I'll have to pass this time. I couldn't find the time to make an appealing deck with one of the required heroes.

Druadan Forest was kind to all the Outlands players, but hard on Mirlonde. Here's how we did (outside cards in parens)

0 Authraw (0)
0 Rouxxor (0)
0 dalestephenson (5)
0 Miceldars (27)
1 Velensk (18)
2 Yepesnopes (41) [nightmare]

And here's the totals for those who completed all three quests this month:

0 Authraw (0)
0 Rouxxor (0)
0 dalestephenson (5)
3 Velensk (18)
3 Yepesnopes (41) [nightmare]
18 Miceldars (27)

Rouxxor couldn't find an improvement on Authraw's deck, so chose to use it. However, the final tiebreaker is standing in last month's league, and as Rouxxor won last month Authraw takes the prize this month. Authraw will get to choose a cycle for January's league, Rouxxor will get to pick a quest to be played, and I will get to pick a quest to be excluded. Miceldars will get to choose a card outside the cycle to not count against tiebreakers.

Next month: Lost Realm/Angmar Awakens. One of the heroes used must be Tactics Aragorn, Halbarad, Dori or Arwen. Tactics Eowyn will not count against any tiebreakers.

The way the rules are writed it appear pretty much clearly that I should win this league. I even say before that I may take the same deck that Authraw since it will make me finish first. But that is not a big deal anyway.

I'm not sure I will be playing the league next month (or any other month). Just playing with the same core set cards each time is a very bad deckbuilding experience. I'm not forced to follow this and I can play whatever I want. But since quest are selected randomly there is always some boring to play. So, at the end I choose this month to play with my deck on the scenario I like over playing the league each time I get the opportunity to play until the last day.

Have fun!

Yes, I worded the tiebreakers badly so you are correct. I wrote this:

Fourth tiebreaker is how well the player performed in the previous month's league, if not in the previous month's league treated as a median performance.

But I meant to write this:

Fourth tiebreaker is how well the player performed in the previous month's league (worse is better), if not in the previous month's league treated as a median performance.

It was never my intention to give a competitive advantage to the previous month's winner. However, the way the tiebreaker was actually worded that would be the logical interpretation. You can consider yourself the winner by rule and next month's seventh tiebreaker will be better worded. But you've already deferred the cycle pick to Authraw, so the rewards are unchanged.

I would be sorry to lose you as a player in the league, but if you can't find a way to enjoy playing then there's no point in playing. If you were playing nightmare instead of regular quests, would the quests be more enjoyable for you?

8 hours ago, Rouxxor said:

The way the rules are writed it appear pretty much clearly that I should win this league. I even say before that I may take the same deck that Authraw since it will make me finish first. But that is not a big deal anyway.

I think it is a very childish coment to make taking into account you copied the exact same deck of Authraw, knowing that he scored a perfect run with his deck.

Nah, I think Rouxxor's just pointing out the rules-as-written; that's how I understood them to work, too (although I'm glad to hear that that wasn't the original intention). We're all gamers here, and gamers love obsessing over rules. It's hard to leave an incorrectly played rule hanging in the air without at least pointing it out, even if you don't actually care about the outcome.

I choose the Sands of Harad / Haradrim cycle for January. The player cards for that cycle are a little weird in a Core-only environment, so I'm interested to see which ones bubble to the top.

I'm sympathetic to Rouxxor's point about most of the decks coming out the same, though. I think by always allowing the Core cards we're sort of doomed to see the same deck or two swirling around month after month with minor variations each time. (This month was a bit of an outlier, of course, partially due to Outlands being so strong out-of-the-box and partially due to the Battle / Siege keywords).

I like the restriction of using in-cycle cards but it does have the side effect that all of the decks are vey similar in November (some version of outlands) and October (variations on Noldor).
I'm predict a lot of people (including me) will line up erestor and Arwen for Agnmar Awakened.

The in-cycle cards as tiebraker makes that often there is one obvious archetype that will perform well and score 0 on the tiebraker.

That being said I don't have any better ideas on an improved tiebreaker and I continue to appluad @dalestephenson for this nice initiave.
Perhaps we can do a winner sof the most loved quest competition (Durin's father recently launched a challonge for this). This way we will be garantueed to play great quests.
Although I don't know how to organize the tiebreaker there.

Why not select a second cycle to allow its cards for the tiebreaker ?

Part of the reason for the in-cycle emphasis has been to level the playing field somewhat for players with an incomplete card pool. A player with just the cycle and a single core could compete with a deck drawn from the entire card pool. My naive thought would be that the likelihood of loss from a minimum purchase deck would be high enough that there would be a balance between powering up the deck and trying to be perfect on the tiebreakers. In one sense that's true -- no one actually risked playing a perfect tiebreaker deck, even though LeBoromir/Hirluin outlands deck with Mirlonde or TaBoromir was capable of getting lucky against the quests. (As I've proven so far, getting lucky is totally a viable strategy...) But the top finishers were once again the strongest archtype from the cycle. I think Yepesnopes had the most interesting deck.

Miceldars' idea about selecting a second cycle has merit, I think. By allowing heroes and cards from a second cycle there's more alternatives and the decks could be less uniform. It does reward a larger card pool, but as the last-place pick would at least help a player who could use the help.

One thing I've suggested in the Legendary Leagues is incorporating hero frequency into the scoring, to reward players for picking less popular heroes and punish them for choosing Black Widow Every Single League (she's a monster in the solo leagues). At least within a cycle it's easily to evaluate popularity of particular heroes compared to other heroes (or for that matter, allies, attachments, and events). But it would complicate things and if overbearing enough would force deck construction in a similar direction again, only with heroes who are considered less fun to play....

Sands of Harad has support for a lot of different kind of decks, but the only archtype that's self-contained in it is Haradrim. Though a Thurindir deck would be mighty tempting.

Maybe selecting one of the quests via poll would be a good idea.

7 hours ago, Yepesnopes said:

I think it is a very childish coment to make taking into account you copied the exact same deck of Authraw, knowing that he scored a perfect run with his deck.

The whole point is to challenge myself with a set of rules. I try to win over a challenge, and succeed at doing so every month until now. But the first month I haven't understand that only one run is allowed so it doesn't count. I say it so to avoid further confusion. This time I just exploit a failure (since at my understanding of the rules as first players of the previous league I win every time the last tiebreaker). I just mention it again. What is childish about it? I didn't complain, I even not claim to a change. I even say that it is not a big deal. I was mostly challenging myself anyway (but using a common set of rules could be more exciting).

I would be sorry to lose you as a player in the league, but if you can't find a way to enjoy playing then there's no point in playing. If you were playing nightmare instead of regular quests, would the quests be more enjoyable for you?

I keep thinking about it this morning. We can, at least, use Deluxe Edition OR core set, it open the challenge to even more small card pool users.

There is a possible tiebreaker system that encourages using less played heroes. I'll describe it here to consider.

The in-cyle heroes each are assigned 100 points (to be in-line with the in-cycle tie breaker).
At the end of the league those points are divided requally between every person who used that hero. The person who has the most points (by using non-popular heroes) wins the tiebreaker.

An example losely based on this month's league:
Tactics Beregond, Leadership Boromir, Hirluin the Fair, and Mirlonde are the incycel heroes: 100 points

3 players use Hirluin, Le Boromir + Beravor
1Player uses T Beregond, L Boromir Mirlonde.

That means each hero gives you the following numbe rof points: Hirluin 33 points (100/3), Le Boromir 25 (100/4), T Bergond 100 (100/1) and Mirlonde 100 (100/1).

The 3 players with the same hero line-up each get 33+25+0= 58.

The player who used less obvious heroes would get 100+25+100=225.
And thereby win the tiebreaker.

The problem I see is if you want to win this tiebreaker, you will be tempted to wait until some players indicates which heroes they use to see who you will pick. And if everyone do this, nobody play

Many thanks are indeed due to Dale for running this league! I'm having a great time with it, whenever I can find the time to participate.

And, like the engineer that I am, I tend to want to analyze and suggest improvements to the things I enjoy. So, in that spirit:

The problem, as I see it, is that deckbuilding can get a little stale. This can manifest in two ways:

Problem 1: The highest-scoring decks each month look pretty similar to one another

Problem 2: Many decks end up being tweaked versions of the same "Core Set goodstuff" deck

This happens because of the way the tiebreakers are set up, encouraging competitive folks to narrow their focus on building "a perfect deck", something which is usually doable, but which narrows the set of competitive decks down to a few variations on a similar theme.

If we're interested in having a greater diversity of decks in the competition, I can see two low-hanging-fruit solutions:

Option 1: Reduce the "tiebreaker privileged" card pool to the point that it is no longer practical to build a perfect deck. (Example: Core Set is no longer included in the "privileged" cards, just the cycle + deluxe, or even just the 3 packs the quests come from).

• Pro: Once you have to start pulling from outside the privileged card pool to build viable decks, you'll probably see people pulling their decks in different directions (not just filling in the gaps with Core cards). Deckbuilding becomes an interesting puzzle to solve.
• Con: Folks with bigger card pools may gain an advantage, having more options to draw from.

Option 2: Increase the "tiebreaker privileged" card pool so that there is more than one way to build a perfect deck. (Example: Each player can choose 10 cards to add to their own personal "privileged" list. Other options might include allowing a Collector's Edition instead of a Core, or adding another cycle's cards to the pool).

• Pro: With more options, you may see a greater diversity of decks become competitive. It doesn't disadvantage smaller card pools too much.
• Con: You'll probably see more perfect scores, kinda defeating the point of a tiebreaker in the first place.

Personally, I'm partial to Option 1, because it sounds like it would make each month its own unique deckbuilding challenge, and it would be dramatic to see just how crazy people's decks get as they try to crank their tiebreaker numbers down. But I'm also someone with a full card pool who enjoys sorta intense deckbuilding challenges, so I don't know if it would have a net positive or net negative effect on the experience for other folks.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, for what it's worth. Thanks again for running this league, Dale, and I look forward to playing more going forward no matter how you decide (or decide not) to tweak the rules.

The option 1 could be great if you don't have 1 type of deck with many of his staples contained in the few privileged cards. For example, in this cycle, you have all the basics for outlands in Steward's fear, and if you reduce the privileged cards to only the 3 quests, it is difficult to play a non-outland deck.

6 minutes ago, Miceldars said:

The option 1 could be great if you don't have 1 type of deck with many of his staples contained in the few privileged cards. For example, in this cycle, you have all the basics for outlands in Steward's fear, and if you reduce the privileged cards to only the 3 quests, it is difficult to play a non-outland deck. 

That's a fair point! After all, you can build a weapons-grade Dale deck with just The Wilds of Rhovanion and The Withered Heath, no Core Set required.

Even so, I think you'd have seen at least a couple of slightly different variations on the Outlands deck this time if we didn't have the Core Set cards to back us up. At the very least, you might have seen Heroes other than Beravor swapped in as the third Hero choice. De-privileging Core would make Cirdan, Erestor, and Bilbo all equally viable options to experiment with.

As a clarification, while core cards don't count against the deck tiebreaker, core heroes *do* count against the hero tiebreaker. So Beravor gave no tiebreaking advantage over Cirdan, Erestor, or Bilbo, and would lose a tiebreaker to any heroes from Against the Shadow cycle.

5 hours ago, dalestephenson said:

As a clarification, while core cards don't count against the deck tiebreaker, core heroes *do* count against the hero tiebreaker. So Beravor gave no tiebreaking advantage over Cirdan, Erestor, or Bilbo, and would lose a tiebreaker to any heroes from Against the Shadow cycle.

I must be missing something. Including a non-Core Hero would have brought the out-of-cycle card count to 1, which brings it down a peg for the first tiebreaker; at that point there would be no need to evaluate the second tiebreaker, right?

The first tiebreaker only counts outside cards in your deck -- heroes aren't in your deck, so don't affect that tiebreaker.

The second tiebreaker only looks at your heroes -- core set heroes count against you here.

Oh, wow, I did not realize that was how it was counted! I may have been unintentionally handicapping myself. Good to know.

Man, I really stink at writing clear tiebreakers!

The card I can choose for january, can it be a hero ?

Yes, it can be a hero.

I don't have Harad cycle (and so won't participate in January), I don't know which card would be great/interesting for this cycle, so let's say a card I like : Gandalf hero.

Rouxxor has chosen Race Across Harad as one of the quests. I've decided to exclude Mumakil to avoid Khaliel being one of the mandatory heroes, with everyone building a Harad deck. (You can still build a Harad deck if you like, Khaliel just won't satisfy the mandatory requirement.) The randomly selected quests are the first two from the Deluxe expansion, so:

1) Escape from Umbar (Sands of Harad Deluxe)

2) Desert Crossing (Sands of Harad Deluxe)

3) Race Across Harad (Haradrim AP 2)

You must choose at least one of Leadership Gimli, Spirit Legolas, and Thurindir as one of your heroes in January.