Gwent goes gloriously gothic as The Crimson Curse launches
Fangs for the memories
It's best not to count a vampire out, but this launched yesterday already, so the Count is definitely out. Higher Vampire Dettlaff van der Eretein and his bat-winged horde have descended upon Gwent, CD Projekt's Witcher-spinoff CCG. Today's expansion, The Crimson Curse is the first major card expansion the game has seen since its open beta debut in 2017, a long time for a CCG to go without fresh blood. Fortunately, it looks like The Crimson Curse brings a juicy transfusion of new stuff to the meta, including five new leaders and 101 new cards and fun new rules to learn. Below, the developers walking through the new stuff.
Gwent's animated cards continue to be a joy to look at, and the ones in Crimson Curse are no slouch either, dripping with gleeful gore. One of the more striking-looking ones is Dettlaff himself, stepping out of his leader role and into his Castlevania-esque 'true form'. This gives him the ever-so-irritating Deathwish ability to immediately re-summon himself back from death three times per game. These revivals aren't considered being 'played' onto the board either, so he basically just has three full extra lives in reserve, so even trying to kill him is probably a waste of time.
There's lots of new keywords in this expansion. Deathblow is a fun one - an ability triggered if that card destroys an enemy. Berserk is another interesting one, activating a special power when a unit is on half health or less. Bleeding is a nasty status effect which damages a unit by one point at the end of each turn. Other new rules are more esoteric. Assimilate boosts self by 1 whenever you play a card not from your starting deck. Effectively buffing yourself through thievery sounds like it requires some very technical deck building, but I'm interested to see how players make it work.
The Crimson Curse expansion is out now, with the full patch notes here. Gwent is free-to-play and can be found on its official site. Players that log in before noon CEST on April 4th will get one free keg (5-card booster) of Crimson Curse cards.