#gwent syndicate

[putitonthedijkstra]

AI Dandelion made up a name for Sigi Reuven’s gang and I’m honestly somewhat taken. @e-merald-terror

[dukeofdogs]

Gwent made this card just for me (delusional)

[stillness138]

#i definitely headcanon he's like half of the gwent distribution and rules board @akilah12902

back when draft mode was Arena, he was the poster boy for it more directly (draft still has that twisted world aesthetic from hearts of stone), which kinda implied that Gaunter like, actually runs gwent tournaments somewhere like they didn't mean to make any heavy lore implications by simply making a popular character the theme for a new game mode, but it's hilarious to think about. selling mirrors is too boring, now he rigs card tournaments and meddles in gambling as a hobby, lol.

Arena mode even got a little trailer and here's some visual assets from the game itself that TC and me datamined

This Reddit post about Gaunter hidden in gwent cards is awesome btw

[gawayne]

nilfgaard is a cool deck. like its very aesthetically pleasing. (and also ur right about emhyr).

i played with the monster deck and tbh that switch was haaarrdder than i anticipated. id gotten so used to the northern realm deck and for the monster deck the strategy is totally different. but it was also so much fun learning how to play it well. ya know???

ugh. gwent. what a treat.

monster rly trips me up too but not as bad as syndicate </3 i rly need to learn the other factions better cause i almost always play with an assimilate deck and sometimes i have no idea how the other person's strategy works lmao

[stillness138]

@do-androids-dream-ao3acc tagged me in a 5 comfort characters thing (thank!) so i'm doing this "try not to post 5 pictures of geralt of rivia" excercise

do ocs count? because honestly most of the time the feelgood for me comes from thinking about ocs. and i haven't delved deep enough into many properties to really get a diverse set of characters for this

so here's my top 5 witcher babygirls (gender neutral) in no particular order and excluding Gerry? predictable as all hell

Ciaran aep Easnillen, surprising absolutely nobody. But the cope i live on where he's perfectly fine and chilling in Vergen is just 'mmm, good for my lil guy'

Madoc, who is very close to becoming an oc (doesn't even have a canon appearance), though i stick to the journey story. It's tragic but it won't leave my brain. I want to ContentTM about him at some point down the road.

Bincy Blumerholdt, whose gwent card i used in my syndicate deck a long time ago and got great results with despite it not being a meta choice at all. And she's super cool.

Isbel of Hagge, i suppose of the entire tb cast, she's the closest to a comfort character for me. I love her vibe, the fact she shows her age, and i find the concept of a pacifist in a war time very interesting. I based a couple ocs on her.

And of course, my babygirl in chief, Rainfarn of Attre. Who is kinda becoming an oc as well, though at least there's more official content to work with. CDPR had to focus on other stuff in B&W, i get it, but they reduced my poor guy into "snorts fisstech randomly on the tourney grounds for everyone to see" which...i didn't like. I swear one day i will find the words and will to finish that fucking Gregoire fanfic.

i tag @gaiusmarcellusnerva and @thirstyforred, gimme your robots mgs eternal fire extravaganza

[thirstyforred]

at Gwent dev reading my blog: hah, is it praetors in Syndicate or are you hinting at School of Rays with that ship in the promo pic? 😏

[aretuxza]

hmm thinking i might add canon characters to my muse list too idk.... mainly cuz of rereading the series + the next gen update for w3 coming out soon.

like can someone pls give me my dream headcanon plots of either: 

the complexity of transitioning from dangerous monster hunting & political/magical scheming life to mundane civilian life in the land of blood love & wine ???  (preferably yen x geralt centric).

or a plot revolving around the results of removing two key players in novigrad’s underworld and how the “free” city fairs now with the newly formed breeding ground of the syndicate (from the gwent faction/expansion).

maybe even a plot that goes into what is left of the mage community and whether or not those who are left will rebuild the past (the ruined institution of aretuza) or carve out a new future (something similar to the elven state of dol blathanna but for mages ??)

orrr exploring more of the continent far south beyond nilfgaard to ofir that is only breifly mentioned in the hearts of stone expansion and the consequences of geralt’s actions in slaying the prince ???

heck even a deeper look into the life of the witcher schools maybe before/after the collapse of them all ?? either through the lens of key figures (geralt, eskel, lambert, gaetan, letho, ivar, erland, keldar, gezras, etc.)

a plot revolving the future of skellige ??? (either of the an craites as the ruler) and the potential turmoil that surrounds whether or not there will be a civil war between the clans of the isles or how members of the clans try to undermine the new ruler through politics or combat ??????

omg not the mention a plot involving the scoia'tael (which include all non-humans not just elves !!) and how they manage to keep the fight alive even through the warring northern kingdoms with nilfgaard (witcher 3 cut content with iorveth) ???

speaking of cut content ... a plot that includes the search for a cure to the catriona plague (involving keira, lambert, geralt, ciri, shani ????).

i have a few other crackpot/headcanon plot ideas i have floating around in my head but these are the ones i could write down into somewhat coherent sentences. if anyone wants to even attempt plotting or making a thread out of these i would owe you my life honestly LMAO

[randomisationgameblog]

TCG's - Gwent

Gwent is a game based off of a minigame in The Witcher 3. Gwent is a round-based card game. The objective in Gwent is to win 2/3 rounds. To win rounds you need to obtain more points than your opponent. Before the game starts, every player chooses a faction. There are 6: Nilfgaard, Monsters, Skellige, Northern Realms, Scoia'tael and Syndicate. They all have different decks of cards you could have and all have different strengths and weaknesses as seen below:

Gwent is an official esports event and people compete from around the globe for an hundreds of thousands of pounds. There are qualifiers and if you get through you can compete for the money. I think this is a really unique game to be in esports. I wasn't aware card games could be played in this way. If I have time I will try and play the game it sounds very interesting.

[aenreth]

You say "tribute", I say "taxes". You say "thieves", I say "hard-workin' street clerks". They call this place the Putrid Grove. But it's the rest of Novigrad that's putrefied. This here's the last bastion of normality, sanity, reason.

[miyku]

.

[miss-cupcakez]

So, as some of my friends on here already know, I recently got into playing Gwent (much to my friend Robyn’s dismay because she’s all about Magic: The Gathering and has been trying to get me to start playing that for a while :P).

I’ve been having lots of fun with Gwent though and the game’s super generous with rewards, so I don’t even feel like I need to buy stuff, which is always a plus. xD

Since I keep getting asked about what’s my favourite faction – I really don’t know, I haven’t even tried out all of them yet. xD

I actually picked Monsters in the tutorial, mainly because it was suggested for beginners and I saw that there is a really cool vampire deck with lots of awesome looking cards. :3 (There are also animated versions, which look even better :O)

I quickly switched from Monsters to Scoia’tael though, because I’ve been told that Monsters are super bad right now and I rather shouldn’t invest in them.

Scoia’tael are pretty cool too (and feel a lot easier to play), especially if you’re into dwarves, elves, dryads ... or generally into lots of naked green girls. xD

But after having collected a few more cards I tried out the Syndicate faction and that one has been my favourite so far. :D It seems to be all about gangs, crimes and other shady stuff, but there are lots of fun cards and cool artworks (most of which I still need to collect, because the ones I want are all rare xD), so I definitely want to stick with that for now.^^

[dukeofdogs]

Gwent: The Witcher Card Game | Heritage | 2/6

[thirstyforred]

✦ thirsty's fav gwent cards (282/∞) Adriano the Mink

“ Right here, beautiful. Have a sit on daddy's lap. “

[bloededhoine]

can we all give kudos to @claire-verlaine for noticing that these sexy gwent ladies are sexy gwent girlfriends? like we knew the undercut butch pirate and eyebrow piercing excessive jewelry femme were gay, but for EACH OTHER??

their names are gudrun bjornsdottir and imke and we will build the ao3 tag from the ground up

being the nosey queers we are, me and claire did some digging. first, gudrun bjornsdottir was a major icelandic woman's rights activist, which is just fucking awesome.

our gudrun is the sole female member of the syndicate, dijkstra's novigradian crime organization that later controlled the entire north. she's also the leader of her own gang, the tidecloaks, who controlled harbourside novigrad and parts of skellige. yeah. she's a mafia pirate.

imke was a prostitute that gudrun got a little crush on. we don't know much of their story, except that imke wanted to take advantage of gudrun's attraction.

y'all. Y'ALL. the potential this has is exquisite. the learning more about someone than you thought you would. the liking what you learned more than you should. the slowly building trust. the realizing where your alliances are. the starting a life with your mafia pirate wife....

[witcher-bullshit]

Okay I wanna talk about Siegfried of Denesle for a hot second (especially in Gwent)

(gif by @thirstyforred​ )

Short background to Siegfried for all those that didn’t play the first game: Siegfried, son of Sir Eyck of Denesle, joined the Order of the Flaming Rose, the military organisation rooted in the Eternal Fire belief, when his father refused to take coin for hunting monsters after his mother fell gravely ill. Though he renounced his father he still followed a strict knightly code to do good and defend the weak. He felt that, although sometimes drastic, the Order would give him that opportunity. What he didn’t know was that the order was rotten to its core and the Grand Master Jacques de Aldersberg cooperated with the criminal organisation Salamandra to make money by producing the drug Fisstech and produce mutants - not the witcher kind though, those mutants were barely human anymore, mangled mounts of flesh made to kill and be killed.

In The Witcher 1 you have the possibility to support the order, but what this mostly looks like is supporting Siegfried. In the end he will see that the order is not all that he was promised it would be. He is named the next Grand Master by king Foltest and assissts Geralt with getting to de Aldersberg to stop him for once and all.

In The Witcher 2, if you have chosen the Order path in Witcher 1, you can meet him again. He will help you get inside Loc Muinne, where an important political summit takes place. Even more importantly though is that he will help Geralt and Vernon Roche to keep the heir to the Temerian throne, little Anaïs La Valette, out of king Radovid’s hands.

The big mystery however is that he does not show up in The Witcher 3. In one DLC you can get the dialogue choice to mention him once to shame a former order member, but that’s it. So what happened? The order had been gifted lands by king Radovid between Witcher 1 and 2, that’s why they stood as his private army in 2. In 3 however their assets had been seized and the Order been disbanded. The members either joined the Witch Hunters or turned to organized crime and banditry, producing fisstech. Absolutely not a word to be found of what became of the Grand Master. You can however find a note on a noticeboard written by a “Siegfried de Löwe” (Löwe=lion) basically threatening villagers if they didn’t pay protection money. It is unclear in-game if this is some other Siegfried or the same.

I will however argue on the basis of the Gwent standalone game that he is not, and even more important, he is doing morally better than the twisted organisation the order became.

The first big indicator for me is that he is a neutral card. All other order members are of the Syndicate faction, meaning they have an association with crime.

Next are his categories. “Human, Knight”. All units that have an association with the Eternal Fire or the Order have “Firesworn” and therefore marks them as belonging to the thus named religiously fanatic syndicate faction.

Then there lastly is his deploy ability “Purify all other units”. This means that all positive and negative effects are removed from your and your opponents units. Of course to sensibly use this ability you’d use it when your own units have mostly negative effects (like bleeding, or having their abilities locked) and your opponent having mostly positive effects (i.e. shield or defender). He is by far of course not the only unit that has a variant of the purify ability, but he has the only one that affects the whole board, giving a certain weight to his “purity”.

There are arguments that could counter this, I want to specifically mention the Philippa Eilhart cards (one is Northern Realms, the other Syndicate), because they show her at different stages of her story, so of course this Siegfried card could just be early-on Siegfried and at some point we will get a Siegfried: De Löwe card or something.

Another point could be, that such a card had to be made neutral (for example a lot of the Witcher cards are neutral as well as Yen and Ciri cards)

I do however have a funny little headcanon.

See this guy?

(gif by @thirstyforred​ of course)

This card is called Lonely Champion with the following flavour text: “So long as he continues the righteous fight the Order and its flame endure.” It shows him surrounded by drowners, run of the mill monsters, not involved with crime. So though he is a Firesworn unit, he is not Not Like The Others. Plus he has the immunity ability.

I like to imagine that this is Siegfried after having the order ripped out under him by Radovid, trying to fight the righteous fight on his own, adhering as the last one to the knightly values he wanted and expected the Order to incorporate.

Alright, thank you for reading! I know Witcher 1 is an ... aged game, but if you should ever feel like diving into the games, keep in mind that you can only meet Siegfried if you play the first game! To all my fellow Gwent and Witcher 1 enthusiast: I would love to read your thoughts!

[uiuishii]

What I heard in the Gwent last video: “the next expansion will be about magic...northern realms...syndicate...the name is price of power...”

Look. I know the new cards will probably about new characters or monsters but... Every single word... magic...price of power... The lodge card? Is my hope justified? Please Gwent you know what you did to us with the Tissaia artwork... Imagine what you could do with all new sorcerers/sorceresses related cards...

I’ll give you everything I have empty her pockets

Hm.