In the Lost Realms thread we started discussing enemy attack and power creep. I thought I would put up some numbers for the community to look at.

The information below is the average attack per printed enemy. I used "printed" because I counted duplicate cards to account for the weighting of more numerous enemies

Core/Mirkwood: 2.48
Khzd/Dwrrw: 2.74 (10% increase)

Heirs/AtS: 3.15 (16% increase)

VoI/RM: 3.28 (3.1% increase)

Full disclosure:

Attack Values of X:

Ghulat X=4
The Nameless Fear X=4

Elder Nameless Thing X=5

Nameless Thing X=4

Like any statistic, we have to understand the inadequacies of this data.
This data does not account for
- card text that increases attack.
- card text that causes multiple attacks
- shadow cards that increase attack or cause additional attacks (e.g. the chaining shadows of HoN)
- Archery (and other direct damage effects)

Cool research Brah. I'm actually surprised that Attack still went up after Heirs/AtS. I thought there can't be more attack

Good work! I remember looking into this for questing points of locations once, and those have gone up a lot since the early days as well. Would be interesting to see the same done for defence, hitpoints, etc.! Very nice work!

The Wildlands encounter set from Core/Mirkwood is used in Journey, Conflict at the Carrock, Return to Mirkwood (and probably 1-2 others), so the Hill Troll appears more than twice throughout the cycle despite there being 2 copies of it in the encounter set. Since all adventure packs reuse at least one of the deluxe expansion encounter sets, I think it would be useful to account for this in calculating average attack values.

That being said, maybe you already did this and I am misreading your post. Are the averages in your post reflecting the number of times the enemies appear throughout the cycle or just the physical number of cards based on one copy of the relevant deluxe expansion/core set?

That being said, maybe you already did this and I am misreading your post. Are the averages in your post reflecting the number of times the enemies appear throughout the cycle or just the physical number of cards based on one copy of the relevant deluxe expansion/core set?

I almost did this, but opted to just use number of physical copies. I'll crunch the numbers and see what happens

Some of us may recall that there was a debate several months ago about whether Spirit or Leadership was the better sphere at questing. While this does not settle the argument, I still find i pretty interesting:

Average Resources per point of printed WP (on an ally)

Leadership: 2.34

Tactics 3.36

Spirit: 2.04
Lore: 2.26

Neutral: 1.86

For example, is costs spirit on average 2.04 resources for each point of printed WP.

Silvan Refugee is a huge bargain at 0.5 resources per point of willpower.

Frankly, any card with Cost = WP is a bargain (except for neutral)

So wait... does this make neutral the king of questing? I suppose Neutral is not a sphere...

Clearly spirit has the cheapest willpower of the four, but it is interesting how close Lore, Spirit, and Leadership are to each other. So close that the global WP buffs offered by Leadership should easily make it the most economical.

I did not count zero WP allies. If I did, the gaps widen. Tactics becomes 7.01 resources per point of WP!

The plot below depicts the number of allies grouped by printed WP. Spirit has the advantage of having more 2 WP allies. In terms of card economy in a 50 card deck, few cards will get you higher WP. Leadership can flood the board with low WP allies and then globally boost them.

Hold on, Spirit has no constant 3-WP allies? I'm sure it's correct, I just haven't thought about it. A whole bunch of Silvans have it with Celeborn's boost, but not permanently.

(You can tell you've played this game for a while when you know exactly which two Lore and Leadership allies have 3 WP without looking it up...)

Every copy of Emery that I've ever seen has an attack value of one.

Hold on, Spirit has no constant 3-WP allies? I'm sure it's correct, I just haven't thought about it. A whole bunch of Silvans have it with Celeborn's boost, but not permanently.

(You can tell you've played this game for a while when you know exactly which two Lore and Leadership allies have 3 WP without looking it up...)

Pelargir Shipwright does if you play mono-spirit. Ethir Swordsmen can also easily get to 3. That's why it's nearly impossible to get much meaningful information from this sort of analysis that ignores card text. Most of leadership's questing comes from Dain, Visionary Leadership, Sword that was Broken, and Faramir. Of course, none of that would show up in these stats.

In Lost Realm, the average printed enemy attack value is 3.39 (3.4% increase from VoI/RM).