If you read our beginner’s Gwent tips feature for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you already know that you need a minimum of 22 unit cards in your deck. In addition to these cards you can add special cards such as weather cards or Hero cards. However, you want to have the least number of cards in your deck so you have a higher chance of scoring the best cards in your opening hand.
The better your deck, the better the odds of pulling good cards in your opening hand. Obviously you want cards with the highest value, but there’s more to it than simply going for cards with a value of 10. There are plenty with special abilities far more valuable than a basic card with a power rating of 10, or even a Hero card in some instances.
With this in mind, we have additional Gwent tips, along with strategies for creating the ultimate deck with the following cards.
Combos, Combos, Combos
One of the most devastating abilities in the game is Muster. Cards with the Muster ability will pull every card from your deck that has the same name. You may be surprised how many cards share the same name in Gwent. If you can fill your deck with five or six cards of the same name that have a value of two, that equates to more combined damage than a single card with a value of 10. In addition, you don’t need to draw those cards to be able to use them during the match. All you need is a single Muster card and you effectively gain access to every other card of the same name in your deck.
Morale Boost cards are another great commodity to have because they increase the value of all cards in that row. If you build your deck around Siege cards, having a single Morale Boost in your Siege row can potentially double your score. More importantly, a Medic card allows you to play a high value card in one round, then pull it from your discard pile in a future round.
Muster, Medic, Morale Boost and even Tight Bond can be far more beneficial than a standard high value card. Tight Bond isn’t quite as useful as the others because you need to draw at least two cards of the same name to make the Tight Bond bonus activate, but it can still be very useful if you have enough of these cards in your deck.
Death and Destruction
Scorch cards can easily win a round and even a match for you. They remove the highest value cards on the battlefield, which can be a devastating blow to your opponent. It’s important to note that Scorch cards can and will remove your own cards from the battlefield, and they can also remove more than one card at a time. For example, if your opponent has three cards with a value of eight, playing a Scorch card will remove all three cards if eight is the highest value card in play. At the same time, if you happen to have an eight value card in play, it will also remove that.
You need to play around a Scorch card if you have one in your hand. That means starting off a round with low value cards and waiting until your opponent plays something of high value before you play your Scorch card. However, if your opponent plays four cards with a value of five, it can be more beneficial to remove all four of those cards instead of waiting for a higher value card to be played. Even if you end up removing some of your own cards, as long as your opponent loses more points than you, it’s still in your favor to play the Scorch card.
Draw to Win
The more cards you have in your hand, the higher your chance of winning becomes. Spy cards are especially useful in this case because they allow you to draw two cards for the price of playing a card for your opponent. The trick is to play Spy cards with a low value.
There aren’t very may Spy cards with a value lower than four early in the game. To work around this issue you can keep weather cards in your deck. Let’s say you have a close combat Spy card with a value of five. As long as you have a Biting Frost weather card in your hand you can play that Spy card without worrying about giving your opponent a significant advantage.
The strategy here is simple, play the Spy card, then follow with a Biting Frost card to drop its value to one. This allows you to draw two cards while only giving your opponent one additional point, and potentially removing more value from their board if they had other close combat cards in play.
Before building a deck, make sure you have the most powerful Gwent cards in the game. Now continue with our free The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt walkthrough, including a Romance guide with step-by-step instructions to sleep with all of Geralt’s admirers, along with another feature that tells you how to make lots of Crowns.
