I have a bold statement to make:

Gwent is a better card game than Hearthstone.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: What the hell is a Gwent, and are you nuts?

Let’s answer the first question first. Gwent is the collectible card game played throughout the northern realms in The Witcher 3. While Geralt is running about slaying monsters and searching for his long lost adopted daughter, he’s also playing everyone he can in the Nilfgardian equivalent of Magic the Gathering, spending as much money (or more) on beefing up his deck as he does on food and drink. Who knew Geralt was a card flopper? Loading

To answer the second question: I may be a little nuts, but not for thinking Gwent is superior to Blizzard’s free-to-play, runaway success of a digital CCG. Gwent emphasizes playing your opponent and playing your hand, instead of just playing around your opposing deck’s power cards or auto-piloting your own deck’s built in wombo-combo. Not convinced? Read on, and believe.

Superior Structure

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Hearthstone’s overall structure; it more or less mirrors the Magic the Gathering formula that’s both familiar and enduring. At the end of the day though, it’s still a game of momentum and chance where you rush to deplete your opponent’s life before they deplete yours. Gwent’s approach is simply more stable and more measured, providing more opportunities for a skilled player to win.

The primary way in which Gwent accomplishes this is by making every match a best of three where you draw an opening hand of 10 cards and have to make it last for the duration.

There’s a reason gaming competitions of every kind (including Hearthston and MtG) use the best of three format: it helps minimize the effects of luck on the outcome. In Gwent, that concept is baked in from the start; you always need to win twice to best your opponent, and with finite resources. Unless you have a cantrip, or some special ability, your 10 card starting hand is all you have to work with, so you need to form a long-term strategy as to how to ration them through up to three rounds of play.

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Not only does this remove the randomness of your opponent drawing some insane, round changing card at the eleventh hour, it also severely limits the impact of crazy card combos. There are cards in Gwent that work really well together to pose a big problem for your opponent, but once those cards are used, that’s it – you still need to find a way to win another round with whatever you have left. That’s if you even draw such a combo in the first place. You’ll only see 10 cards out of your whole deck, so what are the chances of you drawing everything you need? Not great, and since you aren’t constantly drawing more, that number isn’t going up.

To top it off, there are no other resources to worry about. There are no casting costs in Gwent - you simply play one card per turn. There’s no such thing as missing the mana curve and sitting on cards you’ll die before getting to use, so that’s yet another factor of chance removed from the victory equation.

I left both Magic and Hearthstone behind because of how focused competitive play became around just building a deck designed to explode after X number of turns. That’s like competing to see who can build the fastest car. Comparatively, Gwent is how well you can drive that car, and for how long.

No True Power Cards

Yes, there are rare hero cards that have a little extra oomph, but there is no one card that can bail your opponent out of a corner they’ve played themselves into. In Hearthstone, there’s always a card you’re terrified of your opponent top-decking, as it could totally destroy an advantageous position that you’ve made smart decisions to put yourself in. In Gwent, the only way a single card can have that much impact is if you plan it well in advance, or if a very specific set of circumstances occur.

Take the Gwent card Scorch as an example. It’s the closest thing to a board clear Gwent has. It destroys the unit or units with the highest strength on the board. Even if you take out just one enemy unit, that could be the difference between winning and losing the round. But if you want to get any real value for Scorch, you need to stick to playing low strength units until your opponent has a couple of higher strength units of their own with the same power. Unlike say, Hearthstone’s Flamestrike, you can’t just play it when you get it to instantly reverse the course of the match. Because of cards like Flamestrike, you’re often losing a match of Hearthstone in situations that look and feel like you should be winning. Loading

Even cards that do affect your opponent’s army en masse affect yours too. In Gwent, you place your units into one of three positions on the battlefield - melee, ranged, and siege - and each zone has a related weather card that greatly reduces the effectiveness of units fighting there. The thing is, it affects units on both sides. If you want Biting Frost to work in your favor, for instance, you’d make a concerted effort not to play units in the melee line, even as your opponent stacks forces there. Played reactively, when you suddenly find yourself outmatched in a particular zone, the effect of these weather cards is minimal, but when pursued proactively, you get big results. Personally, I’d much rather play a game where I win or lose based on cunning decision-making and long term planning as opposed to one where my opponent’s next draw can negate all the work I’ve done for free.

Still think I’m nuts? Maybe I am. Hearthstone has more cards and more players, and it always will. But at the end of the day, games of all kinds boil back down to this for me: what interesting decisions do I get to make, and how valuable are those decisions? Despite its relative simplicity, I make more tough calls in Gwent, and they always seem to matter more, so that’s how I’ll be spending my time card-slinging.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and argue with everything he says about them.