CD Projekt Red has announced ‘Nilfgaard’, a new playable faction in the upcoming GWENT: The Witcher Card Game.

　　The Nilfgaard faction is part of a major content update for GWENT, which is scheduled for a release next week on February 6. Nilfgaard will introduce a playstyle focused on maintaining control over the battlefield. “The faction equips players with a set of new gameplay mechanics such as revealing cards in the opponent’s hand, controlling the order of cards in player decks, and trickery based on the use of disloyal units”, reads the press release.

　　Aside from the new faction, next week’s content update will expand the number of available cards, including faction-specific cards for Northern Realms, Scoia'tael, Skellige, and Monsters, as well as neutral cards usable by every faction.

　　The free-to-play card game based on the Witcher series was announced for PC, PS4, and Xbox One during last year's E3 conference. “I would like to thank all the fans for supercharging us to make standalone GWENT happen. Thousands of e-mails in dozens of languages coming from all around the world, the phone calls, the forum posts, and more than 40 fan-made versions – all this, and everything in between, didn’t go unnoticed,” said Marcin Iwiński, CD PROJEKT co-founder. “Yes, we were mysteriously quiet after the launch of The Witcher 3, but during all this time we were hard at work on what we just unveiled today – GWENT: The Witcher Card Game. We’ve taken all that heart and energy you gave us and put it into GWENT,”  Iwiński added.

　　In GWENT, gamers clash with their friends in fast-paced duels that combine bluffing, on-the-fly decision making and careful deck construction. The game is played over a best-of-three series of rounds, as players unleash their hand by slinging spells and diverse units with special abilities and use clever tricks to deceive their opponents.

　　GWENT: The Witcher Card Game is currently in closed beta for Xbox One and Windows PC. An exact release date for GWENT hasn’t been announced yet.