Game Updates

Journey Quests: Week 10

This week's Journey quests require players to do the following:

• Boost units 20 times (Regular)
• Damage units 20 times (Premium)
• Play 15 units above 8 power (Regular)
• Play 20 units below 3 power (Premium)
• Finish 2 matches in any online mode (Regular)
• Play 10 cards with the reveal keyword (Premium)

We have prepared three decks to help you quickly and easily accomplish these quests:

• Boost and damage units 20 times - Northern Realms Uprising Orders
• Play 15 units above 8 power and 20 units below 3 power - Monsters Fruits of Ysgith Thrive
• Play 10 cards with the reveal keyword - Nilfgaard Enslave Hyperthin

Seasonal Mode

This month’s seasonal mode is Dual Casting: Once per turn, when you play a special card, spawn and play a copy of it immediately after.

We also prepared several decks for this seasonal game mode.

• Northern Realms Mobilization Siege Resupply
• Nilfgaard Enslave 6 Hefty Helge and Create
• Syndicate Congregate Gord Reveal
• Scoia'tael Mahakam Forge Gord

Season of Magic

The Season of Magic ends on June 30 at 10am CEST. There are three seasonal trees on the reward book where you can spend your reward points.  

Upcoming Events

Claymore Open

Claymore will host an open tournament designed to give community players the feeling of a Gwent Masters event. Qualifier #1 and #2 will take place on June 14 and June 20 with the finals happening on June 21. More details can be found on the Claymore Discord server.

The Invitational

To celebrate their 2-Year Anniversary, Team Leviathan Gaming will host The Invitational, one of this year’s biggest individual community tournaments. Pro players, streamers, and content creators across different teams and throughout the Gwent community have been carefully selected and invited to participate. There will also be a qualifier tournament to give the rest of the community a chance to face each other and prove themselves worthy to join the main event. The swiss qualifiers are scheduled for June 13 and 14 while the main event is set for July 11 and 12. For more information about The Invitational, be sure to join Team Leviathan Gaming's Discord server. 

Master Mirror Expansion - Card Reveals

Throughout the month, several cards for the upcoming Master Mirror expansion will be revealed across different platforms. Be on the lookout for these cards and follow CD Projekt Red and Gwent’s official social media websites. We will be updating the card-reveals channel in our official Discord.

Team Updates

Team Aretuza Top 16 and Top 64 Players - Season of the Viper

Congratulations to Damorquis for securing a spot in the June Top 16 qualifiers and to UnforgivenIV, kolemoen, theshaggynuts, Adzikov, and shinmiri2 for reaching the June Top 64 qualifiers, based on their Pro Rank placements during the Season of the Viper.

Stream Schedule

Here’s the stream schedule of Team Aretuza’s Pro and Stream Team for the week of June 8 to June 14.

Name	Social	Schedule (All times are in CEST)
Ceely	Twitch , Twitter	Tuesday to Friday at 5pm Sunday at 5 pm
Crozyr	Twitch , Twitter	Monday at 4pm Thursday to Sunday at 4:30pm
Lionhart	Twitch , Twitter	Monday to Friday at 11am
Redrame	Twitch , Twitter	Everyday at 3pm
Shaggy	Twitch , Twitter	Weekdays at 6pm
Shinmiri	Twitch , Twitter	Weekdays at 7pm
TheaBeasty	Twitch , Twitter	Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday at 4pm

All schedules are subject to change so be sure to check their Twitter profiles to stay updated. 

Player Spotlight: Shaggy

In this first Aretuza Report, get to know Shaggy, a Team Aretuza competitive player who has participated in several Gwent Masters events and boasts a growing stream presence.

First of all, welcome back and congratulations on finishing in Top 64 last season. What made you come back to Gwent?

Shaggy: Thanks, it feels good to be back. I missed the awesome community in Gwent and I'm having a lot of fun playing the game again. 

I wasn't playing a lot in the months before Homecoming released, and I wasn't happy with the state of the game when homecoming first came out. I wanted to focus on my university studies and playing & competing in Artifact at that time, so I stopped playing Gwent completely.

The impulse for getting back into Gwent was that I wanted to get back in touch with the community and my friends in Team Aretuza, and I wanted to help my teammates with the preparation for the season 1 Gwent Masters finale. Another reason was that I heard the game is in a much better state now than it was when I quit, which I completely agree with. The season 1 finale unfortunately ended up getting postponed due to COVID-19 but I'm glad to be back regardless.

How was the climbing experience to Top 64? 

It went very well, I'm quite happy with both my performance and ability to stay focused for long periods of time when I was actually trying to climb on ladder. I feel like I could have finished top 16 in the end if I started playing seriously a bit earlier into the season, my final position was 28th - so I'm aiming to finish this season in the top 16 like I did two seasons ago. I ended up playing some more unconventional decks towards the end of my climb, like Lockdown with Masquerade Ball and Shupe's Day Off as well as Gedyneith with Shupe's Day Off, to make the experience a bit more exciting for both myself and my viewers.

Did you have any highlights or best moments during your climb? 

I had a good time climbing and some great matches against the best Gwent players out there. No specific highlight comes to mind, but I remember I once had an ~85% winrate over the period of a 10 hour stream which I'm quite proud of.

Any thoughts on the game and for the upcoming expansion?

I think the game is in a good state at the moment, probably the best it's been ever since the infamous Midwinter Update back in 2017. I'm a bit disappointed by there being no balance changes this month, but I'm very excited for the new expansion and the new cards.  The game is most enjoyable to me in a fresh meta with new options to explore.

Competitively speaking, I would like to see some more viable deck-thinning options, like the card Raiding Fleet. Having access to more point-efficient thinning and having a better chance to find important cards by round 3 would be amazing. I don't think tutors like Royal Decree have to be better, but I miss the thinning and consistency cards from old Gwent. 

I would also like to see some changes to something that feels like a very binary interaction and has been a frequent topic of discussions, specifically artifact removal (Bomb Heaver and Shupe Knight) versus Scenarios.

Another thing I'd love to see is more buffing of bad cards.

You are known for imitating Gwent card voicelines and for speaking in Polish on your stream. How did this start?

I've often imitated voicelines of cards even when playing alone and not streaming, so it seemed like a good idea to add as a reward for channel points (which are earned passively for watching the stream).

I didn't really expect my viewers to request voicelines in different languages, but it's been a lot of fun and I like doing them. I don't actually speak Polish by the way, the only languages I'm somewhat proficient in are German, English, and Italian.

Big shoutout to everyone watching and supporting my streams, you are amazing and make playing Gwent even more fun for me.

Here are some clips from Shaggy’s streams:

• Stream Highlight 1
  
• English Voiceline 1
  
• English Voiceline 2
  
• Polish Voiceline
  

That’s it for our first Aretuza Report. The current Journey ends this month so be sure to do those Journey quests and claim those rewards. This season is a bit shorter than the other seasons so be sure to get those games going.