.

@acura_max: Hm you've got me interested. I'll report back here after i've played a bit.

@noobsmog: There's plenty of opinions in the other thread. Actually kinda eerie reading my post from back then, and then here we are with a new patch for open beta that completely revamps the game yet again. I dunno.. I'm still waiting for the singleplayer before I'm gonna make any final judgements, but watching their development process has made me lose any confidence in their ability to make a good, balanced and fun multiplayer experience. I'm sure it's gonna be a game that's fun to dabble with though, but I don't see it having any chance of keeping any relevance a few months down the line.

@ares42: Yeah I started to read that thread but realized it was from 6 months ago. I figured a lot would have changed from then.

Yeah I've played it for about a year? (I think that's right) it's very good, and a genuinely interesting take on DCCG.

I loved gwent in the W3, and obsessively tracked down every card.

I will say that I did fall off it a bit after an intensive few months (for the beta at least) it's a little samey, and perhaps lacks the depth and charm of hearthstone, but I'm confident further iterations will improve this with new modes and a single player etc.

Check it out, great presentation and if you love the witcher world it's totally worth a look, as other have mentioned advancement is quick, and rewards are generous.

Is there a collectable aspect to this game? I really liked tracking down and collecting the cards in Witcher 3.

@frodobaggins: You collect cards by earning ore (free to play currency) through daily rewards. You usually get enough to buy 2 or 3 kegs a day if not more. Each pack is 4 random cards and then you choose between a set of 3 cards rare or better that you want as a 5th. You can also get scrap which lets you craft cards and meteorite ore which lets you make a card premium (animated basically).

It's a fun game and I recommend it highly. New players will be staring with decks that have a full 4 golds and 6 silvers now. Its the most generous card game I have played. I've been playing since the start of the year and haven't got tired of it. Has replaced hearthstone for me quite easily.

Just keep in mind for these first couple days us closed beta players will be at the same mmr as people just starting. So don't get discouraged if you get beat a lot this week. The mmr system has to distribute the players around again before it can start putting you up against your skill level accurately.

Did they ever improve the free to play side or is it still just a ridiculous grind/losing intentionally for the scraps?

So what's different between this and the game in Witcher 3 (beyond the PVP aspect of course)? Are there just more cards or have any rules changed?

@fezrock: Tons of rule changes. Too many to list here honestly. They're only similar in theme really. Witcher 3 Gwent was the starting point, but it's become it's own thing now. Too many ideas in Witcher 3 Gwent were outright broken to keep.

@fredchuckdave: You get different rewards based on rounds won per day, levels earned, and ranks gained. So losing won't get you very far.

@mezza: Interesting. Is it still the same basic concept though? (Best of 3 matches with limited card restocking, three rows of cards, different faction leaders with various useful -but not gamebreaking- abilities, the win condition is building overall unit strength, etc.)

@fredchuckdave: Booted up the open beta to check it out, and it's better. You start with a few more cards and you can play challenges to earn more cards and a good amount of packs. It helps, but it doesn't really change the fact that the multiplayer is completely impenetrable unless you have a very refined deck.

@fezrock: Yeah these game mechanics haven't changed.

They are right. You're going to have to play a few challenge quests before you can play multiplayer. I hope they improve new player experience because getting crushed by old players hurts. Still, it game just came out of closed beta. So the old players will be playing with the new ones.

@fezrock: Yep the core best of three format is still the same. Just a lot of different card effects, rules, interactions, and mechanics now.

A few notable things are that everyone gets to mulligan one card in round 2 and 3 now. Weather is very different as well. Weather effect are different styles of DoTs and can be applied to any row. Factions also dont have faction wide passives that apply to every card now. They've been assigned to specific cards within the faction For balance reasons. For example instead of monsters keeping their last played card on the board, they have an ekimara which will stay between rounds once, and wild hunt warriors which do the same (wild hunt only stay if you lose the round though). Skellige used to have a passive that would raise their cards base strength by one per round. Now the just have a set of cards that raise base strength going into each round. Leaders are also now played directly to the board as a unit with a body, and they trigger their effect when entering the board. Their are also some units which can cause the leader to play their ability again (like Cahir).

So I played through all the challenges, which ended up giving me somewhere around 15 total kegs (with the free ones from tutorial as well). Didn't get a single new silver or gold card, fun times....

I'm really not liking the fact that no effects work on gold cards. Also the fact that going first feels real bad.

Other than that it definitely seems interesting, its a lot different than other card games. I wish it would let me in ranked earlier though! I've won most of my casual games and this is still going to take forever to get to level 10.

@noobsmog: Ye, I definitely feel you on the going first thing. I will say though, as I've cobbled together a somewhat more refined deck it feels like you can approach it more in a "I'm gonna blow plan A, and if he counters me I have plan B ready" way. It just sucks when all you have is plan A.

I joined the open beta now myself. I'm liking the look of things, but it seems like there are plenty of bugs still floating around (either that or some of the card descriptions need to be rewritten entirely to explain what exactly they do).

My first game I got burned because the Wild Hunt Navigator didn't do its thing and summon another ally. Now I'm not sure if the ability requires a card in play or in my hand to target and summon a copy from the deck, or if it can randomly summon any ally from my deck (so that needs to be clearer). But regardless of which one it is, I met all those conditions and nothing happened.

Anyone got a spare code for the witcher 2? ? Ha!

@fezrock: You need to have a wild hunt card on board and a copy of that exact card in your deck. The navigator will then pull the copy from your deck into play. At least thats how i think it works. Pretty sure "summon a copy" actually means "play this card from your deck", and if it does they should really change the wording on this effect.

"Summon" means plays from your deck

I'm not great at it but I'm having a lot fun with my Nilfguardian rotting cow spam tactics.

@fezrock: As others have said, Summon requires the card to be in your deck. Spawn means creating it out of thin air.

If you need to double check the key words you can hover over a card while viewing your collection and a tooltip should pop up to explain.

If you're confused about keywords in Gwent you can always check out the (not at all imposing) glossary.

Weather cards slowly bleeding a row to death unless you happen to have a clear card seems kinda messed up. How the hell are my dudes being killed by friggin' fog in the first place? Is it seeping out of the TV World?

I played a online match (And WON!) and the tutorials, I liked it. not much has changed from the original game.

I kind of wish they provided more flavor text on the cards though, if the Gwent game could double as like a Witcher Encyclopedia with a bunch of info on all the characters and creatures, that would be rad!

I also wish the UI was maybe a bit smoother, it's kind of busy, it has the same problems that the Witcher 3's menus did, they look nice but are kind awkward in a way I can't put my finger on.

The tutorial is all fine and dandy but the rest of the single player is messed up. It's massively stacked against you to lose as you play against AI with all high level cards while you just have shit and it doesn't tell you in the tutorial, if you lose the first round and draw the second, that counts as a win for the other player.

I feel like learning this game on ps4 is much harder than it would be on PC. Having to click over to see what a card does with the dpad vs just hovering the mouse over it is such a chore.

Going to go ahead and summarize my thoughts on this game. I will say upfront that I think it's cool they made this game feel unique and not a rip off of anything else.

That being said, I just don't think the game is that fun to play, or at least not something I would intend to come back to over time. It feels like it's way more important to build a good deck rather than play your deck well. I have zero problems with this and enjoy deck building a lot actually. The problem comes from the fact that I don't have any cards to build a deck around unless I immediately spend a lot of money upfront. When the main strategy of the game is to build a good deck, and you're missing the vast majority of the cards, it's just a huge downer. I'll compare this with hearthstone since I have a lot of experience in that; if I have a crappy deck and face someone with a good deck, I at least have a chance of beating them through skill and sheer luck. In Gwent it doesn't feel like I have have a chance in hell at beating, as an example since I ran into it several times, a queensguard deck with my crappy starter deck.

I will say that I could be wrong about my assumption that a good deck is more important than good play. That leads to my other problem in that it is really hard to figure out why exactly I lost a particular game. Did I play poorly? Does his deck beat mine? Did he get lucky? Did I get unlucky? It's just really hard to tell which is a real problem since you can only get better if you know what went wrong.

I respect this game a lot but it is incredibly unwelcoming to new players and free to play players. I enjoy it enough to keep playing for a bit, but as of right now I don't think it's going to hold my attention for much longer.

And you can't sync progress between ps4 and PC... Bummer

I just want to see the story mode. I didn't really dig the game in W3 at all and the bit I've played of the betas still hasn't convinced me. I love Witcher overall though, so if it has a cool thing going with side story stuff through the card game, I think I'll spend more time with it.

@noobsmog: You're not wrong. I finally was able to pull together the golds and silvers I needed to make a fairly coherent competitive deck, and going from not having that last silver to getting it was like night and day. I would argue that playing correctly is still a huge part of the game though. There's a ton of interactions and math to figure out and hand reading etc. I've lost a bunch of games just because I messed up. But it's all built on the foundation of the deck. So you can't win if you play well with a bad deck, but you can easily lose games if you play poorly with a good deck.

As for figuring out what went wrong, ye it's.... complicated.. ? Talking in HS terms it feels like every match up is like old school freeze mage vs control warrior, you just gotta learn that you have to hit the armor up every turn. It's hard to learn all at once when the meta is so unsettled, but the thing I've been figuring out over time is that you just need to hard mulligan for the right cards. It doesn't matter if your hand looks good, you just have to get the right cards for the match-up. It also doesn't help that there are certain things that are just straight up too powerful and you're just losing because you were set up to fail.

I'm getting a little better with my Nilfgaardian deck now and have more tactics than spamming rotting cows and I have a bunch of stuff that help get me the right stuff I need for a fight no matter what the situation.

Cute little anecdote: I was playing someone called, I think: H-4nu. Anyways, it was near the end of our second round (I strategically passed the first one) and we were neck and neck on power. So H-4nu, thinking he was holding an Overdose potion (Damage 3 adjacent Units by 3 and remove 3 Armor from them) used it on my three strongest cards. But Wait! Turns out he didn't use an Overdose, he used an Immue boost which is the opposite (Boost 3 adjacent Units by 3 and add 3 Armor to them). Seeing that he had clearly messed up on accident I immediately used my Swallow Potion (Boost a Unit by 8) on his strongest resilent dwarf which put him ahead more. Still, through clever tricks I managed to win and we had 1 resilent unit each and it was clear he was gonna win the round but he pulled a Swallow potion of his own and gave it to my unit which let me win.

:D

I like my silly Nilfgaard stuff and enjoy the game a lot.

Played a couple matches, this game definitely still isn't for me. I had fun when I got around to doing the Gwent quests in Witcher 3, but mainly because there was a defined path to getting rare cards, and a clear progression of "beat low-level guys to get better cards so you can face mid-level guys" that made it feel like you were climbing the ranks and getting better.

This game has random-chance cards that they definitely want you to pay for, and I already sucked vs. the terrible AI in Witcher 3 so multiplayer is entirely off the table for me. I dunno, it was a cool distraction in a bigger game, but I just don't think the free-to-play randomized lootbox thing works with this game... especially when the "opening keg" animation is so unsatisfying >:(

I think I've basically figured out all the card important card interactions and rules at this point, and I've gotten pretty good with my Radovid NR deck. I'm sure the deck isn't very good compared to top players, but I got lucky with some silver cards and I'm only level 5 so most players don't have much yet.

I'm having fun but I miss the elegant simplicity of the original game; also I hate the way weather works now. Its way too overpowered and requires having a clear skies at all times. It either needs to be weaker or needs to still affect both sides of the board.

Feels too complicated to me. Spending all my time reading the card descriptions during the games. Guess that's why I liked the simplicity of Gwent in actual Witcher 3. Plus the art looks way worse, imo. Game looked better in Witcher 3. To be fair, I don't usually like card games, though. But I went out of my way in Witcher 3 to get all the good cards and win that tournament quest.

I'd like to consider getting into this game, but it feels completely impenetrable to me. It seems almost entirely dependent on deck building but gives the player absolutely no guidance on how to actually start putting together a deck. I guess perhaps this is a moot point for people who are already experienced in card games, but for someone like me who's comparatively new to these sorts of games, it feels overwhelming in a way that just immediately turns me off of the game instead.

After a few misgivings, I've become enthralled with this game. I love hearthstone, but don't give a lick about warcraft. With gwent I actually know/love the universe it's based around, which enhances the whole experience in a way I couldn't appreciate with hearthstone. If gwent was on phones I'd probably drop hearthstone altogether.

It's very easy to recommend if you like ccg's, and even more so if you also like the Witcher. Notapro tip: go into the settings and switch on the Witcher 3 gwent music. Its way more upbeat and playful than the default music, which I prefer.

Didn't realize it was on PS4, instant install. The game's mechanics are great I just think the free to play aspects are terrible compared to Shadowverse and probably worse than Hearthstone though the amount of shit you can buy in HS is much higher just due to lifespan. We'll see how arena works when that comes but not too optimistic. Of course most people that play these semi-seriously spend ludicrous amounts of money on them so I guess it doesn't matter for that audience.

I'd be curious to hear how newer players are faring with the challenges using base decks; I imagine if you don't have an advanced concept of card games that some of them will be virtually impossible with the decks they give you (and still pretty RNG if you do).

In general there are way too many keywords though once you get a handle on all of them the game is certainly going to be interesting. Deck variety seems better than early beta (~3-4 months ago) at least.

@fredchuckdave: the free to play stuff in this isn't bad at all. Way better than hearthstone. I'm level 10 and I'm still getting 2-3 packs a day, and I'm not even playing that much.

At first I liked this game a lot. I built what I thought was a cool monster frost deck myself and crushed my way through the early levels. The closer I got to lvl 10 the more I lost though. Now in ranked and I still win... sometimes. But most of the time it very much feels like I get crushed by people playing decks built around very specific cards (often expensive gold cards) with finely tuned combos and strategies ''metagamed'' to death. Now I remember why I don't play CCGs. The only way to have fun playing online is to follow a damn online guide and build a specific deck or something close to it.

Like fuck that Nilfgardian gold card basically every Nilfgardian player uses to win every third round. 25 invincible power vs one bronze card. Fuck all those consume and queensguard decks.

@pyrodactyl: Which card is that? I'm a lvl 6 Nilfgaard looking to grow into scoia'tael and monster sectors.

@rongalaxy: Hey here's 40 packs and 6 free arena runs just for logging in: https://shadowverse.com/news/important/news-0115

@cirdain: The gold one with the fleeing guy on a horse. Base power of 10, if your opponent has not passed boost the card by FIFTEEN and your opponent draws a bronze card from his deck.

This card alone guaranties a win in a third round except against very specific counters like Queensguard rez, a very powerful resilient unit transferred from round 2, etc. Because of this single card you can't let a Nilfgardian player take the first round or you basically lose automatically unless you have the perfect counter. While most gold cards have a value of 13-15, this one is more 16-25 based on your luck when played near the end of the third round.

@pyrodactyl: http://www.gwentdb.com/cards/50161-tibor-eggebracht

Tibor Eggebracht - "Used in 44.46% of Nilfgaard decks in the past 30 days."

I have never and will never look at a deck list for my deck because making it's alot of fun. It appears other people are living by the deck lists. I've been meaning to create some Dimeritium Shackles, would they be a good against it?

@cirdain: He's talking about Tibor, and ye the card is especially rough on new players since they tend to run a lot of mediocre bronzes with little synergy. Against a refined deck it's not that bad though. The 25 looks intimidating, but he's generally worth about 18, which there are plenty of other golds that are worth too. He just very obviously states "I have better golds, I win the game", unlike other cards that generates power a bit more subtly.

@ares42: Cool. I'm looking forward to getting lvl 10. Sounds like that's when things get silly :D

@fredchuckdave: I've never even heard of shadowverse, which is why I didn't use it as a comparison. Just because it does that doesn't mean gwent's system is inherently bad or greedy. Also ew, anime stuff (just kidding, or am I...)