Something like Steward's fear has a complicating gating mechanic, forcing you to explore ~8 active locations. My answer to this is to recur Out of the Wild many times to remove the non-locations from the encounter deck. Then during the first staging you reveal 4 locations and complete the active one (1). Then travel to another and complete it with Riddermark's Finest (RF) (2). Then use Thror's Map to travel to another location. On turn 2 you reveal 4 more locations and complete the active one (3) travel and complete (with RF) another (4) and use Map again. On third turn you complete active (5) travel and explore (RF) another (6), and use Map and explore (RF) another (7). By this point you will have revealed an objective or two that are worth an extra 1-3 explorations and you are done on turn 3 as needed.

There might be some other quests that have tricky mechanics, like separating the decks into individual staging areas, but with careful planning like above you can include the appropriate cards to break it.

Ha, you are singlehandedly trying to get Love of Tales errata'ed.

Seriously, amazing work here. I'm one of those 1% who, in between "real" sessions, enjoy the intellectual exercise of breaking a game, and your advances in this vein have been just absurd.

Makes sense. I think there are only 2 cards that really break the game (this post is also in response to your other thread).

1. Love of tales. I agree that it should be capped. The card can generate far too many resources and the problem will only get worse as the number of songs in the card pool increases.

2. Deep knowledge. While all the doom cards can be a problem, deep knowledge is the one that snowballs out of control in multiplayer and allows the decks to have enough card slots for combo pieces so they can break the game.

I think if those two cards are fixed then the crazy broken combos are reduced significantly and are fare more reasonable and risky. Maybe I am wrong, but those are the two cards that jump out to me.

Wow. Honestly just wow. I haven't seen someone break the game like that since before they errata'd Will of the West etc., but that is a very interesting breaking of the game. It's funny, because I've honestly never used Love of Tales! I take my hat off to you, mighty.

P.S. I can't help but feel that the Ravens of the Mountain card is part of the problem also. It seems a lot of the current game-breaking combos are revolving around that.

P.P.S I also wonder they'll do anything about these cards, for the simple reasons that, even though what you propose is interesting, I would not want to play that. I'll be damned if I have the same deck as another player!

Tongue in cheek, of course, but I wonder if they'll errata cards that need to be so carefully used by all 2/3/4 players.

Ha, you are singlehandedly trying to get Love of Tales errata'ed.

Seriously, amazing work here. I'm one of those 1% who, in between "real" sessions, enjoy the intellectual exercise of breaking a game, and your advances in this vein have been just absurd.

I enjoy the building aspect of combo decks for sure. It forces you to look at old cards that didn't get much use but are really powerful in the right situation. But playing the deck? Not so fun. I recorded a video of me playing out the combo, but it's over an hour long and incredibly dull. I think if I post it people will stop watching my channel...

Makes sense. I think there are only 2 cards that really break the game (this post is also in response to your other thread).

1. Love of tales. I agree that it should be capped. The card can generate far too many resources and the problem will only get worse as the number of songs in the card pool increases.

2. Deep knowledge. While all the doom cards can be a problem, deep knowledge is the one that snowballs out of control in multiplayer and allows the decks to have enough card slots for combo pieces so they can break the game.

I think if those two cards are fixed then the crazy broken combos are reduced significantly and are fare more reasonable and risky. Maybe I am wrong, but those are the two cards that jump out to me.

Both of these cards contribute significantly to the problem for sure. Giving them errata might fix this problem, but I'm not certain that it would stop a different combo from popping up.

I think the core of the problem is 4 players.

For example lets say Deep Knowledge and LoT don't exist. Build four decks that have a 1 lead/2 lore hero split. With all the draw cards (including Peace and Thought, which isn't included in the above list). Mulligan for Peace and Thought, and at the end of the first turn draw as much as you can, and start playing a bunch of resource events: Wealth of Gondor, Tighten our Belts, Legacy of Numenor, Gaining Strength, Steward of Gondor, then dump all the resources you can onto one Hobbit using Parting Gifts. At the beginning of the second turn, everyone plays their Fast Hitches and presumably at this point the group has found in their deck at least one Gondorian Fire, Blood of Numenor, Dunedain Cache, Dunedain Warning, and Burning Brand, all of which get put on the Hobbit with Steward. Put in some songs of Travel and Lay of Nimrodel to get willpower.Then you've got a broken quest again.

Or another example, one player has Hama/Merry/Mablung/Thicket of Spears/Hammer-stroke. Second player has Beravor/Bilbo/Draw cards. Hama player gets help drawing cards until he hits Thicket+Hammer. These two cards cost 5 and get Mablung 1. So with +3 res every round that's -1 res, so find some way to get the Hama player +1 res/turn (lots of ways), and Hama+Merry can keep recycling Hammer-thicket forever. Combat is now eliminated from the game and questing is super easy because Hammer gets played before quest resolution. Make decks 3-4 questing powerhouses that never have to worry about combat.

A third idea is built around Path of Need which becomes a card you can get reliably with 4 players.

I have a lot of other ideas like this that all use different cards. They might not break the game to the same extent as this one, but it seems that when you have 3-4 decks to play with, it's not hard to find some cards you can exploit.

Wow. Honestly just wow. I haven't seen someone break the game like that since before they errata'd Will of the West etc., but that is a very interesting breaking of the game. It's funny, because I've honestly never used Love of Tales! I take my hat off to you, mighty.

P.S. I can't help but feel that the Ravens of the Mountain card is part of the problem also. It seems a lot of the current game-breaking combos are revolving around that.

P.P.S I also wonder they'll do anything about these cards, for the simple reasons that, even though what you propose is interesting, I would not want to play that. I'll be damned if I have the same deck as another player!

Tongue in cheek, of course, but I wonder if they'll errata cards that need to be so carefully used by all 2/3/4 players.

Thank you

I find 4 player games of LotR to be fascinating. If people just show up with random decks, 4 player can be far harder than 1 or 2 player even if the decks are individually very good. But if you really craft all of the decks to fit together, 4 player can be trivial.

The rules should recieve an errata, 4 player games should be banned!!

Excellent deck(s) and admirable effort. Thank you for such a contribution!

I don't personally care if people can figure out a way to break the game with 4 players because that is a ridulous amount of coordination just to actually get together and pull it off. The game designers would have to make the cardpool so tame for the other player amounts that it is not worth it.

I do think there is one new rule that can help, however. I think that the 3 card limit should apply to the total cards used by all players, not just 3 cards per deck. Even when not trying to break the game this is a good rule because I have noticed, for instance, you can have a 4 player game where all 4 players run 3 test of will and, since there are normally only one or two truly nasty treacheries per quest, it kinda makes the game lame. If a group were only allowed 3 deep knowledge, etc., it would automatically push larger numbers of players to play with more cards. Most people actually play this way informally, but I think it could be an official rule. Again, it won't solve everything, but it would help.

Then you will do even more hard the preparation of games with partners which bring a random deck (meaning not prepared in coordination with the other players). We spend usually tons of minutes changing our unique characters or attachments, I cannot imagine to start counting the copies of every single card...

To be honest, that post of yours is bit to long for me to read. :-p

But anyways, I think you missed one simple thing. (Correct me if I am playing the game wrong all the time..)

I think the rules saying something like "Each player, starting with the first player..." takes actions etc. Which means to me that the frist player can draw and play e.g. Deep Knowledge and every following player benefits from that effect (having more resources, cards, whatever) but if the last player plays such a card the predecessors will get all the resources but are not allowed to play them anymore this round. So basically your drawing/resourcegeneration cannot happen at once and will be spread on several rounds?!?

To be honest, that post of yours is bit to long for me to read. :-p

But anyways, I think you missed one simple thing. (Correct me if I am playing the game wrong all the time..)

I think the rules saying something like "Each player, starting with the first player..." takes actions etc. Which means to me that the frist player can draw and play e.g. Deep Knowledge and every following player benefits from that effect (having more resources, cards, whatever) but if the last player plays such a card the predecessors will get all the resources but are not allowed to play them anymore this round. So basically your drawing/resourcegeneration cannot happen at once and will be spread on several rounds?!?

It's true that to play allies/attachments you must do so in player order. But if you look at the order of play chart at the end of the rulebook, every step of the planning phase is green. And it says that steps colored green mean " Any player can take actions generally, or between the game steps stated in the rules." So this allows all players to play actions at any point during planning.

This is an absolutely fascinating effort. Good work Seastan!

So now I'm wondering: At what point does a deck become a cheesy deck? I really like the Deep Knowledge / Seeing Stone / Scroll of Isuldur combo; but at what point does it stop being a combo and start being an exploit?

What about Song decks in general? Valid strategy or cheese?

Where is the line between "power deck" and "broken exploit"?

I'm having an existential crisis over here.

IMO, playing more than one doomed card per turn (not counting seeing stone) is cheese. The core currencies in this game are resources and actions/exhaustion. Adding doomed cards suddenly turned threat into a currency. While resources and actions have built in limitations, threat is something that can be easily exploited. It's only limitation is the encounter deck forcing you to threat out and/or engage unwanted enemies. But if you can spam doomed cards, you are exploiting the currency without real limit. So, one doomed card per turn means that you actually have to care about your threat and engaging enemies instead of just viewing it as a bank of currency.

Song decks are pretty much auto-cheese because they just don't function unless you fully commit. And at that point they become broken and cheesy.

I think my definition of exploit would be when you are playing/triggering any card more than about 3 times in the same turn. Gandalf and Elrond/Vilya, for example, isn't an exploit because that's an obviously combo that I'm sure the designers intended. It's powerful and I have no intention of playing it, but it was clearly designed that way. Boromir most of the time isn't an exploit, but when you are using him 10 times in the same turn you know you have broken the game. Any of the "draw your whole deck on turn one" decks rely on playing Deep Knowledge, Mithrandir's Advice repeatedly and/or triggering Love of Tales 10+ times in one turn.

Pretty much nailed it. When an effect becomes easily repeatable it becomes cheese because then you can use it for any situation regardless of what the encounter deck contains. Once the encounter deck is meaningless the game loses all enjoyment.

The requirements to pull this off is also immense, which in my thinking, kind of moderates the absurd power of this deck. Each deck requires 3 Dwarven Tomb, which only come 1 copy per Core Set. So, to have 2 decks for 2 players/hands, you need at least 6 Core Sets! And if you want to play, up to 4 players/hands, you need up to 12 copies of Core Set. Even if such player exists (who owns 12 copies of Core set) or a group of players each with 3 Core Sets, they also would have to have a copy of each of the required expansion adventure pack/deluxe/Saga. What's the probability of that happening?

Don't buy 12 Cores, just proxy the cards? Well, that's a different debate altogether. But considering that the deck builder himself admitted that 'you will have a hard time convincing other people to play this silly deck' and it plays 'boring' and on top of that you'd have to convince them to play with proxy cards too, well, we don't have to discuss the issue of having 'fun in playing' anymore, do we?

So, theoretically, yes the deck is powerful because it breaks the game. Does FFG need to address this directly? Given the tremendous requirements of the deck and likelihood of this deck getting played by 2-4 players regularly (and possibility of complaint in this board that the game has become too easy), I don't think so.

Interesting post Seastan. Basically you revived the "old" love of tales decks but pinpointed their functioning and made them more reliable, thus allowing an interesting discussion to take place. Good work!

As others pointed out (I mostly agree with what was said above, especially by Teamjimby), 4 players games can easily become cheesy if you engineer all 4 decks to break a quest. The most fun for 4p is obtained, in my opinion, by doing pick and play; maybe allowing a bit of cooperation when building decks, but no more than that.

Anyway, I don't think there's any card of those that really needs errata, since the perfect coordination between 4 decks really is what makes those broken.

However, even if Love of Tales can surely be used in other ways without being abused, I do agree that a cap on that (as a cap on Boromir's abiity, or a cap on the amount of doomed cards per round, or on the Horn of Gondor response, or a limit to Merry's readying effect) could make the game healthier.

The "don't like it (that way) - don't play it (that way)" policy has it merits, but I would personally prefer if the designers took care of helping us with some particularly "thorny" cards.

Yes this deck does take co-ordination to pull off. But you can limit yourself to just 2 players and you'll still crush everything. Here's 2-player Into Ithilien Nightmare, 1st turn win, score 0:

The reason I added 3-4 players was so that it really could achieve 0 score on some of the more complex quests. But you don't need to go that far to really consider it broken. See my other thread on 2-player Aragorn/Boromir decks.

Pretty impressive!

Anyway as I say 3 years ago and keep say that for last 2 years…

Say that again :

In any card game with unlimited draw and unlimited hand size cannot be balance. Is only matter of time when this kind of things will happen agaim and agaim. But you sir is really cool guy!!!! Very impressive again! I take my hat off!

Even it is a genius deck,I can name 3 quest that you can't win in the first round:Journey in the Dark,Helm's Deep an Shelob's Lair.

Even it is a genius deck,I can name 3 quest that you can't win in the first round:Journey in the Dark,Helm's Deep an Shelob's Lair.

I did mention a few quests with gating mechanics that prevent a first turn win, but that you could with on the third turn with 0 threat and 20 VP. I think Journey in the Dark could be beaten in this way. But you are right that some quests like Helm's deep require 8+ turns or so.

Like I commented on your youtube video: great attempt at breaking the game, though Isildur's scroll is a unique item so you can't combo it like that. Only one player can use one scroll at the same time. (Not that it really matters though, you'll still get the same result if you play slightly different!). A love of tales errata is probably the only 'cure' for your deck.

Every time the designers forget to limit an ability they risk it breaking the game. I think there should have been a hand-limit, resource limit and allies-in-play limit in the original rules and every card with an activated ability should have a 'limit x per turn/phase'. Just look at the core set: Berevor and protector of Lorien both get a limit errated. A more recent example is Blue mountain trader who got errata because they didn't include a limit again. At the same time, cards like Prince Imrahil and Mablung work fine and probably won't break the game any time soon.

It seems the developers have a: "forget to put limits on player cards (limit once per cycle)" ability on their own design abilities.

Like I commented on your youtube video: great attempt at breaking the game, though Isildur's scroll is a unique item so you can't combo it like that. Only one player can use one scroll at the same time. (Not that it really matters though, you'll still get the same result if you play slightly different!).

Yes thanks for pointing that out. You just need to have the player use the scroll as soon as it gets played and it's fine.

And I agree about the danger of limitless abilities. Almost all of them can be abused in some way, and I like to figure out how

I agree with the limits. In my opinion the core set and the first two cycles are the worst offenders. Boromir is simply bonkers and should probably be limit once per phase, and Burning Brand should be exhaust to cancel a shadow card.

But that would trash my best deck...