Gwent: The Witcher Card Game came out last year after an extended two year beta period, bringing a rather polished and remarkable card game to the table. While it didn’t have the insanely detailed meta-game or card combos of major competition like Hearthstone, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game offered plenty of detailed story set in a detailed and beloved RPG universe, all set against an engaging and varied card game experience.
Since that launch, developer CD Projekt has been steadily pushing out new content. We’ve seen the release of two major expansions, Crimson Curse and Novigrad. This weekend, CD Projekt RED announced a new major expansion called Iron Judgment. And just like the previous two expansions, we’re set to get more cards, new mechanics and a bunch of other goodies. Players are set to return to the Northern Realms popularized by the Witcher franchise for some new conflict, more storied history, and plenty of strategy. This isn’t so much new content though, more of a return to form as the developer seeks to rebalance the gameplay and introduce older mechanics back into the game that players have been missing. You can see the new content in the preview trailer for the expansion down below.
The expansion brings a lot of action to the table, but there’s more than just senseless bloodshed in the cards for Iron Judgment. The expansion will tweak gameplay mechanics in some interesting ways. Iron Judgment brings back Armor as a game mechanic, for example, offering a return of static defenses in addition to the Shield mechanic introduced in a previous update. Shields are a one-use damage reduction for your units, whereas Armor is a permanent reduction to incoming damage.
In addition to the newly revived mechanic, along comes a mission faction, Redania. The faction specialized in armored knights during the early beta periods that Gwent went through, offering a turtle play style which was quite popular. However, armor mechanics were abused heavily during testing periods, leading to the removal of the system from launch versions, which also necessitated the removal of some factions.
Gwent: Iron Judgment will release on October 2nd for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Expect more details about the game and this new content soon, as CDPR start spooling up the hype machine.
