Scoai'Tael is OP in Gwent

[Douglas Quaid]

I can beat every other faction with Northern Realms but as soon as I face someone with a Scoia'Tael deck I get murdered. It's all the summons, one card summons a horde of cards and before you know it the score is something like 103 to 14.

To make things worse Scoia'Tael cards are rare so it's hard to make a deck of your own.

What a broken faction. Did they do any balancing at all on Gwent?

EDIT: For those saying just bait them out or scorch, it's also the overabundance of medic cards that they get, so it doesn't matter in the end. They can revive (almost) their entire army round 2. It's a broken faction.

[ThatRabidPotato]

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Scoiatael is the weakest of them all.
Monsters does the same thing, only even worse, and the counter is the same for them both.
Biting Frost, Impenetrable Fog, and Scorch.
Use Medics and Spies, buy cards off of every merchant that sells them, and do the Gwent quests.
Seriously, if you have a good deck and know how to use it, you should be laughing with anticipation of the slaughter every time you see someone pull a Scoiatael deck.

[lpnlizard27]

Lol you don't know how to play gwent then, make all those summons work against them by draining the amount of cards they have. Try to make them use up some cards in the first round then lose it, maybe place some spies before you pass.

Good technique is to lay down a high card like a 10 on the first turn, that usually prompts them into using a summon unit, then use a decoy to return the unit or let the round pass and use a medic to revive. If all goes well they will use a good portion of cards, limiting them for the rest of the game.

[Dead2Rights]

You're completely wrong.

Those group cards are among some of the worst. Imagine you have a bunch of those in your deck and many of them make it into your hand. If you play 1, you are FORCED to play the rest of them from your hand. This is down right freaking terrible. It's one of the worst card specials I can think of.

Northern Realms is actually the faction that is pretty OP. The basic strategy is to heavily stack siege weapons and clear weather effects and spies. Then open up strong and use the 3rd Foltest Leader card which double siege weapon strength. You can place down 2-3 cards in the opening hand for point values that are over 30 which basically forces your opponent to burn 4-5 of his cards just to try and catch you. Gwent is all about keeping the card advantage in your hand and Northern Realms is really, really, really good at this.

I don't consider myself particularly great at card games (for reference I can get like 5 or 6 wins pretty consistently in Hearthstone Arena play, but almost never more than that) but even I consider Gwent really easy to win at. In fact, I don't think I've lost a match since the tutorial games.

[Douglas Quaid]

It doesn't matter if I scorch, bait them out, it's the endless medic cards that counter anything. They can use all their cards round 1 then dump a bunch of medic cards round 2 the horde lives on.

[zioste81]

Must be your playstyle or the way you build you deck, because personally I breath a sigh of relief when I see my opponent using that particular deck.

To me the key to victory using NR are spies. Do you have Thaler, Dijkstra, Avallac'h?

[nyanko]

Use weather cards and summons are useless.

[Black Sheep Wall]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Originally posted by Vom Tag:

Use weather cards and summons are useless.

There isn't a sure win way with Gwent. Clear Sky + Decoys combined with muster type cards tactic can be very deadly.

Yeah that's false.
There are like 2 decks in the entire game than can take a built northern realms deck, and one is in the tourney.

First, you need spies.
Northern realms has 4 available.
Find them, use them.

Second, cut the crap outta your deck.
You do not need any weather cards ever, including clear weather.
You should only be using 23 cards.

Seige Medic, Yennefer and Decoy x1 let you replay spies if they want to play spy games with you. If you do not need spies use them to get more plays out of the Dragon, or Tight Bond units, especially catapults you used to bait scorch.

Get 3x Blue Stripes Commandos and 3x Cinifred Reavers ASAP.
Don't ever lead with Commandos or Reavers, ideally play them after the opponent passes or after you have baited out scorch.
If your hand is forced, play one of each first and then stack them.

Use 1 Scorch and 1 Horn until you get Dandelion and the Dragon card.

Get two catapults.
This combined with the Foltest leader that Horns seige allows the strongest openings available and perfectly baits scorch.

Always open with spies and then lead into playing your heros.
Don't save your heros, they actually have less total power than your regular cards.
Reavers, Commandos, Catapults all have higher than 10/15 values when used correctly.
The Dragon has better value if that row has a horn.
Heros are one off cards that cannot take advantage of your multipliers.
So don't save them.
In fact, I usually end up picking hero cards for my redraws.

Always toss your two worst cards, do not EVER hold your hand.
The cards you ditch go to the bottom of your deck, this keeps your spies cycling.

Do not use Triss.

I have literally never lost a game of gwent with this deck, but one deck in the tourney came close, so it is mathmatically possible. There was also an innkeeper in a whorehouse that gave me trouble because she had so many spies/decoys. But I still won.

When building your deck, keep the low cards trimmed out.
Don't use anything that plays in the middle row except reavers and heros.

Technically Nilfgaard plays a better spy game, they have more medics and the 4th Emperor leader special lets you replay a spy from their discard pile. But nilfgaard doesn't really compete with NR when it comes to tight bond. Another tip, use your leader ability to delay a turn.

I still have no idea how people manage to lose at gwent.

[Black Sheep Wall]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Originally posted by Ronnie Law:

Yeah that's false.
There are like 2 decks in the entire game than can take a built northern realms deck, and one is in the tourney.

By that I mean there is more than one way to win at Gwent. But once you've collected an OP deck you will become invincible after all.

Meanwhile it actually takes a bit of ingenuity to win the cards you need for the 'dream' deck built.

Nope, literally didn't lose a single game as NR during my entire second playthrough.
And I only switched decks after I already had my NR deck complete.
Gwent is not hard.
Keep card advantage and play big units.
You'll win every time.

[morte]

Originally posted by Ronnie Law:

I still have no idea how people manage to lose at gwent.

That Passiflora's tournament was very hard for me, too many decoys and spies in first 2 games, but third was easy enough.

Great guide, btw!

[Dead2Rights]

Originally posted by Thor - The Butcher of Blaviken:

I lost once recently against an Inn-keeper when I didn't get a single spy and like 4 of my decoy/horn cards, so I had almost no useful cards on my hand. But that was extremely unlucky in the draw.

Honestly I think OP was just having some bad luck and getting salty (and maybe he doesn't know how to build a decent deck?)

Bad draws happen all the time. I play a lot of Hearthstone and I don't actually consider myself a great card player, but I am good at maths. I have a winning record because my deck is entirely built around having the correct number and types of cards to take control of the board by the 4th turn and not let it go. In fact, my win percentage in ranked and casual play is almost exactly the same as the statistical sampling I've produced that indicates this is likely to happen (~70% of the time). However, my win rate in Arena play (where you get presented cards to assemble a deck, intsead of going into the match with a pre-assembled one) is about 50% - or to put it succinctly, entirely average compared to everyone else.

So the take away from this? A huge factor of if you are going to win or not is based on drawing the right cards from your deck. Therefor - building decks is probably the most important "skill" in these card games.

[Mutare]

Have some biting frost cards, as most of the scoi'Tael is used as melee. Have cards like dykstra spies in your deck
I removed the decoys from my deck and choose the horns.