As of right now with the exception of Mutagen formula, the heroes that are in the pipeline are more powerful than the villains we currently have to play with, expert doesn't feel like an expert it feels like normal at this point and I might be in the minority on this but if you take some inspiration from games like Arkham Horror that have four difficulty levels built into the game, there has got to be some happy medium outside of community content to make this game harder.

I'm only saying this because I truly love the game and I want this to be a game that is played for years to come, but with my playgroup it's getting stale more quickly because of the fact that the challenge is not there. Or there is very little challenge.

So please consider on adding something extra to the game to make it more difficult for those other people that have tons of lcg or card game experience.

Tweak villain decks to force you to play different or use a different aspect cards. The game is all about customizing it to fit your play style or Challenge your strategies. The card pool is small now, but as they add more cards the game is going to get harder.

I’m curious how the game will get harder by an expanding card pool. It’s usually just the opposite. This is my first foray into LCGs and I’m genuinely having a blast, but I definitely recognize the game is not difficult. Thematic, fast paced, super fun yes. But difficult no. And as much as I enjoy the fame, I am firmly in the camp that would love to see the game be more difficult.

As things are right now, as soon as you decide to play the game, before you have even picked what villain and difficulty and modular encounters, before you select your hero and aspect, the odds are more likely that you will win the game than lose it. You can intentionally pick sub optimal cards to put into your deck and still have it be more likely than not that you will win against any giving scenario other than possibly Mutagen Formula.

So I’m not sure how A growing card pool and giving hero’s access to higher power level cards is going to make the game harder. At least not a growing hero card pool.

As discussed in other threads there are multiple ways you could make the game more challenging with house rules. If you don't want to do that, for LotR LCG FFG made "nightmare" decks available which took existing scenarios and made them a lot harder (from what I understand, I have never actually used them myself). It's possible we'll see nightmare-style modules at some point in the future from FFG. They could come in the form of a superhard modules that can be played with anything. Or, like, "villain pack 1" which has harder versions of Rhino, Klaw and Ultron and their signature cards.

And maybe we'll never see anything like this. I guess we won't be sure until FFG announces it, if ever.

On 2/26/2020 at 7:55 AM, The Team said:

I’m curious how the game will get harder by an expanding card pool. It’s usually just the opposite. This is my first foray into LCGs and I’m genuinely having a blast, but I definitely recognize the game is not difficult. Thematic, fast paced, super fun yes. But difficult no. And as much as I enjoy the fame, I am firmly in the camp that would love to see the game be more difficult.

As things are right now, as soon as you decide to play the game, before you have even picked what villain and difficulty and modular encounters, before you select your hero and aspect, the odds are more likely that you will win the game than lose it. You can intentionally pick sub optimal cards to put into your deck and still have it be more likely than not that you will win against any giving scenario other than possibly Mutagen Formula.

So I’m not sure how A growing card pool and giving hero’s access to higher power level cards is going to make the game harder. At least not a growing hero card pool.

I was referring to the scenarios/encounter deck most!y. As the game grows your favorite card combos might not be all that great anymore. What if a Villain like Mysterio comes along; casting a spell that turns your Allies against you and they start to attack you. What if there is some Villain that drains your energy with Adam Warlock's soul gem so you lose HP when you're in the hero phase. they might introduce a new card type for the villains that force you to change your play style, they could add the infinity gauntlet to screw things up. There are lots of ways the game could get harder with more card options.

LCGs play just like TCGs in my opinion, what makes OFF great for me is I don't have to track rare cards or open 100s of random boosters to build a deck. You get all you need for that month and you on par with everyone else 😁

1 hour ago, Kaijudo said:

I was referring to the scenarios/encounter deck most!y. As the game grows your favorite card combos might not be all that great anymore. What if a Villain like Mysterio comes along; casting a spell that turns your Allies against you and they start to attack you. What if there is some Villain that drains your energy with Adam Warlock's soul gem so you lose HP when you're in the hero phase. they might introduce a new card type for the villains that force you to change your play style, they could add the infinity gauntlet to screw things up. There are lots of ways the game could get harder with more card options.

LCGs play just like TCGs in my opinion, what makes OFF great for me is I don't have to track rare cards or open 100s of random boosters to build a deck. You get all you need for that month and you on par with everyone else 😁

Well let's hope they do said things, but they do need to later on revisit core villians to make them harder imo

4 hours ago, Kaijudo said:

I was referring to the scenarios/encounter deck most!y. As the game grows your favorite card combos might not be all that great anymore. What if a Villain like Mysterio comes along; casting a spell that turns your Allies against you and they start to attack you. What if there is some Villain that drains your energy with Adam Warlock's soul gem so you lose HP when you're in the hero phase. they might introduce a new card type for the villains that force you to change your play style, they could add the infinity gauntlet to screw things up. There are lots of ways the game could get harder with more card options.

LCGs play just like TCGs in my opinion, what makes OFF great for me is I don't have to track rare cards or open 100s of random boosters to build a deck. You get all you need for that month and you on par with everyone else 😁

Yeah this makes sense. I’m pretty excited for the story box to se what they have in there and I really hope it’s a jump up from even Mutagen.

The thing that’s being talked about in my playgroup though is the new villain content release schedule. We’re all really excited for the new heroes being released (seriously Black Widow looks awesome!) but what we’re having is 3 months of new hero content that only looks to make the existing already not difficult encounters even less difficult.

Again I’m totally new to FFG LCG’s but what we were kind of hoping for in the villain release schedule is something that we could really sink our teeth into for the three months while waiting for new encounters and that it might take that three months with all the new heroes and player cards to feel like we really had a handle on it. Instead we play the scenarios and then begin trying to think of ways to make the scenarios more challenging ( @KennedyHawk2 has some great home brew environments for each encounter) and honestly that has been its own kind of fun, it’s just different than we thought.

We started to wonder how it would be if each hero pack had a new modular encounter (or even a modular environment which I think would be cool) rather than extra aspect cards. I think that runs counter to the model FFG has for this game so I don’t think that works necessarily. Just some way of making it so existing encounters don’t get stale while we’re getting new, more powerful ways of beating it while waiting for the next villain.

Incidentally I like the achievements that have been released for the core set heroes and encounters. Some of those are legitimately hard. Maybe all that’s needed is each hero/encounter to also be released with a new achievement list specific to that pack and that’s a method of upping the challenge.

And hopefully in the future they do what they did with Arkham and release something that makes past encounters more challenging.

Considering both LOTR LCG and AH TCG went back and made harder mods to old scenarios I think we can feel pretty safe that they will do that here at some point as well. Also what modular set you pick to add to the villain deck can wildly swing the challenge in my opinion.

OP I assume you are actually playing on the expert difficulty. I agree that standard difficulty is a bit on the easy side, but I do find that expert has some teeth. Also I tend to throw the harder modular villain sets in there. Nothing is gonna make Rhino challenging though. He's basically the tutorial scenario.