The Witcher 3 Missable Gwent Cards Guide: Quests and Cutoff Points

Gwent looks like filler when you first sit down at the White Orchard inn. A few hours later you're reloading old saves because a merchant left town with a card you never bought. That's the whole problem with collecting these things: the game rarely tells you when a window is closing. So here's what's at risk, which quests pay out the good stuff, and the story beats where doors slam shut for good.

Early Innkeepers and Merchants

Start with the scholar in White Orchard

Aldert Geert hangs out at the village inn during Lilac and Gooseberries, trying and failing to teach the locals gwent. He's your optional tutorial game. Beat him and he hands over the Zoltan Chivay card plus a book called A Miraculous Guide to Gwent, which is the collection tracker the game should have shipped with (more on it at the bottom). Losing to him costs nothing, so keep challenging him until you win.

Don't skip him though. He can only be played in White Orchard, and he later turns up dead at the Hanged Man's Tree in Velen. If you never beat him, his card is still lootable under his corpse, so it's recoverable. Walking out of the tavern with it in your pocket is just way less grim.

Buy Elsa out before the village empties

The innkeeper, Elsa, sells five cards, and they're cheap for what they do:

| Card | Price (crowns) | |-|-| | Decoy | 20 | | Blue Stripes Commando | 20 | | Crinfrid Reavers Dragon Hunter | 20 | | Catapult | 50 | | Foltest: Lord Commander of the North | 50 |

The whole shelf runs you 160 crowns. A Decoy that early is a genuine deck upgrade, and the Foltest leader card saves you hunting one later.

Elsa leaves White Orchard around the same time the story does, after the brawl at the inn. On the launch version of the game that could actually break Collect 'Em All, since her stock left with her. Patch 1.04 softened it: her cousin Bram, the guy getting chased by the griffin in the opening, sells whatever you skipped. Still, buy her out before moving on. It sets the habit that matters all game: open every merchant's shop and look for cards before anything else.

The buy-and-beat loop

Pretty much every innkeep, smith and merchant does two things: sells a few cards, and plays you. Your first win against each generic player drops one random card. That random pool is finite, about 47 cards by the in-game guide's count (51 really, since the four weather cards don't get listed), and once it's drained, generic wins stop paying anything new. So the loop is simple. New region, new village: buy every card on sale, then beat every player once.

The innkeep at the Inn at the Crossroads is the first big stop after White Orchard. He sells Commander's Horn for 10 crowns, Siege Engineer, Impera Brigade Guard and Nausicaa Cavalry Rider at 20 each, plus the Emhyr var Emreis: Emperor of Nilfgaard leader card for 50. The Lindenvale innkeep shares that stock, so most of it vanishes from both shops once bought. Only the Horn has spare copies.

Two more early names worth knowing. The merchant in Claywich starts the game locked in a cage southeast of the Boatmakers' Hut. Free him, then buy him out back in the village. He's a famously buggy rescue, so save before opening the cage, and if he won't talk when you arrive, meditate until daylight and try again. And the Downwarren merchant deserves an early match too. The wiki's player list flags him as mortal, and that village's fate depends on choices you make in Velen. Cheap insurance: play him the first time you pass through.

Quest-Tied Card Rewards

Five secondary quests are built entirely around gwent, and each pays fixed cards you can't buy anywhere. That's the good news. The bad news is that half the people involved have story clocks running.

Gwent: Velen Players

Grab the notice from the Crow's Perch or Midcopse board, or just challenge the Bloody Baron directly at Crow's Perch. He runs the Northern deck, pays out the Sigismund Dijkstra card, and names the rest:

Clear all four and the Monsters leader card, Eredin: Destroyer of Worlds, lands as a bonus. It's 25 XP per player, which is more or less nothing by midgame, so do it for the cardboard.

Gwent: Playing Innkeeps

Three innkeeps, three fixed prizes. The Crossroads innkeep gives Menno Coehoorn, Stjepan at The Alchemy in Oxenfurt gives Yennefer, and Olivier at the Kingfisher in Novigrad gives Tibor Eggebracht. Stjepan runs the Emhyr var Emreis: The White Flame leader, which switches your own leader ability off, so don't be surprised when your Foltest button does nothing. Olivier is the one with a clock on him, more on that in the cutoffs section.

Gwent: Old Pals

Beat Zoltan to start it. The easiest window is during Broken Flowers, either right after you report back from talking to the women, or while he's walking out after the Priscilla scene. Miss both and he's playable again once A Poet Under Pressure wraps up. From there it chains through old friends: Zoltan gives Eithné, Vernon Roche gives Saesenthessis, Lambert gives Triss Merigold, and Thaler gives the Geralt of Rivia card, one of the best neutrals in the game.

There's one ordering quirk. Thaler only counts inside Old Pals if you finished A Deadly Plot before beating Roche. The other order and Thaler gets his own little quest, Gwent: Playing Thaler. Same card either way, so no stress.

Gwent: Big City Players

Start with Vimme Vivaldi at the bank on Hierarch Square, then follow the chain. Vivaldi gives Vesemir, Marquise Serenity at the Passiflora gives Morvran Voorhis, Dijkstra at his bathhouse gives Esterad Thyssen, and a quiet Scoia'tael merchant at the trading camp outside the city gives Ciri. Finish the lot and Francesca Findabair: The Beautiful arrives as a completion bonus. Dijkstra is the awkward one, since the main story keeps making him unreachable (details below).

Gwent: Skellige Style

Pick up the notice at Kaer Trolde Harbor, though nothing moves until Echoes of the Past is done. Ermion comes first and gives Leshen. Gremist, just north of Gedyneith, won't play until you finish Practicum in Advanced Alchemy, and gives Mysterious Elf. Madman Lugos at Kaer Muire gives Vampire: Katakan, Crach an Craite gives Draug, and Sjusta at the harbor gives Yaevinn. Complete the set and the Emhyr var Emreis: The White Flame leader card is yours.

Cards hiding in normal side quests

Three regular quests sneak cards in:

A Matter of Life and Death. The Vegelbud party runs a mini-tournament in the courtyard. Three guests, three rounds, and you can retry each match until you win. Sweep all three and you take their cards plus the Dandelion card. Leave the party with any of them unbeaten and the wiki is blunt about it: Collect 'Em All dies.
A Dangerous Game. Zoltan's card-smuggling errand ends with a choice, 150 crowns or three rare cards (Isengrim Faoiltiarna, John Natalis, Fringilla Vigo). Take the cards. If you grabbed the gold, they show up on the Prison Warden later during The Great Escape, so even the greedy pick gets rescued. The real trap is timing, covered below.
Shock Therapy. A silly prank on a mute druid at Gedyneith. Five minutes of work for 75 XP and the Iorveth card.

Tournament Cards and Preparation

High Stakes at the Passiflora

This is the big one, the quest that eats careless collectors. Read the notice by St. Gregory's Bridge in Novigrad, then pay the scribe at the Passiflora 1,000 crowns to enter. You need a legal deck just to sign up, and the game suggests level 26. Once you're registered you're locked in: no popping out to buy cards, and straying too far from the brothel fails the quest outright.

Four matches, and every opponent holds a leader card that's pretty much unobtainable anywhere else:

So what happens if you drop a match here? Collect 'Em All fails on the spot. Not a journal smudge, a permanent fail on that save, with no patch rescue. Winning Finneas also earns you a fistfight with him, and the autosave before it is your only checkpoint. This is the one gwent quest you show up to overprepared for.

Prep looks like this. Clear Old Pals and Big City Players first so your card pool is fat. Bring a Nilfgaard spy deck, and follow the wiki's advice on the leader slot: run Emhyr var Emreis: The White Flame, since it neutralizes Sasha's leader, and she's maybe the toughest player in the whole game. Pack decoys and medics to recycle spies, with a build of exactly 34 cards so you can keep drawing all match. You're allowed to swap decks between rounds, so tune per opponent if you enjoy that sort of thing. Two cautions from the wiki: don't start this quest while Blindingly Obvious is active, it can break. And hear out Sasha's proposal after the first match. Take her heist job at the end and the quest pays out 4,500 crowns, plus an optional dinner date. Winning the bracket also pops the Gwent Master achievement.

The Beauclair tournament in Blood and Wine

Over in Toussaint, Count Martin Monnier runs a tournament at The Pheasantry in Beauclair, with a catch: you have to play his brand-new Skellige faction. He hands you a starter deck, and the quest Never Fear, Skellige's Here then points you at players around Toussaint to win the rest. The guard at the door won't let you enter until the deck is strong enough.

One trap before you register: play the Pheasantry's own innkeep first. The moment your deck qualifies, the tavern shuts until the tournament is over, and she's carrying Draig Bon-Dhu, a card with no other source. That's a genuinely easy one to fumble.

The bracket itself is friendly. Hamal ogn Dangbahli offers to wager his steel sword against your silver one (winning pays the sword Blave), then comes Ambassador von Hinn, the count himself, and dwarf Yaki Rafiberg in the final, with a chaotic fistfight against protesters in the middle. Losing a match here just knocks you out of the running, nothing expires, and none of it counts toward Card Collector anyway, since that achievement only looks at the base game. Winning the whole thing pays 1,000 crowns, The Victor's Cup, and it conveniently counts as your proof of wisdom for There Can Be Only One.

Story Cutoffs to Watch

So who actually expires? In rough story order:

White Orchard, before the story empties the village: beat Aldert Geert, buy out Elsa.
The Bloody Baron: play him before Return to Crookback Bog ends his storyline, since he leaves Crow's Perch either way. Since patch 1.20 his card sits with a list of players in his office if you missed him, but only once Velen Players is already running.
Olivier: he can die during Now or Never. Play him before that quest, or loot his Tibor Eggebracht card from a small lockbox near the Kingfisher bar afterward.
A Dangerous Game: fails outright if not finished before travelling to the Isle of Mists, or before you ask Zoltan for help in Brothers in Arms: Novigrad. Either trigger ends it.
Dijkstra: the main story keeps hiding him, and the practical advice is to beat him before the Isle of Mists unless you plan to side with him during Reason of State.
Lambert: he flits between Novigrad and Kaer Morhen. Reliable windows are during and right after Following the Thread at The Nowhere Inn, plus Kaer Morhen before the battle. The drinking game in No Place Like Home counts toward this quest too, even though you're technically playing Eskel. Absolute last call is the funeral in Blood on the Battlefield, if he lives.
Thaler and Vernon Roche: both can die during Reason of State, and neither will talk gwent while that quest is live. Beat them both beforehand.
Madman Lugos: once you set sail for Skellige at the start of Battle Preparations, he's done (unless Svanrige ends up king). Miss him and his Katakan card moves to a loot spot in his room.
Crach an Craite: can't be played once the On Thin Ice battle begins. His Draug card still gets handed to you, you just lose the match.
The three party guests, Margrave de Cret, Gomo Seeling and Marius Florin, only exist during A Matter of Life and Death. Retry losses at will, but don't leave the party with any of them unbeaten.

And a word on safety nets, because the game grew some over the years. Patch 1.04 put Elsa's stock on Bram. Patches in the 1.05 to 1.08 range made dead players' cards findable somewhere near where they lived: Roche's hideout, Lambert's Kaer Morhen, Thaler's corner of the Seven Cats. Patch 1.20 added the Baron failsafe. These are rescue ropes, not a plan. Some leave red marks or stuck objectives in your journal, and High Stakes gets no rope at all. Nine times out of ten, playing people the moment you meet them is just cleaner.

Checking Your Collection

The magic book

Since patch 1.20 the game has a proper tracker: A Miraculous Guide to Gwent. Beat Aldert Geert in White Orchard before finishing Lilac and Gooseberries and winning it off him is free. Miss that window and the shop in Novigrad's Gildorf district sells it for pocket change. Open it and it counts what's left, region by region: 52 in Velen, 35 in Novigrad, 28 on Skellige, 7 in White Orchard, 1 in the Vizima palace, 1 at Kaer Morhen, plus 47 from random players. Each line disappears when it hits zero, which is weirdly satisfying.

It's not perfect. The four weather cards never get counted, so the random line really bottoms out at 51. The Kaer Morhen card is just Lambert's, which you can grab way earlier at the Nowhere Inn. A few cards tagged Velen actually sit in Novigrad. And it counts per region, never per card, so "Novigrad: 3" doesn't tell you which three you're missing.

Totals and the achievement

The base game holds 199 cards all told, of which 120 are the distinct types the quest cares about. The rest are spare copies, like the three Ghouls you'll trip over. Collect 'Em All completes when the set is done, and that pops Card Collector, a bronze trophy worth 15 points. Expansion cards don't count toward it, so the Skellige deck and the DLC additions are purely for fun.

Tracking by hand

For naming exactly what's missing, the community does the work the game won't. gwentchecklist.com lists every card with its source and lets you tick them off, and the wiki's Gwent players page works as a solid printable, right down to the dagger marks next to everyone who can die. The rhythm that makes all of this painless: every time the story moves you somewhere new, sweep the inns and shops, buy and beat, then crack open the book. Keep that up through Velen and Novigrad and by the time the Isle of Mists is on the horizon, the only thing left to sweat is the Passiflora.