I loved Gwent in Witcher 3, but this standalone version is terrible in my opinion due to 3 main aspects:

1) Unfair advantage
At the beginning of each match, the game will decide which of the players gets an unfair advantage. As you know, in Gwent the objective is to end the round with more points than your opponent. In this case, whoever gets the advantage automatically gets at LEAST 5 points for free, on top of playing first. This means they can immediately gain dominance, they get 5 points for free AND by the time you start playing they may already have cards ready to attack you, or whatever buff they have. This simply breaks the entire concept of the game for me.

2) Only 1 game mode
There is basically only one game mode, which is standard, where you play with people that at the very least are of your skill level, but after a few matches you will often be paired with people whose decks are already much more advanced than yours. I lost count of how many times I played with people that I simply never had the chance to beat. There is only one other mode, which is in beta mind you, where you get a set of random cards and make a frankenstein deck. Almost nobody plays it though.

3) The grind is insane
I had never seen such blatant milking on a game before this one. This is just sad. Even for a F2P game. You must grind for hours and hours to get a single LOOTBOX containing 4 random low tier cards odds are you already have, and *one* average card. You also can't obtain any battlefield skins or anything like that for free, so unless you pay for it you'll be seeing the same battlefield over and over again. To top it all off, this game has a season pass. And the worst one ever no less. Either you pay *30* dollars for it to get cool rewards, OR you get the same crappy grind key over and over again. That's it. You only get *one* reward over and over again, which is an item you use to grind.

No thanks. Huge pass for me.

I loved Gwent in Witcher 3, but this standalone version is terrible in my opinion due to 3 main aspects: 1) Unfair advantage At the beginning of each match, the game will decide which of the players gets an unfair advantage. As you know, in Gwent the objective is to end the round with more points than your opponent. In this case, whoever gets the advantage automatically gets at LEAST 5 points for free, on top of playing first. This means they can immediately gain dominance, they get 5 points for free AND by the time you start playing they may already have cards ready to attack you, or whatever buff they have. This simply breaks the entire concept of the game for me. 2) Only 1 game mode There is basically only one game mode, which is standard, where you play with people that at the very least are of your skill level, but after a few matches you will often be paired with people whose decks are already much more advanced than yours. I lost count of how many times I played with people that I simply never had the chance to beat. There is only one other mode, which is in beta mind you, where you get a set of random cards and make a frankenstein deck. Almost nobody plays it though. 3) The grind is insane I had never seen such blatant milking on a game before this one. This is just sad. Even for a F2P game. You must grind for hours and hours to get a single LOOTBOX containing 4 random low tier cards odds are you already have, and *one* average card. You also can't obtain any battlefield skins or anything like that for free, so unless you pay for it you'll be seeing the same battlefield over and over again. To top it all off, this game has a season pass. And the worst one ever no less. Either you pay *30* dollars for it to get cool rewards, OR you get the same crappy grind key over and over again. That's it. You only get *one* reward over and over again, which is an item you use to grind. No thanks. Huge pass for me.