If you woke up this morning and wanted more content in Gwent, then today is a weird and lucky day for you. CD Projekt Red has released the Merchants of Ofir expansion, and it’s available to download right now for PC and iOS. The expansion introduces the mysterious merchants from far-away Ofir, a strange land populated by tribes, the remnants of fallen kingdoms that rarely make contact with the outside world. Despite this, it is not uncommon to see merchants from Ofir in trade hubs, and it seems those merchants have all kinds of things hidden away in their robes.
Seventy new cards have arrived, introducing new combinations and builds, and new additions to all the game’s factions. A new type of card has also been added, called Stratagems. Stratagems are picked when building an army and will determine a unique bonus that is gained for taking the first turn in a match. These include Enchanted Armor, which boosts a unit in your hand by 3; Tiger’s Eye, which will gain you four coins; and the Mask of Uroboros, which will allow you to draw an extra card on the condition that you must discard another card.
New Scenarios have been introduced, including Nilfgaard’s Masked Ball, Nothern Realm’s Siege, Skellige’s Gedyneith, Monster’s Haunt, and Syndicate’s Passiflora. Scenarios are special quests, tied to certain factions, that progress by playing specific cards in a certain order while playing a match. An advanced but risky strategy, completing a scenario can have a big effect on a game.
As well as the Merchants of Ofir expansion, Patch 5.0 has also gone live, bringing new features and fixes, as well as many balance changes to all the factions. Logging into the game before Dec.16 will allow you to claim a free Merchants of Ofir Key that will give you five cards from the expansion, including a guaranteed rare or better card.
We reported last week that CD Projekt Red will no longer be supporting Gwent on consoles, which means this expansion is not available there, but console players do have the option to transfer all their account progress and purchases to a GoG account, used by both PC and mobile versions of the game. This option will be available from Dec. 9 until June 9, 2020. According to CD Projekt Red, the account-copying request web page will go live later today.
