Hi everyone,

I'm sorry if there's a thread about this already, I did a quick scan of the forums without finding one.

I'm an absolute beginner in this game: I bought a core set when the game was new, played a couple of solo games and then started playing again very recently. I really like the game, but I'm having trouble deciding which cards to put in the decks. I'm currently building a Leadership/Spirit deck and a Tactics/Lore deck for a two-handed game using cards from two core sets. My questions are:

1. I used to play Call of Cthulhu quite a lot in the CCG days, so I'm used to building decks with no more than 50 cards and containing full playsets of every card in the deck except one. Is this a good way of building decks in LOTR as well?

2. Are cards with a cost of 4 or higher generally useful in multi-sphere decks?

3. Should I have more allies than events in the decks?

4. Are there any cards in the core set that stand out as being particularly good or bad?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-yoghurtoth

If you google talesfromthecards and also "beorns path" those sites/blogs have some fantastic deck building articles for beginers.

Beorns starts with just a core set, builds decks specifically suited to the quests and then plays right through the mirkwood cycle making deck adds and tweaks as he goes.

Ive found card costs in multi sphere decks can depend on resource generation. I had less resorces available on a mono-lore deck than when i played lore/leadership with only one lore-hero because the steward of gondor attachment had that hero generating lots of resource and card draws werent always lore, so i had more resource than i could spend. So card cost depends on your deck design and your plans on how (or if) you will introduce extra resource generation in my view.

Quick links:

Tales from the Cards

and

Hall of Beorn

To answer your questions more specifically:

1. I'm not 100% surr if I am understanding what you are asking here, but in general the number of copies of a card that you put in the deck is dependent on how consistently you want it to show up. If you want it to consistently show up in the first couple rounds put 3 copies in there unless you have a ton of card draw in which case you can use fewer copies of cards to allow for a greater variety of effects.

2. Unless you have a lot of resource generation for that sphere (primarily via Steward of Gondor) I would tend to avoid 4-cost cards. I even tend to severely limit the 3-cost cards.

3. Generally yes. Allies tend to be one the most necessary cards in decks because they give you the numbers you need. Many people say 50% allies and 25% each for attachments and events as a rule of thumb, but dont stay too strict to that. I tend more towards 40%/35%/25% for allies/attachments/events.

4. Steward of Gondor, Unexpected Courage, and A Test of Will tend to be very useful cards. Sneak Attack + Gandalf combo is very good, especially if you are using Prince Imrahil and/or Horn of Gondor so you can take advantage of him leaving play in the middle of the round. I usually sneak him in for questing. That is alk I can tell you off the top of my head.