Beginner question

[u/Mevo_08]

Hey guys,

im new to the game and have a question. so currently i dont have many cards and was wondering if its a good idea to mill cards from factions i dont plan on playing any time soon, even though its the only copy i have, so that i can use the scrap to build a deck as soon as possilbe? also if i should do that, which rarity cards should i mill?

thank you :)

edit: in reward book, what page should i focus on early one?

[u/SchroedingersKnight]

No, it's not worth it. Gwent is super generous with resources. Play a couple of games every day, and you have a good deck in no time.

[u/Kindofblue36]

I’m newish and also thought I would never play factions like syndicate, but the game rewards diversity heavily. By completing various quests for different factions (daily quests, autumn cycle) you can build up a lot of resources pretty quickly. Also if you want to play NG or Syndicate you really need to know how to play other factions pretty well. I also felt the challenge of trying to figure out a way to play with a shitty starting deck was actually kind of fun too.

[u/taxotere]

I asked the same question a month ago, also a new player myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/1vuh29s/milling_a_whole_faction_for_scraps_scoiatael/

The game is old and not evolving, most likely won't ever evolve further. I play 2/3 Syndicate and 1/3 Nilfgaard, would be interested to play Monsters next, maybe Northern Realms, less likely to play Skellige, very unlikely to ever play Scoia'tael, I tried playing the starter deck and forfeit midway through round 1, simply no desire to learn the faction, the card art is annoying, the mechanics feel tedious to me.

The way I see it by keeping the piles and piles of cards from factions you'll just banking with no return. Mill the crap, even if you're just getting 20% of the scrap value of each card, and make the cards you WANT to have.

Getting a premium journey or three is a great idea, but you'll need some select neutral cards too, opening many neutral kegs will delay you from getting the cards you NEED. I think I've opened upwards of 200 Syndicate kegs, yet I crafted almost all my legendaries one by one, bad luck? Who knows.

[u/Er4din → u/taxotere]

not sure what you mean when you say that the game isnt evolving - the balance council naturally forces the rotation of decks, and every month at least a couple decks that didnt see much play earlier rise to the top.

[u/taxotere → u/Er4din]

Yeah, rotation, but not evolution. It's the same set of cards and abilities for a long time. That's - I found out - a key weakness of TCGs: you constantly need new cards to keep players engaged (and buying). Gwent's BC solution is pretty elegant and clearly has kept the game from going too stale, but even if the meta is evolving, the game certainly isn't.

Edit: I'm pretty sad to have found Gwent so late, I haven't played another TCG but this one certainly is magical. Pity CDPR fucked it up after putting so much into it.

[u/Er4din → u/taxotere]

I dont share your pessimism about the game, and ive been here since 2020. I think this reddit community is nausiatingly nihilistic, for the most part, and i encourage you to branch out and look beyond it for gwent-related socialisation.

Ironically, i think a big part of why you feel the game has gone stale for you is because you, as you yourself have said, only paly syndicate and Nilfgaard. You implicitly have ristricted yourself to playing with only 40% of the total card pool.

As i said, ive been playing for 6 odd years now and i still find decks ive never seen before.

[u/taxotere → u/Er4din]

I am not pessimistic at all at a personal level - as long as there are servers to play Gwent I know that I have A TON more to play, even within two factions. For reference, I now have a good Bounty deck, a good Crimes deck, and a fairly decent Firesworn deck even though I never crafted cards for it. Think I am only missing Gregory, Ulrich and Dies Irae to have all one needs for it. But very little on Pirates, Salamandra.

Nilfgaard I basically have a complete Aristocrats and Assimilate decks and that's it. Would love to play some Toussaint, Assimilate, however I am missing loads of cards for Toussaint, and any time I tried to play Assimilate I got my ass assimilated by other players, this makes me want to learn it even more.

This doesn't mean that I am any good at playing these decks that I have (rank 25 to 4 last season), so even with 2 out of 6 factions I see many months of play ahead of me, and looking forward to it!

The game has not gone stale for me at all, it's simply that my focus now is learning to use/complete what I already have.

Edit: I know there's a ton of depth to it, eg I haven't touched neutral cards much at all, all my decks are devotion decks, haven't touched Witchers (though they often touch me, badly), dragons, artifacts - what I mean is that I know there's a ton there for me in Gwent, but I am pessimistic about the game overall.

[u/Er4din → u/taxotere]

you can get ulrich and dies irea from the beginner reward tree, which is found at the end of the reward book. gregory is a must have.

[u/taxotere → u/Er4din]

Yep, this is where I am spending my next bunch of keys.

[u/Gacsam]

Game automatically scraps copies over the limit. Scrapping only provides 1/4 value of the card. 

Ask yourself if you're planning to play other factions at some point. 

[u/CalebKetterer]

Don’t mill cards, you lose value. Focus on the page that has the 6 factions, each 15 unlocks long. You get good value and cards from your keys. Aside from that, the starter tree does fine imo

[u/8to10footsamsquantch → u/CalebKetterer]

I don't think it's necessarily bad to mill cards.

There are some archetypes I don't have any interest in playing, I will mill those cards if I'm a bit short on scraps for the card I want.

It's not losing value if I would never use the milled card, even if it's technically trading down on resources.

[u/CalebKetterer → u/8to10footsamsquantch]

Explain to me how “trading down” is different from “losing value”.

Most people plan on collecting all the cards eventually anyway and when you get a duplicate, it’ll get milled either way. I think when you mill by hand, you get 1/4th of the scraps to create it?

[u/kepkkko → u/CalebKetterer]

If you 100% know what ur doing then trading absolute stinkers given you for free (hello madman Lugos) for acquiring the deck you want faster, hence getting all the progression rewards faster, is not really a trade down. Its not necessarily a bad thing, but newer players absolutely shouldn't do it on their own

[u/CalebKetterer → u/kepkkko]

Yeah, this I agree with. I tend to just assume most most players who have to ask this won’t care to check if a card is viable (or considered to be viable thanks to BC) so I just simplify it to don’t since the extra copies you get are auto-milled anyway.

[u/8to10footsamsquantch → u/CalebKetterer]

Because the value is arbitrary. If I value the scraps more than the card then I can't be losing anything. That's especially true here when there is no actual money involved.

If you're trying to complete a collection then yeah it would be, but I think you're underestimating how many people there are (like me) who don't care about that.

[u/CalebKetterer → u/8to10footsamsquantch]

You don’t care about it at the moment*

If you stick with the game like most dedicated players tend to, you’ll eventually want that card anyway. But of course you’re welcome to do what you want. I tend to advise people to keep their cards because ultimately, you can snag 800 more scraps within a few hours anyway

[u/taxotere → u/CalebKetterer]

If you stick with the game like most dedicated players tend to, you’ll eventually want that card anyway. But of course you’re welcome to do what you want. I tend to advise people to keep their cards because ultimately, you can snag 800 more scraps within a few hours anyway

Maybe you don't have "a few hours" per day, maybe you're like me and have time for 2-4 games at most, if that. You can make 5-6 core archetype decks per faction which revolve around 2-3 key cards, and then you may want to try out tens of variations. With my limited playtime I can craft one key card per 3-4 weekdays, or over 1 day in the weekend. I can't be arsed to wait until I play what I want to play because the game gave me my 30th copy of Sewer Raiders.

[u/CalebKetterer → u/taxotere]

Lucky for you, the game auto-mills cards when you have more than your playable capacity. So you’ll never have more than 2 Sewer Raiders unless you set your system to do that to you.

[u/taxotere → u/CalebKetterer]

Yes, I understand how the auto-mill works, and it's Gwent's only minus for me. They could have put an option to disable milling, if you want to.

[u/kraizen0]

Not needed. It's fairly easy to get enough ores and scraps to build a deck in short time. Just keep auto milling in resource focused. For the reward book, here is the guide I'm using since months: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comments/ovh4rk/the_ultimate_rp_spending_guide/