Over the years, from the introduction as a mini-game in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to the full-fledged PC release at the fall of 2018, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game has come a long way. CD Projekt RED did an extraordinary job, it’s useless to ignore that fact.

The game grew in various ways: extra features came and later disappeared for good, cards were added, unique creatures, spells, combinations and mechanics appeared. The lack of Hearthstone randomness and binding real money donations common for Magic the Gathering, distinguishes Gwent from most CCGs. And don’t forget about simple gameplay, when you need to win two out of three rounds just by getting more points than your opponent. You can describe the entire game in one sentence: pass any time, play one card per turn, get three extra cards from your deck between rounds (with the hand limited of ten), boost your creatures and weaken the enemy’s.

Alas, this leads to greater problems. Despite wonderful art like in MtG, Witcher cards have very shallow mechanics, compared to the later. Most of them are trash and have no actual weight in deck construction. Strict division into factions (except several neutral cards) and hero skills, restricts you to a few working decks. Matches become too predictable, and after a dozen of hours you’ll be able to see through the whole play from the first turns. Poisonous Nilfgaard? Frost monsters? Symbiosis dryads? - Most of the time you will fight against 4-5 archetypes of identical decks.

Recommending Gwent for newbies is difficult. Even though it’s free, try it only if you have nothing else to play right now. Eventually you’ll find yourself in a repetitive and tiresome cycle of battles against clone players with clone decks constructed of clone cards. But if you still want something witchery with card collecting, you’d better look at Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. It has a deep story, lots of lore and decent card puzzles.