Gwent

Journey: Final Week

The current Journey ends on the last day of the month at around 10am CEST, right before the Master Mirror expansion release. Now is your last chance to finish quests and earn daily crowns, and to receive the various rewards on offer.

Season of Magic

The seasonal arena mode for Season of Magic is live. Be sure to spend those reward points and finish off those seasonal trees. Don’t miss the Triss and Yen avatars as well as those two cardbacks. 

Master Mirror

The Master Mirror expansion arrives tomorrow at 12noon CEST. There will be downtime associated with the update and queues will be disabled. Don’t forget to restart the game client to receive the update. 

Pro Rank Cutoffs:

Here are the key cutoffs for Pro Rank as of June 30 at 12:14pm CEST.

Events

The Invitational

Team Leviathan Gaming’s The Invitational takes place on July 11. For more information join Team Leviathan Gaming’s Discord. 

Team Aretuza

Gwent Open # 2

In Aretuza Report # 3, we featured Redrame and got to know how he prepared for the recent Gwent Open as well as his thoughts on tomorrow's Master Mirror expansion. Since then, we saw Redrame's exceptional performance from both days of the Open. He put on a great fight throughout the tournament while keeping the casters and the viewers entertained.  Come back next week for Redrame's in-depth post-Gwent Open interview as well as his updated thoughts on the Master Mirror cards. 

Stream Schedule

Here is the stream schedule of Team Aretuza’s Pro and Stream Team for the week of June 29 to July 5. 

Player Spotlight: Damorquis

Damorquis qualified for three consecutive Gwent Opens and holds the title of Gwent Challenger #4 champion. His passion for The Witcher universe and his real-life knowledge of behavioral economics helped him develop Team Aretuza, which he manages. His extensive tournament preparation often results in ambitious, innovative decks that catch even the best opponents by surprise, and his highly disciplined approach to gaming, always looking for mistakes and areas to improve, provides his unique edge against the competition.

Hi Damorquis. First of all, how are you and what have you been up to in Gwent these past few seasons? 

Hello, I am doing well and I hope all of you are safe and sound in these times as well. Recently I have been playing Gwent and competing in Open qualifiers but took a small break this season. I will try to push for top 64 this season to try my chances in the July qualifier. I am looking forward to the expansion and to The Invitational taking place on the second weekend of July.

How do you balance your personal life while being a competitive player and the leader of Team Aretuza? 

It is a mixture of time management and getting your priorities straight. My life has little routine to it and I prepare a schedule and a set of goals for each week before I go into it. As a behavioral economist I am lucky to be able to overcome my own biases and can identify the things on which I lose time with more ease. I have a great team by my side at Aretuza which supports me a lot and our competitive roster is well known for its outstanding preparation. It can be hard to fit work on your thesis, job applications, competitive gameplay, sports, family, girlfriend, team management and enough sleep into a week. That is how my weeks recently look and will continue to be throughout summer. I enjoy working under pressure and diamonds can only grow under pressure, right? 

What are Team Aretuza’s plans for the remainder of the year? 

It has become harder to set tangible goals with the COVID-19 situation. We would like to continue our organisation of events online and if possible organise a LAN event in central Europe, too. We will soon have a complete rework of our online presence by adding Legends of Runeterra content and a competitive team in addition to Gwent. With the recent influx of new players, we are planning on producing more beginner-oriented content and creating opportunities for casual and beginning players to get their first experience with tournament gameplay. Similar to many others, we are also eagerly expecting the Gwent World Masters Season 1 tournament since we are represented with Adzikov, Kolemoen and myself.

The Gwent Community has been asking for the return of the meta snapshots. Could you give us your statement regarding this matter. 

After CDPR’s decision to hide mmr on pro rank we decided to step away from Meta Snapshots. It is our priority to produce high quality content and our data-oriented approach has provided us with the ability in the past to present our supporters with a meta snapshot based on facts. We are closely monitoring the situation on pro rank mmr data and will return to releasing Meta Snapshots when CDPR will provide an appropriately transparent environment for it.

Which among the new cards and archetypes do you look forward to? 

I am looking forward to Northern Realms the most as it is my favorite faction. The new tutor cards allow players to add more consistency to their decks which I love seeing. My favorite cards so far are Ildiko and Amphibious Assault. This expansion, the art is even more stunning than before. I really love the beauty of Gwent card arts. I am excited for a possible return of Spies and am curious if Skellige Warriors can become an archetype. 

As a competitive player, what changes would you like to see in the upcoming Master Mirror expansion?

I think the meta has been in a fairly good state for everyone who is not a competitive player. For competitive players there have been several things that really burned me out in the seasons I played. Number one is the popularity of Geralt: Igni. Igni is way too good, you can include it in every deck without any reason and randomly pulling it off is just so triggering for the opponent. Igni is definitely in an unhealthy state at the moment. The meta has become very greedy. Highlander decks running cards like Radeyah and Shupe's Day Off are also problematic. These decks have a high top end and hope to draw all of their golds; by missing just 1 of the big golds, you can easily lose. I was hoping that Gwent would implement some kind of provision intervals where the provision distribution over a deck needs to be less extreme and polarized. This would give a lot more decks the chance to rise up. Finally I also hope for two more problems being tackled: more proactive cards so red coin abuse is not as viable, and a significant reduction of binary interactions, especially the Bomb Heaver and scenario interaction.

Any message to the Gwent community?

I would like to thank the Gwent players for being so wholesome and being the reason why I have remained so passionate about the game for many years.

The season ends in a little under 24 hours. This is your last chance to make that final ladder push. Have those resources ready as well as those pre-order kegs to unlock all those new cards once the Master Mirror expansion goes live.