The new Gencon event made a pretty important announcement about a turn to competitive side (which already existed in a very limited capacity) which at least for me is very exciting.

Do you think the game and new sets will continue this or it is just a one time boost? It seems quite interesting of a concept to release new sets with ability to modify them and let other players quest them.

What will be the consequences of this for the older cards? more errata? rotation?

Are you interested in competitive play?

I would be interested in comparative solo (like in the Legendary leagues on boardgamegeek) if there were a scoring system I thought was meaningful for this purpose. The official scoring method doesn't fit that description for me.

I think it sounds very exciting on a lot of different levels, but I don’t think it will be a regular thing. I do believe another one has been confirmed to be coming out after this gencon event. Woodlander realms I think is the name.

I don’t think it it will ever be enough to cause errata or adjustments on its on. Whatever the case I’m excited for more!

I doubt this will ever take over the deluxe/cycle+standalone format. I doubt it will ever become mainstream enough to require extra errata, rotation, etc. Yes I am very interested in competitive play.

One note on scoring, a variant I use scores consecutive rounds as an increase in points. End of first round is one point added to score, end of second; two, etc. An eight round game would render a score (form only rounds) of 36 (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8).

12 minutes ago, Wandalf the Gizzard said:

I doubt this will ever take over the deluxe/cycle+standalone format. I doubt it will ever become mainstream enough to require extra errata, rotation, etc. Yes I am very interested in competitive play.

I agree with this, but the current format of publishing is actually compatible with the new format if every pack had the necessary components to make custom encounter deck.

1 hour ago, Wandalf the Gizzard said:

One note on scoring, a variant I use scores consecutive rounds as an increase in points. End of first round is one point added to score, end of second; two, etc. An eight round game would render a score (form only rounds) of 36 (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8).

This will reduce the influence of number of turns on score, which is IMO a good thing, but it still rewards finishing quickly over finishing slowly, which I'm not convinced is a good thing. I think the true winning percentage of a deck against a quest would be of interest (though the number of plays required to establish what that would be within 10% would be high), but *how* a deck wins is of less interest to me. Punishing a turtle deck for slowness, or a TaGimli deck for hero damage, a TaBoromir deck for threat, or a Caldara deck for dead heroes doesn't make sense to me.

For more difficult quests, I do like the idea of using Seastan's Favor of the Valor to see how much "help" a particular deck needs to get through a quest once, but that method can't distinguish between performances that beat the quest on the first try.

And for any comparative format, even if it could establish the *best* deck from a winning percentage POV, that may be very far from the funnest to play. A tournament where the players compete to build the most efficient decks given the tournament restrictions may be less enjoyable than a tournament where players all use a variety of decks (chosen by vote before play starts) then vote for the deck that is the most fun to play.

The Wizard's Quest seems to be entirely made up of cards from the first "extended cycle". (By that I mean the cycle and the box before it, in this case the core.) The Woodland Realm also sounds very Mirkwoody to me. So we *might* be heading towards a once or twice per year release of a competitive play set using cards from Dwarrowdelf, Steward's Fear etc. I think that will depend on reception though.

We have a group of guys that get together once a month or so. I think it will be fun if one of us gets to customize the adventure and tries to make the others squirm. *coughSeastancough*

I'm looking forward to new execution with old cards. I hope it's not too Nightmarish.

I'm looking forward to giving the competitive thing a try as a GenCon gimmick, but I honestly don't think competitive LotR will hold my interest long-term. The biggest problem is that the game is essentially "solved". We know what the best player decks are; I don't think being able to tweak the contents of the encounter deck is likely to do much to counter decks like The rapid charge of Outlands, for instance. The game isn't well balanced for competitive play.

All that being said, I'm still super excited about the idea of having some structure for building our own encounter decks. That's something I've wanted to do for a long time! I'm hoping this will lead to a trend of people publishing their own encounter decks online for others to play. That's something I would enjoy doing all the time.