'Gwent' injects some choice into its free-to-play deck building
Gwent bears some similarities to other deck-building games like Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone, but it also embraces its roots from The Witcher 3. As you earn new card packs to build out your decks with, you have a choice.
Before we can lay out how that choice works, it's important to understand what sets Gwent: The Witcher Card Game apart from others like it.
In Gwent, all cards except "neutral" ones belong to a particular faction. You can build one deck for each faction (provided you have enough cards), and only the neutral cards can be shared between them.
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Different factions support different strategies and approaches to play. The particulars aren't important for our purposes here, but most players -- especially those just starting out -- will tend to focus on building out a particular faction's deck over the others.
Just like other deck-building games, players amass new cards in Gwent by purchasing card packs, either with in-game currency or real money (it's a free-to-play game). And this is where the Witcher difference comes in.
"We are doing something we hope is quite different and we hope people will like with the way our card packs work," CD Projekt Red development director Ben Lee told Mashable in an E3 2016 interview.
"You get five cards, but the first card that you get [is] a choice of three. So you can kind of guide your deck a little bit more than you would normally [in other deck-building games]," he explained.
It's a simple process. Anytime you open a new pack, the game shows you three randomly selected cards. You must then choose the one that suits you, a choice that should be based on what your deck-building goals are in the game.
"If you're building a Monster deck, you'll probably pick the Monster card. If you're building a Scoia'tael deck, you'll probably pick the Scoia'tael card," Lee said. "You might get some neutral cards in there, so maybe that would be a good choice for you as well."
The rest of the cards in the pack are randomly selected. There are four tiers of card rarity in Gwent -- Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary -- and the four random cards can be any of those. That's not the case with the card you choose, however.
"That first choice is always guaranteed [to be] a minimum Rare," Lee said. "Even if you're unlucky on those other cards, you've still got something good on that first card. So we hope that players will feel that it's very fair and they always feel rewarded."
Gwent will only offer the one type of card pack when it launches, regardless of whether you use real or virtual currency to buy it. "In the future that may change," Lee said, adding, "but it's too early to say."
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Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
