The Continent's favourite card game — and a genuinely great one. Beat every innkeep and merchant to build the ultimate deck.
The Rules in 30 Seconds
- Best of 3 rounds; whoever has the higher total card strength wins the round.
- You keep your hand across all rounds and never draw back to full — so card advantage is everything. Sometimes pass to bait the enemy into overspending.
- Three rows: Close, Ranged, Siege. Weather cards nuke a whole row; Commander's Horn doubles a row.
- Spy cards go on the enemy side but let you draw 2 — the single best mechanic in the game.
The Five Decks
| Deck | Playstyle |
|---|---|
| Northern Realms | Best starter — Spies + card draw + double Siege with the Horn |
| Nilfgaard | Spies, medics and win-condition control |
| Scoia'tael | Flexible row placement & special cards; strong with heroes |
| Monsters | Keeps one random card each round + Muster swarms & weather |
| Skellige (Blood and Wine) | Damage & resurrection tricks |
Get the Best Cards
Buy cards from innkeeps & merchants in every region, win them from named players, and complete the Gwent quests: "Playing Innkeeps," "Old Pals," "Big City Players" and the collection quest "Collect 'Em All." Prioritise Hero cards (immune to weather & effects) and Spies.
Never spend more cards than you must to win a round. Lose round 1 cheaply to bleed the AI dry, then sweep rounds 2 and 3.
How big the collection is
Counting both expansions there are over 200 Gwent cards; for the base game alone the guides disagree — Vandal counts 199 (143 different cards), EliteGuias 150. Apart from the neutral cards, which fit any deck, a card belongs to one faction: you cannot bring it into another faction’s deck. That is what makes «Collect ‘Em All» a matter of buying out every innkeep rather than building one good deck.
| Faction | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Northern Realms, Nilfgaard, Monsters, Scoia’tael | The base game |
| Skellige | Blood and Wine |
It is a common mix-up, and this page carried it until now: Hearts of Stone adds cards — including a new leader card for each of the four base factions — but no fifth faction. The Skellige deck arrives with Blood and Wine. If you are hunting the collection and Skellige is nowhere to be found, check which expansion you have installed rather than which quests you have done.
Still to verify
Cross-checked on 5 September 2026 against Fextralife, which lists the Skellige Gwent deck (27 cards) as Blood and Wine content and gives per-faction counts for the base game (Northern Realms 37, Nilfgaardian Empire 38, Scoia’tael 37, Monsters 40), and re-checked on 1 October 2026 against Vandal and EliteGuias, which confirm the Skellige deck as Blood and Wine content and one new leader per base faction in Hearts of Stone, but disagree with each other on the size of the base-game collection. That Hearts of Stone adds cards but no fifth deck is well-established beyond this one source too. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.