I've been playing lotr lcg for few years now and i have bought many packs in which some cards are absolute trash. For example Elrond's Message, The End Comes and Power in Earth come in my mind. My question is that why these cards were ever designed since they don't serve any purpose in my opinion. There are at least 30 cards that i have only used once or not at all since they are so bad. I know that not every card can be the new Steward of Gondor or Glorfindel, but i think that every card should have some kind of purpose.

Any thoughts?

Every cards are designed with a purpose. In fact among the cards you quote I personally play power in earth and I have already see several decks who includes elrond's message and the end comes. But I still agree with you: some cards are not well balanced. And that is the problem: the designers can't succeed with any theme, or any card in the theme. In a perfect world they do and we have much more diversity but it is almost impossible. It is a natural, human error.

Short answer: there aren't.

Longer answer: Every card can be put to some use. Some cards only have fairly niche uses and some the use they can be put to is largely theoretical rather than something which comes up in practice (e.g. The End Comes), but every card can be used. These cards don't serve ny purpose in your opinion, but your opinion is not universal.

The number of cards *I* really can't find a good use for is maybe 10. Some of those cards I know other people have used. And frankly, the designers are not infallible.

I'm on board with Power of the Earth being an (effectively) worthless card. Its one use would be to give a permanent -1 threat to a location you intend to keep in staging forever, but off the top of my head I can't think of any quests where that would happen *and* I'd want to give up the desk space. I'm curious what Rouxxor uses it for.

Message from Elrond is a narrow card, the obvious use would be getting around the 3x deck restriction. Since I play out of my own card pool and only have three copies of all non-core cards, I've never used it -- but if I played cooperatively with someone with their own card pool, I can see using the card to give another player more copies of some great event for them, or to power up care-about-discard events like Evening Star. It may be useless *for me*, but that's not the same as being useless, it's really very interesting.

End Comes is a very narrow sideboard card. I can see that in particular quests (specifically the Angmar cycle ones using Cursed Dead) it could be worth deck space to devote an event to resetting the encounter deck. But the odd requirement for a dwarf to leave play to trigger it makes it a *very* narrow sideboard card. I don't like to chump block with my dwarven swarm if I can possibly avoid it.

Maybe the best use case is for the first Hobbit saga quest, to keep the encounter cards from running out before you can get the Key and Purse.

Still, all three cards mentioned are from separate products, none of which are especially recent. There's far more than 30 cards I've only used once or not at all, but not because they are (IMO) inherently bad. Is there an AP that has multiple cards that you can't imagine why they were designed?

5 hours ago, dalestephenson said:

Still, all three cards mentioned are from separate products, none of which are especially recent. Is there an AP that has multiple cards that you can't imagine why they were designed?

Good point dalestephenson! You are right that most of the cards that i haven't been playing are from the first two cycles. It seems like that the developer has gotten pretty good at designing new cards. I also think that the quests are only getting better and better as new ones are released.

And no i don't think that there's AP which has many bad cards.

@dalestephenson I was wrong about both rumor and the end is come, I was thinking about other cards instead. I play with french cards so I'm very bad at recognizing the english name of cards that I almost never use :x.

I feel like Power in the Earth can't be as bad as it seems. It's effectively +1 willpower for 1 resource, which is good value. It has the advantage of not being an Ally, so it's less likely to die to an errant Treachery effect, too.

And yet, I don't think it has ever made the final cut for any deck that I have ever played.

The problem is that it's 1 willpower for 1 resource only if you leave the location in staging forever, which isn't generally desirable.

However, it would be desirable if there were locations with a positive effect from being in staging. Unfortunately, I don't think there are any, so it fails even as a sideboard card. However, if we had player-card-locations that went into the deck, providing some ongoing benefit while in staging in exchange for some threat, this could serve as a cost reducer for that deck.

An alternative that could provide some narrow use for it would a hero that (Damrod-like) benefits from playing attachments on locations. If a hero could play Power in the Earth for 0-cost and draw a card, it'd be worth putting in a deck -- even more so if there were attachment cards that provided benefits in staging rather than just mitigating the damage like this card, Thror's Key, and Guarded Ceaselessly do.

Well, there are plenty of Locations that are pretty much neutral (except for threat) as long as you don't travel to them. Ones that have nasty Travel effects or "When Explored" abilities, in particular. Leaving those around indefinitely isn't too bad.

But then it's a dead card until you see one of those Locations, so maybe that's part of why we never see it played.

Love the idea of trying to rejuvenate it with new player cards, though! I'd love to see player cards that put Locations into the encounter deck.

The blog Tales from the Cards has done a few posts analyzing cards that are generally considered subpar and finding cool potential uses from them. A guest writer even managed to defeat one of the quests considered to be the most excruciatingly difficult at that time(and this time still) using one of the most hated cards among those. If you wanna powergame, sure, use the top tier the whole time. But it's also fun to just throw subpar cards into the mix and see what happens.