Like the title says, what do you all think?

Did VoI add anything good for Outlands decks? Are the Encounter cards in this set more of a challenge for Outlands?

No out lands cards, and the first quest penalizes hand size which can certainly hurt out lands. Second quest basically takes away half your deck which can take away some key OL cards

There are no player cards supporting the outlands trait in this box and for what little my opinion is worth, I dont think we'll see any more possibly ever.

The 1st quest is more of a traditional quest so not much more of a challenge there

2nd quest will almost certainly be very difficult for outlands since you start the quest without 20 cards from your deck so you'll lose access or at least very early access to a lot of the key allies which outlands relies on.

3rd quest would be a breeze since its all questing and practically no combat

I built an outlands deck with the doomed mechanic along with a crazy amount of card draw and resource generation. It was just as strong as most outlands decks, but I enjoyed playing it more, since threat was raised significantly the first round or 2 (Aragorn lore to reset), so they had to be ready for action when they were still quite fragile. The deck had Grima in it so I could not play it on first scenario of VoI, but it did fine on the other 2 scenarios. I tend to think the doomed player cards did do something for outlands, if a deck is built around it, otherwise there is nothing for Outlands in VoI.

There are no player cards supporting the outlands trait in this box and for what little my opinion is worth, I dont think we'll see any more possibly ever.

I'm probably delusional, but haven't it been stated in one of the articles, that we'll see some outlands support in one of these advanture packs?

UPD: Yep, I'm delusional. Checked latest news, and there was 1 mention of Outlands but it was not about them being supported in new cycle.

There are no player cards supporting the outlands trait in this box and for what little my opinion is worth, I dont think we'll see any more possibly ever.

The 1st quest is more of a traditional quest so not much more of a challenge there

2nd quest will almost certainly be very difficult for outlands since you start the quest without 20 cards from your deck so you'll lose access or at least very early access to a lot of the key allies which outlands relies on.

3rd quest would be a breeze since its all questing and practically no combat

Outlands gets kind of a bad wrap for being OP (which it arguably kind of is) and promoting lazy deck-building (which it TOTALLY does). But I DON'T think we've seen the last of them...and that's a good thing. The thing with Outlands is that, while a lot of the criticism of the trait is fair, it was what the game needed when it was released.

The fact of the matter is that as this game gets older and more and more APs and Deluxe expansions come out, it becomes somewhat unreasonable for the designers to assume that the player picking up their latest Adventure Pack has a complete collection of player cards. Maybe they skipped Khaza Dum and jumped straight into Heirs of Numenor. Or maybe they just got the core set and the Hobbit Box expansions when the movie came out and now they're looking at exploring the game further starting with the newest (and in the mind of such a consumer, "best") set of cards. Maybe they have a smattering of APs from all across the cycles. Or maybe they are coming right out of the Core set. Hell--even people that WANTED to collect all of the cycles and expansions at this point are going to have a hard time as some have been in and out of stock for a while and even if you could find them all it would be a pretty hefty financial investment.

Enter Outlands. The game NEEDED an easy to build power deck self-contained within the new Against the Shadow APs (and critically, front-loaded into the early APs) in order for less experienced player--and those without access to the much broader card-pools that some of us old-timers have--to have a chance at beating those quests. Without that, it would have alienated new players not starting in Shadows of Mirkwood.

So...that's why the game NEEDED Outlands at the beginning of the Against the Shadow Cycle. Want to know why you should be excited for more of them now? Because they don't have to be amazing or simple anymore.

Think about it--they did their part. They were dumb and awesome for a cycle. But now we are in a whole new cycle and some other deck type will have to establish itself as the "beginner-friendly" deck of choice this time around (I doubt it will be Isengard and Doom so it will likely be the Silvan trait that has to fill that role). Suddenly Outlands cards can begin to have more complicated strategies and combos, more weighty deck-building decisions, more nuanced cards, etc. And yeah--Outlands will STILL be kind of OP unless they intentionally nerf them. But they will be INTERESTING.

For the record--I'm not saying you personally were hating on Outlands. I just feel like we are ALWAYS going to have a "beginner" deck build itself in the first few APs of a cycle from now on and Outlands gets SO MUCH hate when I think it HAD to be what it was. Now we get to find out what it can become.

JonofPDX: hey man I completely agree 100%. It's always hard to tell context/tone through the internetz but I didn't think my previous post made any disparaging remarks towards the trait. Maybe my "no outlands ever again" might be an overestimation but I'll stand by the opinion that I'll personally be very surprised if we see Outlands support within another 1 or 2 years. Look at dwarf, the only relative cards they've received in the past year were well-equipped and Ered Nimras Prospector neither of which augmented the current dwarf archetype to any degree whatsoever.

I will never envy the creative team at FFG cause I know they have a very difficult job with a cooperative game such as this, they certainly have my support