I wanted to let you all know about the new series I just launched on my blog.

I've recently been hearing a lot of new players asking whether or not they should jump ahead to some of the newer cycles or if they should wait for the older cycles to come back into print so they can play them in order. The typical advice is to wait for the old stuff to come back into print—after all, the newer stuff is probably pretty hard since it was built with a larger card pool in mind. But I'm curious to find out if that's really true.

I call my new series Path Less Traveled, and my goal is to find out how the game would play if you bought the various cycles out of order. I'll be starting with The Grey Havens deluxe box, since the full cycle is still widely available right now. Hopefully new players will find this series useful, and old veterans will enjoy a fresh take on the card pool we all know and love.

Come check it out!

Path Less Traveled

Interesting. For the subsequent cycle you will use the growing card pool of all the cycles or restrain yourself to Core + the given Cycle only?

I love the idea and enjoyed your first quest. Do you plan on taking your initial deck (with modifications) through the cycle, like Beorn's Path, or building new decks for each quest?

Thanks for the support everybody! Makes it that much more fun to write knowing that somebody appreciates it. ?

15 hours ago, wolframius said:

Interesting. For the subsequent cycle you will use the growing card pool of all the cycles or restrain yourself to Core + the given Cycle only?

I'm going to do each cycle as a separate entity, starting the card pool over for each one. That way I can compare and contrast them on an even playing field.

8 hours ago, dalestephenson said:

I love the idea and enjoyed your first quest. Do you plan on taking your initial deck (with modifications) through the cycle, like Beorn's Path, or building new decks for each quest?

Initially I was indeed planning to continually adapt the same deck like Beorn does, but while I was writing the article I realized that it would probably be more useful if I built different decks so that we could see more of the player cards from each pack. I suspect that decks with the same sphere combinations will turn out pretty similar, but we'll see how much of an impact each pack's player cards make.

12 hours ago, Authraw said:

Thanks for the support everybody! Makes it that much more fun to write knowing that somebody appreciates it. ?

I'm going to do each cycle as a separate entity, starting the card pool over for each one. That way I can compare and contrast them on an even playing field.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Heirs of Numenor. I predict it will be the most difficult to approach, especially the deluxe + 1 core alone.

4 hours ago, wolframius said:

It will be interesting to see what happens with Heirs of Numenor. I predict it will be the most difficult to approach, especially the deluxe + 1 core alone.

Agreed. I'm moving into Heirs of Numenor in my Thematic Nightmare series right now, so I'll probably hold off on it for Path Less Traveled until later. Plus, I actually have heard accounts from people who picked up Heirs first (It didn't seem to go well) so there's already a little cultural wisdom built up there.