Skellige Gwent Deck - list of cards and strategy The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine Guide

Note on the notice board informing of the Gwent Tournament

Blood and Wine enables Geralt to assemble a completely new Gwent deck - Skellige. The deck is associated with a Gwent tournament which is held in Toussaint. You can learn of the plans to organize a big tournament after reading the relevant message on one of the notice boards. This will unlock the side quest Gwent: To Everything - Turn, Turn, Tournament!

Count Monnier is the organizer of the Beauclair tournament

Start by heading to Beauclair and locating the organizer of the tournament - Count Monnier - in the western part of the city. After a conversation with this character, Geralt will come into possession of a basic set of cards from the Skellige deck. In addition, you will learn where to look for the other cards. From that moment on, in the course of the side quest Gwent: Never Fear, Skellige's Here you can visit certain points on the world map, where you will find players in possession of Skellige cards. With each of them (there are 19 of them in total) you can play a round of Gwent, and for winning it, in addition to gold, you will also receive a new Skellige card to your collection.

The list of all available Skellige cards and where to find them

The complete list of Skellige cards

Skellige Deck - Strategy

Skellige Deck.

Decks of Northern Realms and Nilfgaard have lots of spies, which provides them an edge over the rest of the decks. If you are playing against such, it is a good idea to include decoys in your ranks. Playing spies is different from how you play decks such as Nilfgaard, Northern Realms, or even Scoia'tael. Skellige has lots and lots of special cards with the Brotherhood property. Therefore, there is a high chance of drawing, from the deck, twin cards from this segment. Unfortunately, this is not the best thing that can happen (exactly in the same way as in the case of monster decks).

The key strategy is to avoid the opponent's conflagration. Wait for a good moment to play Drakkar or Cerys cards to avoid losing your strongest cards. In any case, you should have Cerys, Drakkar and Kambi cards. On the other hand, you can ignore berserker cards altogether, as they require luck to be drawn in an ideal configuration, i.e. Mardroeme/Ermion and at least two young berserkers in one hand. Keep in mind that the Mardroeme special card takes up the empty slot for the Commander's Horn, which is why Ermine is the best solution here. This is so, because, unlike Mardroeme, it does not take up the slot of the Commander's Horn. As you can see, it is a matter of luck to a large extent, and in majority of cases you will not draw cards in the configuration that you require to use the full potential of berserkers.

While picking the commander, you should keep one thing in mind - if you like playing decks with weather conditions, pick King Bran. If, on the other hand, you play against decks of Nilfgaard or Scoia'tael - pick Crach. Bran will allow you to alleviate the effect of weather conditions to a certain extent, thanks to which you save the strength of the cards that you have already played. Crach, on the other side, allows you to shuffle the rejected cards of both players, which makes things significantly more difficult for opponents that use lots of medics.

Cerys is your best weapon. Use it with care.

The above screenshot shows one of the best card configurations for the Skellige deck. There are your main forces here, i.e. light longships, O'dimm's Shadow (Heart of Stone expansion) and Cerys. If the game has selected double cards from the "brotherhood" segment for you, get rid of them before the main dealing. The strategy is not much different from the one used for monster decks. The difference is that you do not have to rely on "brotherhood" cards. In Skellige, there also are several "bond" cards.