http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=5179

The competitive LCGs will have their new rotation policy, The rotation will help them a lot in balance and metagame experience.

Maybe we don't need balance between players and encounter decks, because the quest is becoming more and more difficult along the card pool becomes bigger, and we have nightmare decks to "fix" the difficulty of old quests.

And we also don't care the balance among the different spheres, because the sphere is different from the house in Aogt LCG and company/hacker in Netrunner, we can put any numbers of spheres and cards in a single deck.

BUT, there're still some problems because of balance, like infinity resources, infinity drawing, infinity will power...In some decks they can occur easily, and maybe occur one after another, like the "powerful' Bilbo Baggins/Beravor/Bombur Deck.

They are boring, they can mean lowset score but the score means little thing, we don't use them. But I think they should be fixed. We cannot use "Other LCGs have the same problems" to comfort ourselves(or maybe just myself) because they begin to roll.

Finally I want to say that we play Lotr LCG becasuse it is the lotr and it is LCG. I hope I can feel the middle earth and feel great card game machanism in this game.

Best wishes to all of you.

Sounds yes there is no need for rotaion cards at least for now.

The one think what I will love about lotr lcg if we will have in the future some new quest (special edition) when real player can play Encounter card against other player. That will be cool!

Rotation? In Lotr? How? Thats not how the game works, even though its a card game, its essentially its own format. It would be nearly unplayable and honestly quite lame going around banning cards in Lotr.

1 broken deck comes along after 4 years of the game's lifespam and its still fixable with errata or just plain ignoring it. Big deal. Try running anything else in nightmare first! Infinity resources? Yeah right.

Solid errata are enough to ensure healthy gameplay.

Edit: some of the most powerful cards are in the core set. Steward of Gondor and Unexpected Readying come to mind. You can't rotate those out without shooting yourself in the foot with casual/regular players.

We just need some errata for the draw your whole deck within a turn or two decks and we're all good.

Friends don't let friends play outlands anyway. Banning cards would just be dumb though.... its a co-op game...

Rotation fixes nothing...think of the infinite combo deck the OP mentioned... how does rotation help? Gandalf is in core. Doomed cards in VoI. Bildo in 1st cycle. Fat dwarf in 2nd hobbit saga box. Mithrandirs advice is in HoN.

"What About The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game?

As a cooperative LCG, rather than a competitive one, The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is excluded from rotation."

Imagine having 1500 player cards for LOTR!

"What About The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game?

As a cooperative LCG, rather than a competitive one, The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game is excluded from rotation."

Imagine having 1500 player cards for LOTR!

A man can dream.

Rotation isn't even a big deal for most of the others right now anyway. Netrunner's been out for 2 years and we're in the middle of the 3rd cycle... So in another 3-4 years some cards will go away.

I'd love to see errata for the infinite combos, though.

For me, this just highlights why LOTR is superior to the other LCGs. We get to use ALL of the cards we buy and we don't have to wait around for someone to be A) available to play and B) as into the game as we are!

As a lot of players dont want to play outlanders, players also can chose not to play the Bilbo-Bera-Bombur deck or similars. Why fix it with overpower rules? It is not a problem, the problem is with competitive games as the article wrote trying to fix it with the rotation idea.

edit- yeah posted in the wrong place

Not sure you meant to put that here...

For tournaments matter need to have some ban list cards to avoid some decks domination. That will be enough

One piece of relevant LOTR news is that there will be another Fellowship event in October 2015, and this past Fellowship event had the participation of over 300 stores.

One piece of relevant LOTR news is that there will be another Fellowship event in October 2015, and this past Fellowship event had the participation of over 300 stores.

As a fan of the books and this game, I'm really happy to have the opportunity to play more LOTR Saga quests, so this is really good news. I was able to attend the Fellowship event last month and had a fantastic time. The only thing that would have made this news better is if the next Fellowship was scheduled much sooner. October 2015 is a long ways away.

Let's hope they promote next year's event a little more than this year's.

My guess is they work their way through The Return of the King, maybe go another cycle or two, then do a second edition. That still gives us years of enjoyment and quite a pool to work with.

A large part of me hopes that they make a VS version of the game next.

Speaking of the rotation as a whole, I think it's a good thing.

As I see it, a second edition for LotR would have to address a few things to be viable and a positive move for the game:

• Clear up rules / errata. The growing list of errata and increasingly complex rules could stand to be incorporated better into the core game rules and cards themselves. This would make the game more accessible for new consumers.
• Promise of new encounter content. Similar to how Caleb and Matt have approached revitalizing the scenarios by pushing new mechanics and punishing common play styles, the designers must be confident that new, dynamic scenarios can be developed regularly with the same depth of connection to the Middle-earth lore. Rehashing more treks through Moria is just dangerous.
• New directions for the player cards. It won't be good enough to just republish modified versions of existing player cards and exclude the old ones from play. They'll need to cultivate new mechanics and new types of synergy and honestly, I don't know how they would do that without treading on aspects of the game that have been extremely successful so far. After all, a new Aragorn is going to be compared to the old Aragorn(s). Every card with a recognizable thematic hook into the old game would lead to comparisons and probably divide the community.

With this said, Magic The Gathering has done this a few times already and while I'm not intimately familiar with their design decisions, it seems to have worked for quite a long run. I'm sure lessons from that game could apply here.

I would personally love to see a First Age edition of the game which would give the ability for all these issues to be addressed, but that's sidestepping the premise.

A First Age expansion would be an instant-buy for me, however I think there is a LOT of design space left in Lotr. Since FFG's reprints include errata however, I see no point for a second edition for our game. Game of thrones was a real mess, totally obscure rulings all over the place. In Lotr we have some timing issues and framework questions but they are easily fixed.

A large part of me hopes that they make a VS version of the game next.

Speaking of the rotation as a whole, I think it's a good thing.

Versus idea I like too. They can try do some POD scenarios where one of the player take control of encounter deck and play against a player. That can be interesting. But to be honest I dont think ffg will do it. They wonna keep this game on her unique shelf probably.

I'm on the other side and really really hope they don't make a versus mode. I love that this game in its entirety can be played by yourself without friends, versus would ruin that.
Plus then there would be cards people WOULD want to ban cause the "encounter" or evil player would not want to see Outlands or Dain and the "good" player wouldn't want to see stuff like Sleeping Sentry or Sudden Pitfall. You could no longer choose to just not use what you don't want to use.

The game is made to be a co-operative game. If they make a separate similar game set in Middle Earth that is competitive that might be cool but I'd really rather they didn't do it for this game especially this far down the track and after its gotten so **** good and is so established. I think it would severely damage the existing game as it is as well. It would take up time and resources that could be spent making more new AP's and Deluxe boxes.... new people would get into the game and play only the competitive aspect and complain about the co-op aspect.

I specifically moved away from MtG and to this game to get away from competitive play....

Can't you guys play the MECCG or Guardians of Middle Earth or something if you want to play a versus LOTR based game?

No.

Versus idea only works in theory.

Fun fact: Magic the Gathering has a player versus encounter deck mode and it is, as expected pretty terrible. The same would happen if we diluted Lotr LCG with elements that go against its basic design. I understand why they sound charming in theory, but it wouldnt work out in practice. Besides, the overwhelming majority of players play solo or have no interest for non-coop. I want what has been advertised to me please, a quest solving, adventure-like card game with Tolkien theme.

Versus idea only works in theory.

Fun fact: Magic the Gathering has a player versus encounter deck mode and it is, as expected pretty terrible. The same would happen if we diluted Lotr LCG with elements that go against its basic design. I understand why they sound charming in theory, but it wouldnt work out in practice. Besides, the overwhelming majority of players play solo or have no interest for non-coop. I want what has been advertised to me please, a quest solving, adventure-like card game with Tolkien theme.

Well said! The Minotaur Horde and Hydra Deck events were indeed utterly terrible. As would be VS mode in this game.

If we are talking about a versus mode that is developed using the existing cards then I agree that it won't work. I said so months ago. I am talking about a ground up new game where you bring two decks to the table, one for the good guys and one for the bad guys - similar to what the Star Wars LCG does as I understand - and then play it out.