Alright - some revisions based on feedback from a lot of places.

First off, Glorfindel. I am more than halfway considering retracting the proposed nerf, after it has been pointed out to me in a number of places that Glorfindel is a lot less overpowered than he once was - in large part because his historical overuse has at least as much to do with the fact that there were very few viable Spirit options for a general-purpose deck until the game's 4th or 5th cycle. In Core, Eowyn is the only one - Dunhere is too specialized to splash and Eleanor is largely a multiplayer card. In Shadows of Mirkwood, Frodo is useful (but also the only Spirit hero that cycle). In Dwarrowdelf, the only other Spirit hero is Dwalin, whose ability is situational, so you can't just put him into a deck. In the Against the Shadow cycle, you get Spirit Pippin (one of the worst heroes in the game) and Caldara (good - not yet very good, that will require a few cycles - but only useful in a mono-spirit deck). In Ringmaker, you get Idraen and Galadriel, the first real splash options for Spirit for a long time (Idraen is fine and Galadriel is amazing). The Hobbit boxes brought Nori and Oin - useful in a Dwarf swarm, but not so much outside, and the first 2 LOTR Saga expansions brought only Fatty Bolger - another candidate for one of the worst heroes in the game. So...not a lot of options until much later in the cycle.

In addition, I've had some feedback that the Glorfindel nerf as proposed would kill the hero entirely for a number of players - just too much downside to be worth the low starting threat.

So here we go:

Another option might be to give Glorfindel a positive ability as well as the harsher original nerf - something mild but useful. (Of course - the easy option is to leave him the way he is, and realize that the game's power curve has crept up enough that he's not so powerful that he warps deckbuilding space anymore - and as I've said, I'm seriously considering it.)

Asfaloth, on the other hand, probably stays nerfed (although remaining as-is is also on my mind). But nobody really liked any of the proposed ideas.

So, building on Dale's observation that one progress is not enough and two is too much, but 1 with a conditional 2 might work out, here is an idea:

It synergizes with Noldor, but not so much that it can't be played outside the trait. And it can also - finally! - go onto ally Glorfindel.

Next - those Healing Herbs were far too powerful. I'd blame lack of sleep, but really it's probably that I didn't spend enough time to actually think deeply about what I was writing on the card when I made the last-minute change. Instead, here is another version - built along the lines of Dale's suggestion (and very similar to the pre-last-minute change version - I don't know what I was thinking, other than maybe not wanting to step on Athelas' toes).

And there has been widespread pushback about Risk Some Light - 1 cost for scry 3 plus discard a card might actually be too cheap. And on reflection, I agree with it, although I still think that 3 is too expensive. Luckily, there is a wonderful middle ground just waiting for us.

Finally, Heavy Stroke was generally well-received (except for 1 commenter who felt that being a niche card for non-immune boss enemies was exactly what the card should be - I'll just register my disagreement here and move on, noting also that it is not even really that useful against non-immune boss enemies), but it was felt that the proposed version of the card lost a lot thematically. Here is a proposed version built from that feedback that is more thematically useful - though I think I'm skeptical that it would be good enough to displace Khazad-Khazad as an attack boosting card.

That's the last of the revisions to the latest set of cards. However, I did remember one card that I wanted to touch - more to resolve a lingering wording frustration than because it actually needs a boost. Rivendell Bow. Later on in the game's life, the "making a ranged attack" wording was almost completely dropped, replaced by "attack an enemy not engaged with you." So we're just updating this card (and the few other cards in the early card pool that deal with that wording) to reflect the later approach. Also - because this card not boosting Haldir's Combat Action is...not good.

We also relaxed the "printed ranged" restriction, although it really only matters for a hero given the Dunedain Cache, I suppose, and therefore could be kept as a less-wordy alternative.

As always, feedback is appreciated very much! And - as I hope we have shown - always listened to and often worked into the project.

3 hours ago, Onidsen said:

Next - those Healing Herbs were far too powerful. I'd blame lack of sleep, but really it's probably that I didn't spend enough time to actually think deeply about what I was writing on the card when I made the last-minute change. Instead, here is another version - built along the lines of Dale's suggestion (and very similar to the pre-last-minute change version - I don't know what I was thinking, other than maybe not wanting to step on Athelas' toes).

I guess the wording now should be "exhaust attached character"

55 minutes ago, Alonewolf87 said:

I guess the wording now should be "exhaust attached character"

Yep. Good catch - thanks

4 hours ago, Onidsen said:

Finally, Heavy Stroke was generally well-received (except for 1 commenter who felt that being a niche card for non-immune boss enemies was exactly what the card should be - I'll just register my disagreement here and move on, noting also that it is not even really that useful against non-immune boss enemies), but it was felt that the proposed version of the card lost a lot thematically. Here is a proposed version built from that feedback that is more thematically useful - though I think I'm skeptical that it would be good enough to displace Khazad-Khazad as an attack boosting card.

Basically it's more worth it than Khazad! Khazad against non-immune enemies with 4 Defense or more. Of those there are quite a few, for example some boss enemies like The Watcher in the Water (non-saga) a couple of versions of the Witch King and the Guardians of the Three Trials, Ship enemies, Huorns, Nameless enemies, some Trolls. Situational but so is Khazad! Khazad. I think it would definitely be worth it to sideboard in some quests.

4 hours ago, Onidsen said:

That's the last of the revisions to the latest set of cards. However, I did remember one card that I wanted to touch - more to resolve a lingering wording frustration than because it actually needs a boost. Rivendell Bow. Later on in the game's life, the "making a ranged attack" wording was almost completely dropped, replaced by "attack an enemy not engaged with you." So we're just updating this card (and the few other cards in the early card pool that deal with that wording) to reflect the later approach. Also - because this card not boosting Haldir's Combat Action is...not good.

We also relaxed the "printed ranged" restriction, although it really only matters for a hero given the Dunedain Cache, I suppose, and therefore could be kept as a less-wordy alternative.

Seems good to me, at least now we can see something different on Haldir than the usual Dunedain Mark.

4 hours ago, Onidsen said:

It synergizes with Noldor, but not so much that it can't be played outside the trait. And it can also - finally! - go onto ally Glorfindel.

Very on point.

4 hours ago, Onidsen said:

Another option might be to give Glorfindel a positive ability as well as the harsher original nerf - something mild but useful. (Of course - the easy option is to leave him the way he is, and realize that the game's power curve has crept up enough that he's not so powerful that he warps deckbuilding space anymore - and as I've said, I'm seriously considering it.)

How about something like that:

Forced: after Glorfindel commits to the quest raise your threat by 1.

Response: after questing successfully discard a card to ready Glorfindel

I don't like the proposed change to Glorfindel to be able to discard a card. Based on his low threat he should have a definite downside (even if that was able to be mitigated).

Now that he has Noldor synergy, not only can you mitigate his downside, but you can actually turn it into an upside, which makes him better than he was before.

3 hours ago, rees263 said:

I don't like the proposed change to Glorfindel to be able to discard a card. Based on his low threat he should have a definite downside (even if that was able to be mitigated).

Now that he has Noldor synergy, not only can you mitigate his downside, but you can actually turn it into an upside, which makes him better than he was before.

I think the difference is that Noldor decks usually give the option of discard to trigger ability, such as Arwen and ally Erestor. In this case, he can synergize with Noldor decks but struggle in non-Noldor decks. The other thing is that his ability was strengthened to include "committing" to the quest as opposed to exhausting to commit. Thus, if you are wanting to do a basic action with him that every other hero save Galadriel can do, it will cost you a card.

If the intention is to play these cards along with a mostly-full card pool I think you can leave Glorfindel untouched, especially if you are hitting Asfaloth as well.

Looks like the plan is to leave Glorfindel untouched now. Thanks for the feedback on that, everyone.

And the Ancient Mathoms project is back with the player cards from both Hobbit boxes! Between the two boxes, there's only 8 cards that we were wanted to touch, and a few of them we're not certain on whether they need it.

There are also multiple versions of Oin and Thror's Map, and feedback on which one is preferred by the community would be appreciated.

In addition to the cards below, we also looked at Fili and Kili - they are powerful enough as is, but we were wondering if our nerf to Leadership Dain might make it worth giving Fili and Kili a small boost (we were thinking a play-from-hand effect that boosts their willpower or attack - depending on which one you played and which one you put into play - until the end of the phase). On the other hand, they are probably good enough as is - but we'd like some community feedback on the idea.

Oin is not a bad hero, but his resource smoothing effect is niche and the attack boost really isn't needed for Dwarves - you're almost certainly looking for ally attackers if you're running tactics in a 5-dwarf deck.

In addition, he's almost completely sidelined by the hero version of Nori.

We've had 2 different ideas. The first idea was to open up a healing card for Dwarves specifically - they are one of the last traits without in-trait healing (others being Eagles, Woodmen, Outlands, and Beornings). This ability plays into the dwarf mining theme as well - thematically, the descriptions of the Dwarves from the hobbit films describes Oin as the healer, but that's thematically weak, to be sure.

This version of Oin attempts to give Dwarf Mining a much-needed willpower boost. Since most Dwarf allies have lower willpower than normal to account for Dain, it's hard to do an early-game willpower ramp.

Oin can help bridge the gap with strong early-game questing.

The only thing we did to Dwalin was to give him the warrior trait. This makes him eligible for Hauberk of Mail and Raiment of War - the premier defensive attachments for allies. It also puts him in line with the Erebor Guard.

This one we're not 100% needed to be done, but it's been a slight annoyance - Dwalin could be a fine defender, but isn't eligible for the majority of defensive attachments that could go on allies.

Bombur is...an interesting hero. He makes it so you only need a single dwarf ally to get up to the 5-dwarf requirement to turn on Thorin, Ori, Oin, and many of the Dwarf allies.

However, he is completely useless after that. Not to mention that his stats are less-than great. So basically, his ability lets you get access to a small number of hero or ally abilities a turn earlier.

Now, it is incred ibly thematic, so we didn't want to get rid of it. But we did want to give him another ability, and this one hits right at one of the most annoying parts of playing a dwarf mining deck - drawing into your Hidden Cache or Ered Luin Miner. There's a reason that Gandalf w/Wizard Pipe is so popular in a dwarf mining deck.

So his ability lets you shuffle a card from hand back into your deck and draw a card. It's not super powerful - ally Erestor is probably better, Lore Bilbo is definitely better, and Beravor, Gleowine, or Erestor are entirely in a league of their own. In addition, the more you use his ability, the more diluted your deck becomes in the future. But it does get cards you'd like in your deck back in there, so you can use Very Good Tale or Timely Aid or mining cards or something else to use them the way you wanted.

The stealth errata to Thror's Map was...contentiously received by the community. We had actually planned on nerfing the card as part of the project, but the actual nerf went further than we had planned on going.

One of the ideas we had discussed was reducing the cost to 0 and making it discard for the effect - it's the most like the actual errata'ed card.

A second idea involved requiring a hero exhaustion to trigger the effect. We also gave it a willpower boost to the attached Dwarf to give it some utility outside of the travel effect.

The third idea required spending a resource from the attached hero's resource pool each time you use the map.

Expecting Mischief is a fun card, but hard to use effectively - you end up playing it without knowing whether or not an enemy is coming up. It can be useful with scrying, but the theme is a little off - the title is about expecting mischief, but the effect requires you to either guess or already know that something is coming.

We made it a response to an enemy being revealed instead.

Finally, ravens of the mountain. A cool idea, but in execution, less effective. Forcing you to shuffle before playing the card makes it possible for the card to do absolutely nothing, wasting the resource and the hero exhaustion you spent on it. Not worth it for the 2 or 3 progress you could get out of it. We took out that requirement.

For Bard the Bowman, we just cleaned up his wording to match modern phrasing. Instead of "makes a ranged attack," instead its "attacks an enemy not engaged with you.

This is part of our larger push to get consistency on the very few early cards that point to ranged attacks when they probably should point to attacking enemies not engaged with you. For example, Rivendell Bow not working with Haldir of Lorien's Combat Action.

For Great Yew Bow, we addressed the common problem that the Bow allows you to make attacks into the staging area but doesn't help you make those attacks effective. We made it a weapon that works with Dale or Esgaroth heroes.

As always, we'd love to hear community feedback on these! Let us know what you think!

Super-quick turnaround, but some really good feedback from various places has put another Thror's Map version on the table:

The consensus seems to be that a repeatable effect that ignores travel costs is just too powerful, and so keeping it discard-to-use is important. However, the idea to keep the discard-to-use but also give it +1 WP to dwarves was floated, and I like it.

My takes:

---Oin---

Between the two abilities, I think the healing would be very useful and has a very weak thematic link to the flavor text (since fire-making is useful for healing). But it's highly unusual to give a healing effect to spirit, especially when there's a Lore dwarf hero that you are also boosting. The one good thing is that it would help a little bit with patching up Gloin, which is a good thematic link.

Willpower boost is a natural spirit ability, but allowing twice a round should be a boost for more than dwarven mining. 4 willpower for 8 cost is very strong, especially when the willpower can be tuned for 2-4. Would be very popular in a dwarven mining deck.

I tried to think of what else fire-making would do in the game, and the obvious related card is A Burning Brand. Discard for shadow cancellation or replacement would be useful and appropriate to sphere, but also overlaps too strongly with what Balin already does.

A useful ability makes Oin attractive as a splasher, and a discard ability makes Oin attractive in a mining deck. But Oin's passive text wants to be in a dwarven swarm, and to compete with Nori in that environment he needs a larger five-dwarf boost. Unfortunately there's already so many dwarves that synergize with swarm already that it's hard to think of a reasonably powerful effect that wouldn't substantially overlap to a hero that already exists. Perhaps an Elfhelm-like effect for dwarven heroes would be useful enough -- give dwarf heroes at the table +1 defense if leadership, +1 hp if lore, +1 willpower if spirit, and +1 attack if tactics -- this would give Oin both attack and willpower when the threshold kicks in. The downside is that it takes so much room that it would be the only boost he gets.

---Dwalin---

He's good value already for 1, obviously, but his stat distribution would definitely be more useful if he had the warrior trait.

---Kili and Fili---

The one change I'd like to see here is to search the deck *and discard* for their opposite number. Two allies for three is a good deal, but not when the effect can't fire.

---Bombur---

Bombur's biggest problem is his stat distribution -- if he were 3/4 instead of 2/5 he'd have better defensive bones. The shuffle-to-draw is both Lore-ish and mining-useful, but the heroes that want five dwarves aren't generally the dwarves that want to mine. And the five-to-dwarves don't have a good defender. If we can't alter the distribution, maybe we could give more incentive to invest the attachments in making Bombur a fine defender -- if he defends without taking damage, draw a card. This would synergize with hero Dori, at least. You could also make it easier to boost his defense, perhaps by giving him +1 defense for each attachment with Dwarf printed on it.

---Thror's Map---

Of the three versions, I like the third best. I don't like a unique attachment being a disposable, and I do like the idea of making it useful in a Dwarf deck even without travel requirements to work around. Making it a resource cost is not only appropriate for the money-loving dwarves, it avoids anti-synergy between the dwarf-specific willpower boost and the need to have a hero ready in order to travel safely.

---Expecting Mischief---

Two damage for a 1-cost response is very strong, I think the card is fairly priced for its current effect *if its effect fires*, which it isn't guaranteed to do. What this card *really* needs to be is a 1-cost trap that does 2 damage when attached -- for weak enemies that'd be better than Poisoned Stakes, though not as strong against stronger enemies.

---Ravens of the Mountains---

The shuffle makes the progress less predictable, but optimizing for progress makes the scrying useless -- and removing the shuffle also prevents you from mixing it up when you know something bad is coming. I think the card would be fine with the shuffle-and-scry if you had the option of discarding the encounter card or putting it back on top, so if you've got a nasty treachery you may not place progress, but you can avoid it completely.

---Great Yew Bow---

I like the change. When it enables attacking alone, it's a hard thing to lose a Restricted slot with no benefit, and giving a benefit to Dale/Esgarath heroes is thematically appropriate.

I think the Bombur ability would get very tedious if playing with actual cards. Whether you expect anyone to play these with actual cards determines whether you should consider this relevant. I also like the idea of doing something with his defending. What I really want him to do is to squash enemies after he defends against them, because that is funny. Ignore this suggestion.

I assume Bard has lost Ranged by accident rather than by design.

For Dwalin, did you consider making a similar adjustment as you do for Secrecy cards? Dwalin is not really playable outside dwarf swarms. But I suppose that is true of the entire archetype and probably is not worth "fixing".

22 hours ago, Onidsen said:

The consensus seems to be that a repeatable effect that ignores travel costs is just too powerful, and so keeping it discard-to-use is important. However, the idea to keep the discard-to-use but also give it +1 WP to dwarves was floated, and I like it.

I would still keep the Travel phase limit on the Action.

Could I also suggest that we use the "travel without paying the travel cost" or does that just absolutely nuke the Burglar contract into OP range?

I'm just dying for more travel cards. Striders path and ghan-buri-ghan can only be repeated so many times.

I want Bombur to have x hit points, where x is the number of dwarves you control. Undefended Smaug? No problem.

On 5/26/2020 at 4:13 PM, dalestephenson said:

My takes:

---Oin---

Between the two abilities, I think the healing would be very useful and has a very weak thematic link to the flavor text (since fire-making is useful for healing). But it's highly unusual to give a healing effect to spirit, especially when there's a Lore dwarf hero that you are also boosting. The one good thing is that it would help a little bit with patching up Gloin, which is a good thematic link.

Willpower boost is a natural spirit ability, but allowing twice a round should be a boost for more than dwarven mining. 4 willpower for 8 cost is very strong, especially when the willpower can be tuned for 2-4. Would be very popular in a dwarven mining deck.

I tried to think of what else fire-making would do in the game, and the obvious related card is A Burning Brand. Discard for shadow cancellation or replacement would be useful and appropriate to sphere, but also overlaps too strongly with what Balin already does.

A useful ability makes Oin attractive as a splasher, and a discard ability makes Oin attractive in a mining deck. But Oin's passive text wants to be in a dwarven swarm, and to compete with Nori in that environment he needs a larger five-dwarf boost. Unfortunately there's already so many dwarves that synergize with swarm already that it's hard to think of a reasonably powerful effect that wouldn't substantially overlap to a hero that already exists. Perhaps an Elfhelm-like effect for dwarven heroes would be useful enough -- give dwarf heroes at the table +1 defense if leadership, +1 hp if lore, +1 willpower if spirit, and +1 attack if tactics -- this would give Oin both attack and willpower when the threshold kicks in. The downside is that it takes so much room that it would be the only boost he gets.

---Dwalin---

He's good value already for 1, obviously, but his stat distribution would definitely be more useful if he had the warrior trait.

---Kili and Fili---

The one change I'd like to see here is to search the deck *and discard* for their opposite number. Two allies for three is a good deal, but not when the effect can't fire.

---Bombur---

Bombur's biggest problem is his stat distribution -- if he were 3/4 instead of 2/5 he'd have better defensive bones. The shuffle-to-draw is both Lore-ish and mining-useful, but the heroes that want five dwarves aren't generally the dwarves that want to mine. And the five-to-dwarves don't have a good defender. If we can't alter the distribution, maybe we could give more incentive to invest the attachments in making Bombur a fine defender -- if he defends without taking damage, draw a card. This would synergize with hero Dori, at least. You could also make it easier to boost his defense, perhaps by giving him +1 defense for each attachment with Dwarf printed on it.

---Thror's Map---

Of the three versions, I like the third best. I don't like a unique attachment being a disposable, and I do like the idea of making it useful in a Dwarf deck even without travel requirements to work around. Making it a resource cost is not only appropriate for the money-loving dwarves, it avoids anti-synergy between the dwarf-specific willpower boost and the need to have a hero ready in order to travel safely.

---Expecting Mischief---

Two damage for a 1-cost response is very strong, I think the card is fairly priced for its current effect *if its effect fires*, which it isn't guaranteed to do. What this card *really* needs to be is a 1-cost trap that does 2 damage when attached -- for weak enemies that'd be better than Poisoned Stakes, though not as strong against stronger enemies.

---Ravens of the Mountains---

The shuffle makes the progress less predictable, but optimizing for progress makes the scrying useless -- and removing the shuffle also prevents you from mixing it up when you know something bad is coming. I think the card would be fine with the shuffle-and-scry if you had the option of discarding the encounter card or putting it back on top, so if you've got a nasty treachery you may not place progress, but you can avoid it completely.

---Great Yew Bow---

I like the change. When it enables attacking alone, it's a hard thing to lose a Restricted slot with no benefit, and giving a benefit to Dale/Esgarath heroes is thematically appropriate.

Wow - I never got back to responding to the feedback. I feel kind of bad about that, but I went back to work from the pandemic right after this round of cards, and things have been incredibly hectic ever since.

On hero Bombur - I ended up agreeing that the shuffle-back mechanic was clunky and annoying, and also didn't quite fit with the 5-dwarves theme. Instead, we took inspiration from another dwarven theme, benefiting from getting damaged. This version still helps with the card draw, is still useful as a defender, but prefers hit point boosts to defense boosts. He's in-sphere for healing, too, and is an excellent target for our new Self-Preservation. Also goes well with Dwarven Shield, to gain a resource and a card when he gets damaged. Also a good target for our new Citadel Plate

On Ravens of the Mountains, I agree with you completely:

And we ended up preferring the willpower boost version of Oin, but I agree that he's too powerful as printed above. I'm torn between reducing his ability to once per round, or to increasing the number of discarded cards to 2 and keeping it at twice per round. Much less sustainable the second way, while the first is more restrained but also more balanced.

Of course, the reason I'm back today is because we're back with cards from Heirs of Numenor! The Against the Shadow cycle is widely considered to be the last of the cycles where a large proportion of cards don't measure up in the modern card pool. This will be reflected in future cycles in the Ancient Mathoms project - out of the entire LOTR saga (all 8 boxes!), we've identified only 8 cards that may be in need of boosting, and my cursory overview of the Ringmaker cycle shows 14 cards over the entire cycle (compared to 37 from Dwarrowdelf) that may need a touch (not all cards we identify as candidates end up getting boosted, of course).

Let's start with Leadership:

First off, we looked at Mutual Accord. It is a fascinating card, but Rohan doesn't have enough global bonuses to be worth it and Gondor doesn't have deck space to spare. It could potentially work in a dedicated fellowship, but even there, it's tricky. Honestly, though, I don't know what to do with this card. With cards like our updated We Do Not Sleep, it might have a place, but Gondor Swarms don't normally need the attack help.

Anyways. Just making it cantrip seemed a poor fix that doesn't address the problem with the card, which is that the 2 traits don't really synergize together. We looked into restricting it to having heroes with the 2 traits, and having it give actually good card draw, but it still made the trait-sharing a sideshow. Our current fix is still not great, but is at least interesting.

Wealth of Gondor was an easier fix. One card for 1 resource is...rough, except in an Erestor deck. So we did what we like to do with 0 cost events that are a little lackluster. We made it conditionally cantrip.

A note - the Citadel Custodian came up as a card that might be worth looking at. After all, it's not awful (in fact, it's quite playable in a Gondor swarm, and synergizes nicely with A Very Good Tale), but it isn't exciting and has no ability other than the cost reduction. Since it's actually playable as-is, we have ended up not touching it for the moment, but reserve the right to come back to it (and would welcome feedback on how y'all feel about it).

Moving on, there were no Tactics cards in this box that needed help, but all 3 Spirit cards were problematic in one way or another.

Damrod was very difficult. Even in the new Lothiriel decks, he struggles to pull his weight. We boosted his hit points to 3, because 2 defense and 2 hit points is hardly worth having, especially on a unique character who has a discard-based ability. One of the options we explored was just to reduce his cost, which would make him useful in high player counts - 3 for 6 reduction (Greetings) is good value, and it's not too hard to see 6 enemies in staging in a 4-player game.

The other option, however, was to punch up his discard effect, which is what we ended up going with:

It is a powerful effect, pretty much only seen on Saruman so far. Saruman is more flexible, of course, but comes with the Doomed cost. We felt it was at least useful to a ranger deck (not a ranger trap deck, of course - that's the biggest problem ally damrod has to contend with - his hero version).

Next is Blood of Numenor. This and Gondorian Fire are probably the last 2 cards we are going to give a nerf to (there might be some exceptions in later cycles, especially as the community figures out ways to break the newest set of player cards, but nothing is standing out as bonkers overpowered that we've seen).

We're approaching both the same way, so consider this a bit of a spoiler for the cards in the cycle. We decided to make the attachment a discard-to-use thing, which keeps it being very powerful, but prevents it from being a one-stop solution to all of your attack or defense needs.

Finally, Light the Beacons. This card is tricky to place. It is a very powerful effect in abstract, but in practice, it becomes a bit redundant. Thematically, you are calling for aid, so we decided to parallel the send for aid sidequest. The cost is steeper, since you are paying 5 resources and exhausting a hero you control, but hopefully you are getting a high-cost ally out of it. Even in solo, it may be worth it for a 4- or 5-cost ally like Glorfindel, Legolas, or Jubayr; you are paying the ally's normal cost, plus maybe 1 (and a hero exhaust) to find it in the top 10 cards of your deck. Probably a bit dicey, though. In 2-player, it is a clear winner, and it scales up incredibly to 3- or 4- players.

We still kept the +2 defense and do not exhaust to defend, and that becomes an added bonus. Jubayr is an obvious choice here, but high-cost defensive allies like the Defender of Cair Andros, Deorwine, Gildor, Beorn, Gimli, Knight of the White Tower, etc. Honestly, any ally with 2 or more defense is a good pull with it, and the 5 cost might even be worth pulling out a cheaper ally like Defender of Rammas. The other nice thing to note is that it bypasses sphere restrictions, which can be helpful in some decks.

And now to our last card from the box, and the only card from the Lore sphere

(Should pause for a moment to note that we felt that the Ithilien Tracker is just fine. It's 2-cost for an inconsistent questing boost, but it can punch well above its cost when a high-threat enemy is revealed. Multiple copies are also good targets for a ranger bow - a little expensive for the combo, but Lore has the card draw to pull it off, at least).

Master of Lore is a fine card that got errata'ed out of the meta. Probably rightly so, given its role in an infinite loop. The nice thing is that the ability is still useful, just overcosted. Bringing the cost down to 2 makes him a perfectly playable card. (Incidentally, this goes a long way towards helping to deal with the Ithilien Tracker cost problem). On the turn after you play him, he's paid for himself, and from then on he's generating extra resources.

As always, we appreciate your input and feedback! There are a bunch of cards still to come in the cycle, including quite a few that need a lot of help (Trained for War or Against the Shadow, anyone?), and we're excited to start giving that out!

My takes --

Mutual Accord. I think the synergy between Rohan/Gondor, besides being intensely thematic, is as good as you're going to get. What better motivation for trait-sharing than the mix of a trait with global constant buffs and a trait with powerful trait-based events? The problem I think isn't the traits, it's the timing and the sphere. By the time Rohan can afford to play the global expensive events that boost all Rohan, Gondor has a big swarm out and no longer needs the help. Meanwhile, on the Rohan side the card would become immediately useful as soon as Visionary Leadership is in play (which unfortunately is not at game start) -- but it's a leadership card, so it's not likely to be in the Rohan deck. Gondor/Rohan is no less synergistic than Dwarf/Rohan would be, but if Mutual Accord worked with Dain it'd be immediately useful in a Rohan deck (with Dain at the table) as a 0-cost *spirit* event. The way it is now, the deck that needs to play it is the deck that doesn't need it, which discourages its use outside of a dedicated fellowship. But dedicated fellowship is the sweet spot for the card anyway, so I don't see that as a game-breaking problem.

However, free cost reduction certainly does give an incentive for the Gondor deck to have the card and play it, even without Rohirrim at the table. Faramir for two could benefit a lot of leadership decks.

Wealth of Gondor -- from unexciting card to unexciting cantrip in mono-Gondor deck. I think it's better, but it's still a narrow use case. If the event both added a resource and let you redistribute resources, I'd like it better.

Citadel Custodian -- I'm not a fan. It's true that once you've got enough Gondor allies out it makes for a good-value swarmer, if a boring one. But as a swarm deck, once you've got enough allies to play Citadel Custodian cheaply you're already on the road to victory, and while you're trying to *get* to that point this overpriced ally is no help at all. As an AVGT aid he has the same issue, he only saves you money if you *already* have enough allies to get him down cheaply, in which case AVGT is likely to be win more. And however useful he is in exhausting for AVGT, he's no help at all when discarded by AVGT. I usually don't bother with him in my own Gondor decks, though he did make the cut in the Stereotypical Gondor Deck.

Blood (and later Fire) -- expected nerf. This form is still a powerful one-shot effect, though as a one-shot effect I don't know that limiting to 1/hero is really necessary.

Light the Beacons -- it's an interesting and powerful effect that thematically matches the card name, though obviously it scales against lower player counts. A more solo-friendly version of the card would be X, where you pay the cost of the ally put into play (or cost+1 without hero exhaustion), though obviously it would be lower impact with just one ally rather than up to 4. You could give +2 *and sentinel* to the allies put into play, that's probably worth doing even in the current version, so the decks who can't put an ally into play are still protected by the Beacons.

Master of Lore -- at two it's a useful card again, but I don't think the original errata was "rightly" done. MOL only reduces to cost one, it was Horn of Gondor making that effective zero that allowed infinite Hammersmith playing. At the heart of every infinite loop is card recurrence and attachments that don't exhaust, and the Master-of-Lore deck loop had both while the Master *itself* enabled neither of those. A proper fix to Horn of Gondor (not the one it eventually got) would've broken the loop, as would removing Will of the West (eventually done) or even exhausting Legacy of Durin (eventually done). I would be fine with the errata simply being undone for this project.

Happy New Year all! I apologize for my continued absence - I got a new job in late July, and that had a massive effect on my ability to keep up with all of my projects. But with the news that the forums will be shutting down, I want to try and finish out the major arc of this project before the shutdown happens - perhaps just for aesthetic reasons, but it works.

So let's get right into the first 3 packs of the Against the Shadow Cycle! But first, one holdover from the box set: Citadel Custodian. It's just not an exciting card - and even its best use case is fine , nothing more. So we added a valour action, something to help get off those really expensive high-cost events - Grim Resolve, Light the Beacons, Fortune or Fate. Gondor has had a sub-theme of discardable allies, and this fits right along those lines.

We'd love feedback, because we're still not sure on this idea, and other ways to make Citadel Custodian not-boring would be wonderful.

In addition, there is one card that we have literally no idea how to handle.

We've tossed around the idea of giving a boost to Gondor characters, letting you manipulate the encounter discard pile to get encounter allies back into the deck, and even thought about letting you play with the top card of the encounter deck face-up. One option might just be to drop the cost dramatically, making him 1-cost for a beefy statline, but then you lose him when your heroes start inevitably taking damage. But we haven't found anything that actually feels good. If you have any ideas on this ally, please let us know!

And now, for the meat of the post:

Lord of Morthond is a fine card - but as discussed above, we are going to be removing the requirement to have *printed* resource icons for the mono-sphere cards introduced in this cycle. The distinction is very fine, and ends up restricting deckbuilding space in ways that are more annoying than fun, especially since the game branched out in later cycles to be far more focused around Traits than spheres. So we removed the requirement for the printed icon, and then made the card exhaust to grant the card draw, because making it easier to take advantage of makes it possible to be used in infinite loops. Unlimited card draw is just bad form.

The first of the 4 mono-sphere event cards, and by far the most powerful. This card is single-handedly the biggest worry we had with removing the *printed* requirement, and one of the few of them that is probably worth running the combo to get sphere-granting songs in order to run this.

Gaining Strength is another card along the lines of Wealth of Gondor - trading a single card for 1 resource tends to be a bad trade. One option is to give it conditional card draw - conditional cantripping is our favorite approach to underpowered 0-cost events, after all. But it can be overdone, and when there are good thematic reasons to go another direction, I tend to want to jump on them. Since the flavor text and card art represent Aragorn using the Palantir to challenge Sauron, the second option goes for the traditional purview of the Palantir - encounter deck scrying.

Moving on to Tactics, we reach Trained for War. Unlike Strength of Arms, this card needs some work. It is a wonderful effect for a Tactics deck, but in a multiplayer environment, it turns off the willpower-based questing of the rest of your group. So we altered it to make the tactics player quest with attack instead of willpower for a round - good for a one-turn questing push from the combat deck.

The record attachments will also receive the treatment of removing the requirement for printed resource icons. This was our second concern - that making the recursion easier to accomplish could break the game. The easy answer to that was to remove the ability to put the event you play back on the bottom of your deck. This makes the standard use case of the card more effective, since you don't lose the event from your discard pile, while simultaneously turning off some of the last infinite loops that remain in the game.

And now we come to Spirit Pippin, probably the worst hero in the game. Our first instinct was to reduce the threat cost of his ability from 3 to 2, and to make it that the affected enemy cannot engage any player, not just you. This allows the Pippin player to choose an enemy that the group can just ignore for some time, as long as you can handle the threat in the staging area.

The second option gives even more flexibility to the ability, making it an action that can even work on an enemy engaged with you - I worry that that makes it too powerful, though. We'd love your feedback!

Minas Tirith Lampwright is an interesting design marred by too many restrictions. Discarding the ally for only the chance of cancelling surge is just not consistent enough to work well. My first idea was to make it so that you only discard the ally if you actually cancel the surge, but to keep the chance for failure. Other feedback indicated that just discarding the card to cancel the surge directly would be simpler and more appreciated - let us know what you think!

Against the Shadow is the third of the 4 monosphere events, and the least played. It is uniformly near-useless, pretty much only useful if you are going to take a mono-spirit willpower deck up against a siege quest. Which begs the question "why would you want to do that?"

We made it provide a generic willpower boost, which is always good, but also add Spirit character's willpower to their defense instead of replacing it, which not only makes it better if you *do* want to take that mono-spirit questing deck against a siege quest, but also lets you actually use some of those spirit questing characters as defenders. Cirdan the Shipwright defends for 7 for a turn, which is extremely interesting. It's inconsistent, which makes the idea harder to break (especially as we have limited recursion).

Small Target is a card with an extremely fun idea, but is really hard to pull it off. First, you have to have 2 enemies engaged with you at the same time, then one of them has to be powerful enough to actually damage or kill the other enemy, and then you have to correctly guess whether or not there is going to be a shadow effect on the card. It can be done with shadow scrying like Silver Harp or Dark Knowledge, but even then, you often end up with the card sitting in hand, waiting for the right situation. We added an effect for the card for if there is a shadow effect on the attacking enemy. Now it cancels damage from a single attack if it didn't redirect the attack to another enemy. It incentivizes you to defend against the larger attacks with your Hobbit hero, which are the ones that could potentially kill the other enemy in the first place, and means that you survive even if you don't redirect the attack.

We have discussed Mirlonde in this thread before, but we've now officially reached her expansion pack. So here she is in all her glory. We decided to give her synergy with the victory display archetype, with a setup action that lets you search the top 5 cards of the encounter deck and add a non-unique card to the staging area. We also expanded her threat reduction to work with all Silvan heroes in addition to Lore heroes. We also gave an additional threat reduction if each hero has the Silvan trait. This was a thematic consideration (the easier option would be to have -1 for each silvan hero and -1 for each lore hero, but that would mean that a Silvan deck could only reach Secrecy if each hero had the lore sphere - Mirlonde, Argalad, and Rossiel is the only lineup that fits there. This way, you can still run Mirlonde and any 2 9-threat silvan heroes and still start in secrecy - rossiel, argalad, thranduil, or legolas all fit the bill), based off the flavor text. Hopefully, this opens up opportunities to run a deck themed around the woodland realm instead of Lorien for the silvan archetype.

The Ithilien Archer tried to address a weakness of Trap decks - what do you do if you didn't have a trap ready when the enemy was revealed? In practice, though, it was too finicky to actually work. You generally end up having to engage the enemy, deal with its attacks but not kill it, play a trap on the next turn, then handle the enemy's attacks for a second turn, and then return the enemy to the staging area instead of killing it. And then you hope that the trap was worth not killing the enemy for 2 turns. Between the Ithilien Guardian and ally Mablung, there are a lot easier ways to accomplish that. And 3 cost for 2 ranged attack in lore is fine, but when you could get ally Quickbeam out for 1 cost less (and 1 attack more), it leaves you questioning your life decisions a little bit.

So we decided to have it interface with the Trap archetype in a different way. After you attack an enemy, the archer lets you play a trap from your hand (paying the printed cost, of course). The precise wording also lets you pay for the trap even if you don't have a resource match, letting you get Tactics traps like Outmatched or Followed onto the enemy without needing a Tactics hero or Song of Battle. This feels like it could be incredibly powerful in the right circumstances, and I'm excited to give it a try.

The Harbor Master was a tricky one. We normally try to keep our modified effects within the bounds of the card's original vision, or at least adjacent to it. But in this case, we couldn't even figure out what the card was trying to do in the first place. There aren't that many repeatable resource granting effects (infinite loops with Miruvor aside), and even 3 per turn isn't enough to turn the Harbor Master-as-written into a decent defender.

In addition, the card has no synergy with Noldor or with other Lore options, and really doesn't have any good uses for the rest of the card pool. So we decided to keep *an* interaction with resources, and have it synergize with the class of Noldor heroes that spend resources to activate their card effects - Lorefindel, Gildor Inglorion, Elladan, and Elrohir. It also works with other heroes - Grimbeorn, Core Aragorn, and Tactics Imrahil all come to mind. This is a feature, not a bug. The limit prevents you from overpowering Grimbeorn and attacking/defending all the enemies with no penalty.

I'm actually on the fence about the Ithilien Pit. I think it's almost fine the way it is - it's a 1-cost trap in a Damrod deck, which means it costs 0 for a card draw. It also has a marginally useful effect - it gives everyone's characters ranged against the attached enemy, and even lets them attack into the staging area. Our small addition just increases the engagement cost of the enemy, letting you keep it in the staging area easier. This offers more options for Lore Faramir's effect - not hard to get up to 6 attack with him with 3 ranger spikes and a copy of ithilien pit filled in the staging area.

The next 2 cards just have the printed sphere requirement removed. It increases the use cases slightly - but it's still a combo to get both these cards *and* the sphere-granting song.

Finally, we have the White Tower Watchman. He's interesting in a mono-sphere deck, but a little lackluster. We added a boost to get more use out of his stats - if you control a Gondor hero, he doesn't exhaust to quest. Since he's a watchman, and all. (I'll see myself out).

That's all folks! Let us know what you think.

@Onidsen Where will you be posting your work after the close of the forums?

16 hours ago, Felswrath said:

@Onidsen Where will you be posting your work after the close of the forums?

I've been posting my work on the COTR Discord as well as the LOTR LCG Facebook group, and I will continue posting the cards there for feedback. I see that many of the forum folks are migrating to boardgamegeek - I might explore the idea of opening up an account and posting the work there.

On 1/15/2021 at 2:42 AM, Onidsen said:

I've been posting my work on the COTR Discord as well as the LOTR LCG Facebook group, and I will continue posting the cards there for feedback. I see that many of the forum folks are migrating to boardgamegeek - I might explore the idea of opening up an account and posting the work there.

Awesome you should as it would be nice to keep seeing your changes!