I've been distracted from my LOTR LCG play lately because of Journeys in Middle Earth, but I haven't forgotten it. I'm trying to figure out how to approach the Dwarrowdelf Cycle. Anyway, I have a question. Supposedly the guideline for a deck is that you have at least 50 cards. Obviously there is an advantage to having fewer cards (the cards you want will come up more often). Do any of you build any decks that are larger than 50 cards? Especially significantly larger than 50 cards? And if so, why?

I tend to make a 50 card deck and throw in one extra card that I otherwise rarely use, but is fun to see in play at times. This can be a quirky ally (like Bombur in a Dwarf swarm) or an attachment/event that should work well with the deck. That way I avoid using only staples in my deck, which can get a bit boring at times.

In rare cases I will go over 51 cards, usually when I have a solid card draw engine and need more cards to fuel it. Most Erestor decks can easily justify using 50+ cards in the deck since you go through your deck very quickly. Having more cards that can be played from your discard pile this way would, in theory, extend your hand size. But if I am not running mono-Lore or don't have a way of drawing 3+ cards per round, then I will stick to 51 cards in my deck.

I often end up at 52-54 cards. Mainly because I have a vague memory of an article from Tales of the Cards that went through the changes in probability for opening hand composition, and added 4 extra cards didn't change the probability of getting your must have card too much. This lets me have an additional copy or two of some core cards, or even a copy or two of an entirely new card that would otherwise be cut.

Two or three extra cards isn't too big of a deal. 55 cards is usually the limit to how high I go.

Now, with deck thinners like Daeron's Runes and We are not Idle (which don't really count as adding a card to your deck, since they replace themselves) I'll let my deck bloat a little.

Other than that, you should really only go past fifty to fifty-five cards in a Noldor deck.

The decks in my Dori fellowship tend to have exactly 51 cards -- 50 cards plus a single copy of Gather Information.

Unless you churn a deck quickly and don't want to reset with Will of the West, it's easy to say that a 50 card deck is optimal -- with a 51-card deck you could be drawing the 51st-best card instead of a card that's better, and that hurts. But there's two mitigating circumstances:

1) Unless you draw your whole deck, you might never draw the 51st-best card at all.

2) You may wrongly evaluate what your 51st best card is.

#2 is the real killer here. It may be more obvious what the most valuable card actually is in battle rather than on a ringsdb screen, and the way you cut down to 50 involves removing cards (making them completely unavailable) or reducing the number of copies (which has *way* more impact on availability than bloating past fifty). For us non-godlike deckbuilders, it may well make more sense to play with a 60-card deck that has a wider variety and more copies of cards than a 50-card deck would, then play a 50-card deck where we made wrong decisions in advance while cutting down.

It's also worth noting than bloating a deck merely makes it less efficient, not inherently unplayable. To take an example, suppose you built a thematic Silvan deck and put 3x of every Silvan event and Ally in the deck that matched your hero spheres. This would be *way* bigger than 50 cards and would significantly impact your likelihood of getting a critical attachment like O Lorien or the really awesome events like Tree People. But it would give you a much wider variety of cards to play than an efficient 50-card Silvan deck could fit, and it would give you awesome *variability* from play to play. The idea that decks *must* be 50-cards, no more, rests entirely on the view that efficiency is the only thing worth maximizing, and that's simply not true. Variety is worth something too, and as long as you are not impacting someone else's fun (by taking a weak deck for pickup multiplayer at GenCon, say) there's absolutely nothing wrong with making and playing *massive* decks just for the variety. Just don't expect a lot of people to like it when you post it on ringsdb!

Indeed, in the extreme case you could run Thurindir/Elrond/X, with a single copy of Gather Information and a single copy of Vilya, put every powerful card in the game in the deck and still have a lot of fun. Until the encounter deck makes you discard Vilya, at least.

Still, most of the time there are going to be a card or cards that you really want in your opening hand, and bloating the deck works against you there. How much of an impact? Tales from the card had a probability chart of how often a 3x card would be in your opening hand if you mulligan for it -- for a 50-card deck 57%, 54% for a 54-card deck, 50% for a 60-card deck, 45% for a 70 card deck -- so if you play 33 quests with a 50-card deck you'll get your mulligan card 19 times, as opposed to 15 times with a *70* card deck. Less efficient? You bet. So massive a difference that playing wouldn't be fun with a bloated deck? Not in my book.

So I'd recommend not to worry too much about bloat. If you find yourself making a deck with way over 50 cards, just play with it, then cut the stuff afterwards that you wish you didn't draw :).

There is a quest in the Lost Realm deluxe, where you lose, when you run out of your deck: Deadman's Dike. So a bigger deck lets you avoid defeat for some extra rounds.

24 minutes ago, dalestephenson said:

It's also worth noting than bloating a deck merely makes it less efficient, not inherently unplayable. To take an example, suppose you built a thematic Silvan deck and put 3x of every Silvan event and Ally in the deck that matched your hero spheres. This would be *way* bigger than 50 cards and would significantly impact your likelihood of getting a critical attachment like O Lorien or the really awesome events like Tree People. But it would give you a much wider variety of cards to play than an efficient 50-card Silvan deck could fit, and it would give you awesome *variability* from play to play.

I have been having a similar problem building my own Silvan deck. So many things to consider, which is why I've ended up with a lot more two-of allies than I usually would.

The Tree People means I want a good proportion of Silvans. Galadhrim Minstrel means I want a good proportion of Events.

But, there are also several key attachments that the deck really needs to function: O Lorien, The Elven King, Nenya (for Lore icon as much as anything else)

Not to mention that literally every Silvan is in contention because Thranduil makes it a psuedo quad-sphere deck.

Now I could spend ages honing the deck to a perfect 50 cards, but I know that I'll only play the thing for like 10 quests before changing things up, so why bother?

I also double sleeve my cards, so much past 50 and there is a serious question about whether I'll even be able to shuffle them all.

I have a 100 card "super deck" that goes with my Treebeard/Elrond/Gandalf group and contains 1 copy of each type of expensive card to Vilya into play, and then many fetch cards to find Vilya itself. It may not be the smoothest but it definitely has the most variety of any deck I've played. No two games are even close to each other.

Good answers, guys.

I've been looking over cards to put into my Khazad Dum deck. I'll see a card I never use and I'll think "Wow, that's a handy ability, why don't I ever use that one?". Then I'll see the cost and realize why.

I've been wrestling with putting together a themed deck vs just using the strongest cards to beat the scenarios. Or a compromise between the two, to get a flavor for the "new" expansion.