I, on the other hand, don't like it, and I'll tell you for why:

1) Having a chance to try greater number of cards virtually depends on their amount (the lesser them - the more chance to try), but all it really depends is viability and versatility, and that's exactly where the more - the better;

2) Out of 7 non-hero player cards, we got only 4 independent ones. Flame of Anor, Gandalf's Staff and Wizard Pipe all were (obviously) created to support new Gandalf hero and just happen to be able to support some other existing player cards, and not with that spectacular effect as they would support the Gandalf hero. Reminds of anything? (Spirfindel and Light of Valinor)

I applaud the designers for making 2 of them playable on other Istaries instead of just slapping an "attach to Gandalf" on all of them. Not that it makes a lot of difference at the moment, but I sincerely hope for some other Istari hero somewhere in the future, maybe they'll promote Radagast, maybe they'll get some courage to implement a Blue Wizard, or maybe my dream will come true and Saruman himself will ascend as a hero to help us on our journeys. But for now it's just a foundation, which is good, but not that great as it could be.

Expert treasure-hunter + Hidden cache + Wizard pipe ... 2 Ressources per turn !!

Wow. That's an awesome combo. I don't know if I ever would have thought of that. Of course, it's a 3 card combo, so it's not super efficient, but why not try it? Potentially a 4-card combo if you're not using Hero Gandalf.

You can easily put in place the combo with words of command and Bilbo baggins ally

Gandalf and his stuff are very (over ?) powerfull ....

As much as the cards were there to support the new Gandalf hero, I'm actually quite excited by their ability to improve Hobbit Gandalf. As long as a deck can handle the threat gains from Hobbit Gandalf, he's suddenly way more powerful and brings a lot to the game. He was already really strong because he could commit 4 willpower to questing while also commiting 4 defense or attack every single turn. No hero can claim that without at least 3 attachments. Now we can give Gandalf some attachments to make him even more effective and they can aid your heroes.

I'd definitely love to see something that can really make Radagast better specifically, though. Even if it can work on the Gandalfs, I think it should be more targeted toward Radagast.

The Gandalf ally will always be inferior to the Gandalf hero regarding those attachments because of one single reason: with Gandalf hero you've already got your base material in play, all you need is to draw your Gandalf-enhancements and play them, while building all that stuff around Gandalf ally could easily fail with a bad draw. BUT, even if you draw Gandalf first turn, unless you have some cunning way of putting him into play forever(all of which are also luck-based to my knowledge, think a very good tale or timely aid) - you need to pay 5 resources for him, and that's 166% worth of one turns resources, and then you'll need to draw and pay for every stuff you wanted to give him, so you'll need a complete focus and that's gonna be hard. A lot harder than just having Gandalf around from the turn 0, all ready to go.

Also, ally Gandalf is a lot more vulnerable to encounter effects (Knife in the Back, to name only one).

They need to start adding encounter cards already! This is a mean tease only posting all the cards we already know (other than the pipe and elven rope but meh) and not providing any encounter card info!!

To me the Wizard's Pipe seems too much like Gandalf's Light of Valinor (i.e. Spirit Glorfindel). It takes the one weakness Gandalf had (minus the threat) and nullifies it. I think they made a mistake with Spirit Glorfindel and LoV and I think this is a mistake as well. I may be wrong though, only time will tell.

I got the box today, the encounter cards look amazing and while I haven't played the quests, there seems to be a lot going on and a lot of cool mechanics. I have super high hopes. Also, the art on encounter cards are amazing

No new player cards I suppose, right?

The Gandalf ally will always be inferior to the Gandalf hero regarding those attachments because of one single reason: with Gandalf hero you've already got your base material in play, all you need is to draw your Gandalf-enhancements and play them, while building all that stuff around Gandalf ally could easily fail with a bad draw. BUT, even if you draw Gandalf first turn, unless you have some cunning way of putting him into play forever(all of which are also luck-based to my knowledge, think a very good tale or timely aid) - you need to pay 5 resources for him, and that's 166% worth of one turns resources, and then you'll need to draw and pay for every stuff you wanted to give him, so you'll need a complete focus and that's gonna be hard. A lot harder than just having Gandalf around from the turn 0, all ready to go.

You're forgetting Elf-Stone. In any case, I'm talking about taking a deck that already uses Gandalf and making it better. I've played some decks that used Hobbit Gandalf to some amazing effect, and I have no problem paying for him on turn 2 or 3 if I have to; he's worth the resources and the wait. It honestly doesn't matter if his attachments don't show up. They're just making a great thing better because, like I said, Gandalf is better than a 4th hero, so he doesn't need the attachments.

I got the box today, the encounter cards look amazing and while I haven't played the quests, there seems to be a lot going on and a lot of cool mechanics. I have super high hopes. Also, the art on encounter cards are amazing

SPOILERS!!!!!!! Please =p

Encounter cards yes yes we want to know it please......we want it we want it now!

The Gandalf ally will always be inferior to the Gandalf hero regarding those attachments because of one single reason: with Gandalf hero you've already got your base material in play, all you need is to draw your Gandalf-enhancements and play them, while building all that stuff around Gandalf ally could easily fail with a bad draw. BUT, even if you draw Gandalf first turn, unless you have some cunning way of putting him into play forever(all of which are also luck-based to my knowledge, think a very good tale or timely aid) - you need to pay 5 resources for him, and that's 166% worth of one turns resources, and then you'll need to draw and pay for every stuff you wanted to give him, so you'll need a complete focus and that's gonna be hard. A lot harder than just having Gandalf around from the turn 0, all ready to go.

You're forgetting Elf-Stone. In any case, I'm talking about taking a deck that already uses Gandalf and making it better. I've played some decks that used Hobbit Gandalf to some amazing effect, and I have no problem paying for him on turn 2 or 3 if I have to; he's worth the resources and the wait. It honestly doesn't matter if his attachments don't show up. They're just making a great thing better because, like I said, Gandalf is better than a 4th hero, so he doesn't need the attachments.

Elf-Stone is even worse - you need a location, you need to travel there, and you need to explore it. And on the top of it, if it's multiplayer, you need to be the first player while it all happening, not to mention having both Gandalf AND Elf-Stone in your opening hand.

Grey company are re-posting all the cards already spoiled and already up on cardgame db.... EVERYONE WANTS ENCOUNTER SPOILERS YO!

I want to know about the 9th Nazgul, uhh, player card! What went wrong?

Too bad designers don't speak to the community. I would love to ask them what was the card and why it got scrapped... and actually receive an answer

I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with this. Why do you think there's a card missing? The hero counts as a player card. If you don't count Frodo there's 9 cards.

Let's just enjoy the release without getting all conspiracy theory on this shall we?

Incorrect, as debated before, they said 9 * 3 yimes the new player cards, so they didn't count Gandalf as one of them. Also they didn't count heroes as player cards before in announcements.

I just wanna see the encounter cards..... =D We'll get new players cards that are dope come Nin-in-Eilph!!

By the way, lets sum up what we know of player cards from tis Swamp AP, shall we?

Fill the blanks if you know what's missing:

Hero:

???

Leadershit:

Follow Me!

???

Lore:

Mirkwood Pioneer

Wingfoot

Tactics:

Silvan Girl with a Bow

???

Spirit:

Island Amid Perils

???

Even with my limited knowledge, there is plenty of cards we already know about. But most exciting one is yet to be revealed... the hero.

Wizard Pipe completely eliminates the one challenge that I faced when splashing a sphere that did not belong to one of the heroes in a deck. This problem actually made Gandalf interesting to build around because there was the potential of getting dead cards stuck in hand, so I was relying on Gildor ally for 5 resources. Now the pipe makes it easy to move these cards back to the top of the deck, so now I can pretty much put any off sphere card into a deck and have a chance to play it. If it was not for gandalf's high threat I'd say he's pretty broken.

I'm still quite intrigued to build some decks with him, but when testing him out I started to find that Gandalf's style of play became pretty boring. with too much player deck manipulation for my taste. It was similar to Elrond Vilya, which I also find boring and broken. Makes many scenarios easy. It's the same story with Gandalf.

I understand why the developers designed wizard pipe. It eliminates Gandalf's one handicap, but now the only thing going against him is high threat, which can be worked around easy enough.

The Hall of Beorn Card Search now includes spoilers and images for the player cards from The Road Darkens. I should have encounter card text added when my copy arrives in a few days. Enjoy!

http://hallofbeorn.com/Cards/Search?CardSet=The+Road+Darkens

What's up with the image quality degradation? New FFG policy?

I was kinda wondering the same thing. And none of the QR code pages work anymore either: http://ffgapp.com/qr/MEC29
They redirect to the CardGameDB home page.

Yes, I had been hot-linking to those qr/MEC images but the webmaster of CardGameDB warned me about a month ago that they would be going away. This is precisely why I created my own search engine, all of the other available resources are out of date or incomplete and seem to have haphazard update policies. I hope that FFG does eventually do something with CardGameDB - it hasn't changed substantially since they bought it over a year ago. In the mean time, Hall of Beorn Card Search will keep chuggin' along.