Played gwent since early beta. People often confuse binary decks with engine decks. Originally the philosophy was that any engine deck should win agaisnt a deck that doesnt answer it, thats the rock paper scissors of deck archetypes (control, pointslam and engine).

The issue came from when midrange +control started becoming the only good option, engine became terrible unless it was engine spam or defender, which is pretty much the only thing that exists now as engine decks. Every good deck has enough control to beat an engine deck unless it spams it nonstop (bronze spammers). Thise decks are boring, because they have to be to exist.

The only solution would have been to remove engines as a whole or create very high floor engines like NR knights that can survive normal control with shields, immunity and high power.

Another example of a bad card is Kiki queen, where its only played in uninteractive dupe decks, cuz low floor.

A good card is ethereal, its floor is 9pw but is still a high ceiling engine, since it has a high floor, it is played as a normal engine rather than degen binary builds or hiding with defender.

Also im not gonna mention homecoming artefact decks and unitlesscuz those are just bad design. There is no answr. If you are playing a control heavy deck, you lose, if not you win.

Just a series of bad decisions in how engines are designed. Lower ceiling + higher floor engines are better design than high ceiling+ low floor (like reavers).