As a competitive card game, Gwent has a community of players that’s both completely devoted and perpetually grumpy. The latest target of that energy happens to be a card called Imlerith: Sabbath, a gold monster whose power was best demonstrated when it almost single-handedly won a recent match.
Screenshot: Wikia
Jan “SuperJJ” Janßen, a pro Hearthstone player for Complexity who also plays Gwent, was streaming yesterday when he decided to do something bonkers: passing on the final round of a match with nine cards still to play. Why did he effectively fold his hand and give his opponent a giant advantage? Two words: Imlerith: Sabbath.
He played regular version of it on the last round and then proceeded to buff it by 12 points with Parasite. At 13 strength (it had already taken some damage) and six armour, it looked unstoppable. As a result, SuperJJ passed, banking on the idea that his opponent wouldn’t have anything powerful enough to counter it, an assumption that proved true.
The following clip has been making the rounds on the game’s subreddit.
Part of the game’s most recent batch of new cards, Imlerith is a five strength monster that duels other cards and heals itself by two and gains two armour if it survives. Dueling is one of the game’s newer mechanics, in which two cards deal damage to one another equal to their strength.
It can be a good way to retain board control since opponents’ cards placed after the dueling one need to be more powerful in order to survive, but it’s also extremely susceptible to removal since it starts out at such low health and has to duel every new card that comes down after him.
Whether this advantage and disadvantage are balanced remains very much in dispute by the game’s players. Some have written in-depth analyses of why they think Imlerith is one of Gwent‘s best new cards, exemplifying a new layer of interactivity brought to the game with the latest new set of cards.
Since Imlerith isn’t unstoppable right out of the gate, he requires players to think creatively about how to deploy and combo him with other cards. Others have listed their frustrations with how easily the card can get out of hand when strengthened with another spell or given resilience so it can hang around and wreak havoc for a second round.
Imlerith: Sabbath is an engine card that becomes unstoppable if players don’t address it early or have the right removal spells.
Those who played The Witcher 3 might remember Imlerith as the Wild Hunt lieutenant who serves as one of the game’s most difficult boss battles on a mountain in Southern Valen (I spent an hour trying to beat it on the Death March difficulty).
It’s understandable why he would be so powerful in Gwent then, even if it might make sense to at least tweak him, like making him slightly harder to buff while still in a player’s hand. No one wants to go up against an opponent in ranked or arena and be confronted with a 13 strength, six armour card that’s ready to duel all of theirs into oblivion, but at the very least it’s still interesting to see how Imlerith is pushing the boundaries of what players and the game’s designers think Gwent should be.
Comments
3 responses to “The Gwent Version Of This Witcher Boss Is Out Of Control”
Eh. He’s absurdly powerful in arena mode, but otherwise the ST cleaver combo is more problematic. He’s a ‘do you have control cards’ check basically.
The art work in this game is phenomenal, particularly the animated cards.. WOW! You can tell that they’re not trying to churn out a cheap stand alone, some of that animating etc. would have taken ages.
CDPR’s Gwent stand alone is subtly different from the in-game version. Biggest change for me was that cards are no-longer restricted to certain rows, eg. you can place archers on Melee or Siege rows. Not sure what I think about it as it definitely meant in the in-game version that you had to strategically choose cards for certain rows. Now you don’t really choose cards for rows at all but there’s other mechanics that impact whole rows, so they probably thought being able to place units on any row was the best thing to do.
I don’t understand how online card games work, I can only assume people buy packs of so many cards and its random chance, but then I’d assume you can trade cards also. Seems if your quite rich you could make a unstoppable deck by buying the best cards, meh.
Depends on the game. Only two card games I play are hearthstone and gwent and have never bought cards with real cash. Both games allow you to accumulate in-game currency with which to buy decks with random chance of certain cards and you go from there.
I hear that the upcoming Valve card game will be similar however you will be able to also trade cards.
End of the day i’m pretty casual. I am pretty low rank in both games and simply play for fun and the fact that games don’t take too long so I can care with my 7 month old daughter when she WON’T GO TO SLEEP! 🙂