The Slightly Smarter Way to Open Kegs in Gwent

EDIT: This guide is based on the beta, and now outdated. Click here for the current one.

I’ve been enjoying Gwent since the Beta went public. Apart from the $7.55 starter special, I haven’t spent any money on kegs, and I usually only play it once or twice a week. Yet despite my casual approach, I’ve collected the maximum amount of nearly every card. How? These hard-won lessons, which I freely share.

1. Don’t open kegs or spend ore until there’s a Premium Card Weekend

Every couple of months CD Projekt Red has some kind of special event where for a few days only every keg will contain a Rare (uncommon bronze), Premium (animated) or Epic (silver) card. At first I found it hard to resist the temptation to open my kegs as soon as I got them (especially after a Season End), but unlike many other games, the contents of the kegs are not determined when they’re awarded to you, but when they’re opened. This weekend is the Epic Card Week, meaning every keg contains at least one silver card, and you better believe I just cashed in all my ore to open 50 kegs in a row.

2. Stop playing once you’ve won six rounds per day

Winning six rounds every day is the most efficient way to earn those sweet, sweet glitter rocks that Shupe loves so much (read: ore to buy kegs). Curiously, CD Projekt Red doesn’t reward people for playing longer; 6 rounds nets 100 ore, but an additional 12 rounds (18 in total) rewards only 75 more. Personally I think that the rewards should exponentially increase the more you win to encourage you to keep playing, but hey, I’m not a dev. The daily rewards reset at 2am CEST (if that means anything to anyone), so unless you’re really enjoying long stretches of the game I’d say stopping at six per day is the most efficient use of your time.

3. Ever wondered what those numbers mean when you’re opening the 5th card in the keg?

To be honest, this is the real reason I’m writing this. I scoured the internet and couldn’t find an answer to this question until I figured it out tonight. Behold.

Sorry for the blurry picture, but it will suffice for this example.

Here I was choosing between three standard (non-animated) cards.

For numbers without a fraction, that shows how many of that exact copy of the card you have. In this case, I had 3 standard copies of White Frost.
For fractions, the number on top shows how many copies of that exact card you have, and the number on the bottom shows how many copies of that card you have in total. In this example, because the card being offered is non-animated, I have 1 standard copy of Braenn, and 2 copies in total (the inference meaning that I have 1 premium copy of her as well). For Morkvarg, I have 0 standard copies of the card, and 1 in total (meaning I have 1 premium copy already).

If these cards offered were all premium, it would mean I have 3x premium copies of White Frost and x0 standard copies, 1x premium copy of Braenn and 1x standard copy, and 0x premium copies of Morkvarg and 1x standard copy.

Also note that these numbers reflect your current number of cards, and will change once you make a selection. Because I already had standard copies of White Frost and Braenn, I chose Morkvarg. This would have updated the fraction to say x1/x2. (One standard copy of the card, two copies in total.)

4. When choosing between cards, pick the animated cards first!

Unless there’s an incredibly useful standard card you don’t have yet and can’t afford to buy, pick the premium (animated) card every time. Premium cards are WAY more expensive if you’re considering purchase them with scrap. And if you choose to mill them, not only do you get the standard amount of scrap, you also get meteorite powder (which can be used to transmute cards from their standard to animated forms)!

Incidentally if you’re looking at milling premium cards, this is how much meteor powder you’ll get depending on the rarity:
20 for Common (bronze)
50 for Rare (uncommon bronze)
80 for Epic (silver)
120 for Legendary (gold)

5. Don’t mill your cards unless you need the scraps!

Much to my regret, I only just learned this one mere minutes after milling 30 Epic cards.

Unless you need the scraps to build a new deck that you want to play with right away, try not to buy cards in general. If you open enough kegs, you’ll get the cards you want, as well as a hefty pile of duplicates too. Apparently it’s useful to hang onto these, because according to this reddit post the next major update (Homecoming) will completely reset everyone’s collections and refund their full card values. This means if you’ve got three copies of White Frost like I did, hanging onto them will be worth 200 scraps each (rather than 200+50+50 like I’ll get because I just milled my duplicates like the fool of a Took I am).

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And that’s it! Hopefully these tips help you make more informed decisions about what cards you want to choose. Now that you know how to open kegs like a pro, I hope you rake in those legendaries!

How to Master Lucioball

Last year I wrote out these Protips for Lucioball, which are kind of aimed at helping people get from gold to diamond. This season, I set my sights even higher and worked my way into Master rank, with my goal for next year to hit GM. Hopefully these tips are gonna help you do great!

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General tips

-At the start of the match, establish if everyone feels confident playing as a goalkeeper. If anyone says they can’t keep, make sure they switch with someone who can.

-Communicate before you ult. Unless you’re deliberately overwhelming the opposition defence with two simultaneously ults, it’s generally better to use them one at a time.

-When ulting, shooting directly at the goals is rarely successful (especially at the start of a round). Setting up rebounds is much more likely to cause the defenders to overextend and create gaps to shoot through.

-Passing along the ground may sometimes be preferable to passing through the air; for a short distance the ball moves faster as it travels in a straight line, even if it has more resistance over a long distance. Therefore, short passes along the ground may disorient the defenders and allow you to get around them.

-When the ball comes to you and there’s no one else in striking distance, take your time. Walk the ball up the field – it’s surprisingly easy to dribble. When your opponents get impatient and try and take the ball off you, boop it over the heads or punch it into a wall and skate right on past them.

-If you and an opponent are racing towards a ball and they’re slightly ahead of you, booping it at the wall (instead of towards their goal) is not a bad way to neutralise their advantage, especially if you were further back and then you suddenly turn around and are in the lead.

-It’s possible to set up goals that are impossible to block, the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. One time when I was striking, the ball came to me while I was at the peak of my jump besides the opposite goal and I saw the goalie waiting to block me. In that moment if the goalie had jumped I would have shot it past him to the left. If he had predicted this unlikely shot and moved left, I would have taken the easier shot to the right. These moments are rare, because you have to be far enough away that the goalie can’t take the ball off you, but close enough so that they don’t have time to respond at the last moment.

-The best goal I ever scored was from suddenly redirecting the ball without letting it lose any momentum. My teammate shot for the goals at the right jump pad and the goalie moved to block. Jumping and meeting the ball side on, I shot it into the left corner and it moved so quickly it was impossible to meet.

Striker tips

-Once you have established good ball skills and you can place it exactly where you want it to, the game takes on another level. It’s no longer about making the best shot (the most direct line to the middle of the target) but about making a shot that is least likely to get blocked. This means anticipating whether the defender will move high or low to block you, but more often it means not shooting straight at the goals but shooting at the wall and catching it (or letting your well-placed teammate catch it).

-A simple combination of a punch (onto the wall) and boop into the goals seems to work better than boop onto the wall and then punch into the goals, but it’ll depend on your distancing and the placement of the defenders.

-Learn to rely on your teammates a lot. A single striker is less likely to score a goal than two strikers who understand each other’s intentions and help set up assists and rebounds.

-Learn to cross the ball (and if you’re striking, assume your teammate will pass it to you and position yourself to receive the cross). That is to say, pass it across the field (rather than towards the goal) to get around defenders.

Goalie tips

-Always take note of where your teammates are, and where the opposing strikers are. Make sure to set up useful passes to your teammates, but if the opposition’s is closing in it is preferable to pass to an empty corner/space than try and pass it to your teammate.

-In a desperate situation, sometimes you can’t just shoot down the field to clear the ball because there will be two opposing strikers closing off the angle and waiting to return the shot. In these instances, passing up the wall, or even along the wall may roll it past them.

-Furthermore, if the ball is slowly rolling towards you, don’t just shoot it up the field for the sake of getting it away from your goals. If you pass it straight to the opposing goalie or defender, you’ve wasted your boop and may not have time to wait for it before another shot is coming.

-As the goalkeeper, a good option for clearing the ball while setting up for a shot is shoot the ball directly to the opposite wall on either side of the goal so that it rebounds to a waiting teammate. However, this has a higher chance of being repelled by the opposing goalkeeper.

-Another excellent place to pass the ball is to aim for the wall next to the jump pad, so that the ball will slow down and let your striker control the rebound.

-Best of all, shoot into the air above the jump pad so that a skilled striker can spike it over the waiting defenders or put it in the farthest corner.

-There may come moments when your boop is on cooldown and the split-second timing of the punch may be too perilous to use. In moments like these, blocking the ball with your body may be preferable because the ball will stop quite dead if it hits you, enabling you to set up a shot to clear it out.

-You know how last year I said if the ball’s not going to get into your goals, don’t worry about blocking it? Yeah forget that. At advanced levels, waiting until the last second to try and boop the ball out of there gets increasingly dangerous. Sometimes it’s important to leave the goal and get to the ball early so that you can clear it the hell out of there before any of the opposing strikers close in. If the strikers are very good, blocking it once won’t be enough: they’ll catch the rebound, and your boop will be on cooldown as you try and block the next shot.

-This doesn’t necessarily mean skating towards a defender and trying to jam their shot. While it’s true that the closer you get to them the narrower their angle of shooting becomes, a clever striker won’t shoot directly for the goals but will just pop it over or around you and then follow up with the rebound. Or worse, they’ll pass it back or across the field to a waiting teammate who will shoot it past you. In other words if there’s no one near the ball feel free to get it, but if someone’s coming at you try and react at the last second so you don’t overextend.

 

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After several hundred games, I can summarise all of these tips thus: try and get the ball into their goal, and try and stop them from getting it into yours. At the end of the day, no amount of advice will make up for the intuition and rapid response that comes from sheer repetition. Play enough games and you’ll automatically calculate timing, distancing and positioning, and more importantly develop appropriate responses based on where you, the ball and the other players are. There’s no easy formula for that, and it’s the simplicity that makes Lucioball a work of genius.

Good luck, have fun, and don’t forget to endorse your team.