has been rough on many veteran players. This guide is designed to lay out the differences between the two so players can have a better idea of what they can expect from the new Gwent.

Between the open beta and Homecoming, the folks at CD Projekt Red completely dismantled Gwent and rebuilt it as a new game. For new players picking up Gwent for the first time, this is fine. They can learn everything fresh. But for those up us who have played the open beta for the last year and a half, this transition can be jarring. While it sometimes feels like everything but the artwork has been rewritten, enough of Gwent has stayed the same that it can sometimes be hard to shake old habits. So, for those of you who are sticking out the transition from beta to Homecoming, this guide is designed to help you navigate the plethora of changes you can expect to find in Gwent’s Homecoming version.

But First- Let’s Commiserate

When the public beta launched in 2017, CD Projekt Red said that any progress in Gwent from then on out was meant to carry over into the final game. While they warned that this was still a beta, and thus there was a small chance that progress could be reset, Gwent went through patch after patch for months with relative stability and no real threats of a reset.

Then, at the final hour, the game was completely rewritten and all collections were emptied. Now, that’s not to say that progress was reset. Only card collections. So while your collection may sit empty upon first logging in, your levels and rank all kick in, unlocking a flood of rewards based on previous accomplishments. So with this small pile of in-game resources, plus the plethora you’ll be able to unlock with your achievements, it is relatively easy to rebuild your collection to what it once was.

But that’s not necessarily a fun experience. Sure, it’s nice seeing iron ore and scrap values in the thousands alongside a couple dozen card kegs, but actually going through the process of spending all those resources can be long and drawn out. The “wow-wow” factor of the new kegs wears off after about the third one, especially once you realize that old favorite cards have been rewritten with keywords and lingo that may as well be foreign. It’s frustrating.

Still, I would rather rebuild my collection than have my old collection transfer straight over. With the total revamp of the meta, many old powerhouses are now garbage, and many old poop piles are now invaluable. So I appreciate the opportunity to rebuild my collection and select my gold cards according to the new meta rather than be stuck with a bunch of random decks that don’t synergize at all anymore.

And for many players, it’s the gameplay or the new aesthetic that rubs them the wrong way. That alone is an incredibly lengthy topic, and an incredibly subjective one at that, so I’m not going to address it here. But rest assured, if you are grumpy with the new Gwent, you are not alone.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into what’s new.

Gameplay – Rows and Weather

In the open beta, the rows on the battlefield lost their edge in a big way. Sure, it was handy to arrange an army just right so as to counter potential weather effects, but that was about it. This was a big reason behind the Homecoming revamp. CD Projekt Red wanted to get back to the Gwent that felt like a battlefield, where unit placement mattered again.

To accomplish this, they did a few things.

Most notably, the board change from three rows per player, to two. According to the official Homecoming page, this was largely done to improve the visual experience of the game. With six rows on the field, it was hard to see and engage with units.

Personally, I can’t help but wonder if this was also a move to make tablets an option in the future, since the large board size was one of the biggest things holding them back from that market.

But CD Projekt Red didn’t simply shrink the board and call it a day. They also revamped many unit abilities (more on that in the next section) to play differently depending upon which row you play them in. A unit may need to be played in the melee row in order to gain the best impact, but that could potentially put them within reach of the enemy’s unit abilities. Decisions, decisions…

Of course, the old weather cards could have easily wrecked these small boards. Just two weather cards down and the entire enemy field is wet and wrecked for the rest of the round. So now weather cards behave a bit differently, lasting for a set amount of turns in most cases rather than staying on the field indefinitely. Honestly, I like this change because it makes the weather cards feel more adaptive and realistic, rather than a simple force of oppression.

Overall, the rows in Gwent’s Homecoming play radically different than they did in the beta.

Gameplay – Abilities Old and New

While mechanics like consume, deathwish, deploy and resilience remain intact, Gwent Homecoming gave us some new abilities: order, thrive, bloodthirst, and others. The two most common abilities I’ve noticed are deploy and order, so I’ll start there.

Deploy works mostly the way it did in the beta, you play a card and it activates an ability. But now deploy often comes with constraints like melee or bloodthirst, which will determine if the ability will actually go through. You see, as I mentioned above, some cards must be played in the melee row in order to activate their deploy ability. Or, sometimes a card will have two different abilities: one for melee and one for ranged, allowing more flexibility for how you want to use the card. In the case of bloodthirst, X amount of enemies must be damaged in order to trigger, so you’ll need a damaging deck to support this.

The best way to damage enemies is with order abilities. Some cards now come with an ability that can be activated on your turn without counting as a card played. Unless an order card has zeal, it must wait until it’s second turn on the field to be activated, or you can hold onto it until the right moment. This makes for a deep game of risk/reward as you play mind games with your opponent.

For the most part, order abilities tend to deal damage to enemies or boost allies, but there are exceptions, such as orders that trigger deathwish abilities. For order cards with charge, they can activate these abilities multiple times per charge counter, and sometimes regain charges if certain conditions are met. The way in which order abilities count during your turn is also quite different, but I’ll leave that off for the leaders’ section below.

For both deploy and order abilities, sometimes they have an additional constraint called reach. This number limits how many rows an ability can reach across to deliver its action. So if you want to drop a Venendal Elite with Reach: 2 on your ranged row, it has to go across your melee row to deal damage to the enemies melee row, but it cannot damage anything in your opponents ranged row because it is out of range. This is what I was referring to when I said that putting an enemy too close to enemy lines could put them in harm’s way. Yet another thing to consider when choosing which row to play a unit in.

The only other ability I haven’t talked about is thrive. This is a fairly straightforward ability primarily found on monster cards. Basically, once this unit is on the field, anytime an ally unit with higher power is played the thrive unit gets a +1 boost. Pretty handy, if you play your cards right.

Gameplay – Artifacts

Another thing I should mention in regards to gameplay is artifacts. In the beta, artifacts were basically a type of special card, but in Homecoming they are something else entirely. While they still have unique abilities designed to manipulate other cards on the board, they aren’t simply played and discarded. Now, they are dropped onto the field where they will stay until either they are destroyed, their triggering circumstances are met, or their order ability is spent (depending on the card.)

This adds another layer of mind games because your opponent can see the card on the field, and thus must decide how they will react. And with artifact clearing cards being relatively few, sometimes destroying the artifact isn’t an option.

Of course, the most notable artifact you will see in every game is Tactical Advantage. This card is designed to counteract the disadvantage of going first by providing a chance to boost one of your units by 5. (Only usable in the first round.) And since it is immune, the opponent can’t simply wipe this card off the board, so it’s a fairly valuable card for evening the playing field.

Gameplay – Leaders, Passing, and Mulligans

Okay, time to wrap up the gameplay differences with the last three items on our list: leaders, passing, and mulligans.

Much like in the beta, each leader’s ability is unique and designed to mesh well with their faction. Some use order abilities, some use deploy abilities, some refresh every round, others don’t. It’s a whole new world, one that I can’t entirely breakdown in a single paragraph, so you’ll have to learn the new abilities on your own. But they work largely like the abilities described above, so you’re well on your way.

But the most important thing to note is that using a leader ability does not count as playing a card. In fact, neither do the order abilities. You could play your leader and three deploy abilities in a single turn and still play a card. That’s a lot to drop in one turn. But the idea is that your opponent can see those orders and leaders coming, and thus can plan accordingly.

Of course, the thing that throws most veteran players off is the way this interacts with passes. If you use a leader or an order ability, you cannot pass. You must play a card. So you’ll have to keep that in mind when planning your passing timing. This also means that the turn doesn’t automatically end when you play a card. In order to leave room for activating leaders and orders, the turn doesn’t end until you click, “End Turn.” This drove me nuts at first, but I eventually got used to it.

The last thing to mention is that mulligans work differently now. Instead of getting a set number of mulligans per round, you get a set number per game. Which means, you could blow all your mulligans in the first round and not have any for the rest of the game. Or, you could go the other way and save up your mulligans to draw that perfect hand in round three. Your call.

Deckbuilding

Deckbuilding has also changed a lot in Gwent’s Homecoming. Unlike in the Gwent beta, decks no longer have maximum size limits. In fact, you could pile in as many silver and gold units as you like- with one caveat. All cards now have recruit costs.

Recruit costs basically serve as a way to indicate a card’s power and thus limit how powerful your deck can be. So a gold card like Iris Von Everec has a recruit cost of 9, while a bronze card like Fiend has a recruit cost of 4. Altogether, a deck must have a minimum of 25 cards, and a maximum recruit score of 165. So you can choose to focus on a few powerful cards or overload on inexpensive cards. Whatever you decided to do, you do you.

Progression

Progression is still fairly straightforward, with new rewards, new prestige levels, and a bunch of added depth on the lore side.

For ranked, the most notable difference is the addition of stained glass emblems. Winning games earns glass shards for the player, and once they collect all five they get a shiny new player icon to show off their status. Pretty neat.



Otherwise, it’s still the same grind to the top, with lower tiers getting more forgiveness, and higher tiers getting more rewards. It doesn’t look much different than the old system, but nonetheless, CD Projekt Red did a good job breaking it down here.



In terms of leveling, they’ve switched over to a prestige system much like what you would find in Call of Duty or Overwatch. Upon passing level 60, a players level resets to 1 and their prestige level goes up by one. So a level 75 player would actually be level 15 with 1 prestige. Each prestige level comes with its own rewards, such as daily reward upgrades, guaranteed premiums, and more.

In my experience with prestige leveling, it’s usually a much more satisfying and faster way to gain awards at higher levels, so I’m glad to see it here.

Players can also unlock achievements in Gwent now. And these aren’t just for bragging rights. Achievements grant Reward Points which can be spent in the Reward Book. The neat thing about this book is that you can tailor your rewards to the faction you prefer. So if you’re a Skellige fan, you can dump points into the Skellige branches to unlock lore, leader skins, and Skellige-specific card kegs. I like it!

And as I mentioned, CD Projekt Red did a good job of breaking down everything mentioned in this progression section, so feel free to visit their page here if you want more details.

TL;DR:

If you’re a veteran player and you want to stick with Gwent, you’re going to have to bite the bullet and relearn the game from scratch. Fewer lanes, order abilities, and passing changes have rewritten the tempo and meta of the game.

It will take a while to relearn it all, but I’m curious to see which strategies emerge because, personally, I think there is a lot of potential to be found in this new system. It’s just a matter of time before players adapt and push it to the limits.

And if this article has you rethinking whether or not Gwent is for you, feel free to check out this article in which I compare Gwent, Hearthstone, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and Fable Fortune.