The Witcher 3's deadliest foe might just be The Bloody Baron's Gwent deck, which has spent 10 years kicking our collective butts across 458 million matches

Later this month, The Witcher 3 celebrates its tenth anniversary, and CD Projekt Red is kicking off the celebrations by revealing one of the game's toughest foes - The Bloody Baron's Gwent deck.

In a tweet celebrating ten years of The Witcher 3, the studio revealed that over the past decade, Geralt has partaken in more than 458 million rounds of Gwent. You might wonder how he had time for quite so many games of cards when Ciri's fate hung in the balance, but that's a question that's probably better not to ask out loud.

In fact, that 458 million figure isn't even close to the total - CDPR says that it's only counting matches played since the launch of The Witcher 3's next-gen update in 2022. Over the past ten years, then, we could be talking about billions of rounds played.

One thing we know for sure, however, is just how effective a Gwent player one particular NPC is. CDPR says that The Bloody Baron is the community's "most dreaded opponent," claiming a win-ratio over players of 61% - far in excess of the 50/50 you might guess at. Happy to kick Baron Strenger while he's up, however, CDPR says that "the old man might be a wreck of a human being, but he sure can hustle."

The Bloody Baron certainly is a Gwent skill check in the early game, but if you can beat him, he'll give you a useful card in the form of spymaster Djikstra, and point you towards several other players you might want to face off against. Personally, I didn't find him that hard to beat, but that's because I mostly skipped Gwent during my first playthrough until I was forced to repeatedly save-scum to beat Shani's one-time match late in the Hearts of Stone expansion.

Without any decent cards to pad out my deck, I spent many attempts over several hours, playing Gwent late into the night to ensure I didn't miss out on that one reward card - though in doing some research for this story, I've just found out that you can pick her Olgierd card up from her clinic in Oxenfurt if you don't win it off her, so apparently all that was a complete waste of time.

Gwent will be back in The Witcher 4, so maybe I'll be able to redeem myself.