While Northern Realms players left the first Faction Challenge with a smile on their face and two extra cards in their collection, the challenge as a whole was a bit of a mess. Most of the problems could be attributed to the simple fact that the Gwent website clearly showed which faction was winning, which naturally resulted in a snowball effect as people kept piling on in order to get their guaranteed rewards.

This has thankfully been fixed for the second Faction Challenge, the one that will have Monsters and Nilfgaard players square off in order to secure an exclusive character border. As before, the Faction Challenge will last for an entire week (as of right now), and all you need to do in order to participate is to secure wins with your favorite factions. The only requirement is that you have to play in the Casual, Ranked, and Pro Ladder game modes in order for your wins to count, for obvious reasons.

While this Faction Challenge is leagues ahead of the previous one, I still have a bit of a problem with how the rewards are distributed. Right now the winner gets a brand new and exclusive character border, while the loser gets a measly 100 Meteorite Powder. When the winner's reward was a single Gold card this discrepancy wasn't too big of a deal, but now that we're talking about exclusive rewards it really is a problem since trying to push a less popular faction is a terrible idea.

For example, I prefer playing Monsters, but since Nilfgaard is the more popular faction across almost all skill ratings there is simply no reason to try and secure a Monsters victory. All I'd achieve by doing so is sacrifice a unique Nilfgaard themed character border and gain a relatively meaningless 100 Meteorite Powder. It's probably too late to change things right now, but I can only hope CDPR will fix things for the next Faction Challenge as these events should be about faction loyalty and competition between players, and not about min-maxing rewards.

The above-mentioned character borders