Nevermind, issue went away on its own.

Recently I had Ciri played against me, which is thought provoking since she has a unique effect. If I'm not mistaken, Ciri was very common when she was 7 power, but then she was nerfed to 5 power and then practically disappeared. I don't see why: if Ciri triggers, then she's effectively become "draw a card [Ciri] at the beginning of next round". She can only trigger once, since one cannot lose two rounds. Since her power isn't high even at 7 power, she would probably have to be mulliganed next round. Under these conditions why not just run the faction spy? Unless the gameplan is to run both Ciri and the spy, and to play them both in a round one is intending to lose - but they'd both be low tempo plays, and after playing one there's always the chance the opponent passes before the second one is played.

So is anyone planning to watch Gwent Slam this weekend? Rooting for anyone in particular? As long as Swim gets beat I don't care who wins myself, but it will be interesting to see what decks people run.

Freddy/gameking/swim/panda are all cool guys and I'm going to be happy if any one of them wins. The matches should be pretty high quality.

Actually I'm going to be happy as long as it's not meleeman or tides, those two winning just won't look good for the future of competitive Gwent.


Re: Ciri. She's an interesting but also at times problematic card due to the nature of tempo and card advantage in gwent. It's not just about slapping her down whenever you feel like you are going to lose the round.
When she was 7, a common Nilfgaard opener was to play John Calveit turn 1, fishing for Ciri and summoning 3 golems and roach for something like 20 points. Let's say the NG player went second, then he's probably ahead in points, and if his opponent plays another card, he can pass for having 2 card advantage for the rest of the match. If the opponent doesn't try to catch up, they lose round 1 to the NG player on even cards which is just as bad, leaving the opponent with no good options. When such early high tempo plays are available Ciri is extremely powerful so putting points on her body is dangerous, especially since she exacerbates the going first disadvantage.
She could maybe use a points buff, but only after the coinflip is fixed to add some additional points to the player going first, +5 or so.

I have to bring my daughter to ballet in the morning and I'm attending the Ixalan prerelease in the late afternoon, so I will catch whatever Gwent Slam matches fall in between those two events. I'll be watching the entirety of day two for sure.

Personally, I'm interested in seeing how swim prepares for and plays in a tournament. I'd like to see him do well. I also really like Freddy's and Panda's streams as well, so those are the guys I'm rooting for.

My prediction is that the mill deck is going to define the event. Not because it's super OP or anything but merely because it exists and attacks on such a different axis. I wonder if people will adopt a "ban mill" strategy or will bring some bigger decks to fight it. Should be a cool event.

Meleeman with the spies win over Dagon after a miss-click in an earlier round was so satisfying. Nilfgaard represent.

I gotta say, Adzikov made a lot of incomprehensible plays. Who doesn't take +2 card advantage over spies with Dagon? Who leads with Battering Ram on an empty board? The better player won, no complaints there, I'm just shocked Adzikov could make so many apparent rookie mistakes in a tournament match.

So glad Freddy won. He beat Swim (who ropes every single turn and whose chat is cancer) but also from the UK. Awesome stuff, plus he made mill work after losing hard with the deck when retarded mongs from reddit want it nerfed.

Well, to be fair, in a tournament game you want to make full use of your time every turn. Maybe if the game switched to an MTGO-style clock where everyone has (say) 30 minutes to complete the game. As for mill, I don't think people want it nerfed because of its power level, but because of how different it is. It's like playing against lantern control in Modern. People want to make decks that thin effectively, and mulligan for cards like Djikstra instead of Blue Stripes Commando, and mill does not allow you to do that.

And that is why mill is important to a healthy meta

Looks like an update is heading our way. Overview to happen tomorrow:

https://twitter.com/PlayGwent/status/912690610880073733

Can we move this thread to the Magic Arena forum? Saves me from having to check multiple subforums, especially since I don't really care about Duels anymore.

How about moving it to the OTHER GAMES subforum where it belongs?

Hope it fixes all the freezing on xbox. I'm starting to get suspicious that it's intentional considering how often it happens round 3 when I'm winning with mill

Patch is live. Notes are here:

https://imgur.com/a/wgdQz

Wtf? I haven't even finished climbing and there's a new patch already?

Not an end of season patch; it's the Mahakam Ale Festival, which comes with a bunch of new challenges and a hotfix to some cards.

Yeah but then I'd have to spend another long period fine-tuning my decks and feeling out the meta in casual mode

I had this bright idea to use WH Rider with Iris for the instant kill, but it turns out people are already using that combo. The buff to WH Rider helps with that. However I'm surprised at no nerf to Woodland Spirit. The card itself isn't overpowered (8 power + weather is the same as Caranthir) but when you also get +4 Foglet +4 Roach +3 Harpy +1 Harpy deploy, that's rather busted.

I don't have a real opinion on most of the other changes. Clear Skies adding some strength would help the fact it's so low tempo, but it could also make the silver mages less effective in comparison. Quite odd that WH Hound got its power back but not Aretuza Adept. Wholesale buffs to Skellige might be a bit too much but we'll see.

Just want to say that for free content the challenges were pretty entertaining. Good job CDPR.

That feeling when you go into round 3 up two cards against Spelltael with him on the play as well, and still lose. RIP Sage's semi-ambiguous wording that made me think I can replay Scorch. Like, I even double-checked that Scorch was a spell before going for that line.

Sometimes when I open a keg, during the pick phase I would see two numbers above the card. One of them clearly shows how many copies of that card I own. What does the other mean?

@Sjokwaave - yes, it feels like CDPR are becoming the next Blizzard, where all their games are high quality.