They both actually are, and my feelings towards them are irrelevant. Even if they were two of my most loved game features, they create unhealthy game situations which you can't argue against. It doesn't make mathematical sense. Quests are easier in multiplayer, especially in early cycles, because of bad game design decisions. Off the top of my head, I think second stage of journey down the anduin has you revelaing 1 additional card each quest phase regardless of the number of players, so if you're solo - your encounter card count doubles, if you're four players - your encounter card count increases by 25%. If that's not an objectively bad game design decision in your book - I don't really know if there can be anything objectively bad for you at all, and just propose to agree to disagree. " Having elements of the game that scale against multiple players is IMO *good* design " - there is already an inbuilt scaling element: number of encounter cards on setup (sometimes) and per turn scales with the number of players. There is no actual need to scale and spread the effects themselves, because if in a 4 player game each player drew a card that affects each player, then players have essentially drawn 16 worth of encounter cards, and this is an objectively bad design outcome.

It doesn't to you, it does to me. I see this as an evolution. Bad design elements get shaved off, better and more refined ones get introduced. Don't really see the point of Marvel Champions dropping locations altogether as a supposed fix to only one location problem. I didn't play MC, but I watched some vids, and if I remember correctly, the way questing there works is you just exhaust a character and progress immediately pops up. The concept of locations from LotR simply doesn't work there in any capacity. Also I'm fine with effects that affect each player in general, I'm not fine with the amount and power of them that are used in LotR. AH LCG also has effects that affect all players, but they are much more sophisticated and make sense.

I don't see how Doomed situation can be addressed by the designers in any capacity except for crutches like Saruman's staff.

Because reboot would imply they would need to make new content by the new standards. There gonna be no disbalance due to the gap between god tier and thematic trash cards, there would be no 900 basic attack enemies with 1000 health popping on first turns to get you regardless of your threat, etc. Of course the designers do what they do - they're in this too deep. They can't just abandon their design philosophy at this point, or many previous points. Magic the Gathering is one of the worst competitive card games on the market, immensively outdated (I'm not gonna argue on this, I'll just say that a game which you can lose just because you didn't draw mana or drew too much mana is not a good game) and is in severe need of reboot and rules revamp, but it's never gonna happen. Why? Because they are in it too deep. If they do it, they will lose on profits, they will invalidate the collections of all the people who are bringing them money. So they're not gonna do it. Are they correct from the financial standpoint? **** yes they are. Are they correct from the gameplay standpoint? **** no they arent.

To do well in LotR LCG, you need to be really good at building decks. Many of the problems pointed out by John Constantine can be countered, as dalestephenson argued, by building a good deck to get around them. He rightly points out that the full card pool offers many tools that, when put together in the right combinations, can provide an answer to everything from location lock to Doomed to overwhelming dark forces during setup to scaling encounter effects. However, if you don't put together the tools in the right combination, the encounter deck will stomp you mercilessly.

The necessity of strong deck-building can be a source of major frustration for many players. If you don't have a solid deck design going in, there is no degree of expert game playing tactics or strategy that will overcome that deficit. This is not to say that knowing how to play the game well doesn't matter at all. As was pointed out earlier, many top-tier decks require a top-tier player to pilot them -- a novice will still likely lose if they don't understand how to take advantage of the deck's potential. The necessity of expert deck-building skill is mitigated by community resources like RingsDB, where players can find ready-made decks and often very detailed strategy guides to go with them. However, that's a LOT of homework for the average player, especially a new player. And it takes experience to learn how to properly pilot a top-tier deck and to learn how to deploy its tools to counter whatever nasty thing the encounter deck throws at you.

Bottom line, for me, is that the game and quest design places a huge emphasis on deck-building, and less on actually playing the game. Maybe, to hazard a guess, it's like 70/30 in terms of importance. That's great for those who love the in-depth research and skill required to build good decks, but far less so for the players who want to just jump in and enjoy the adventure. This isn't a flaw in the game, per se, but can definitely frustrate players who aren't that great at deck-building, but also don't want to feel like they're 'cheating' or missing a crucial component of the game by copying the decks of others.

I only read the OP

On 3/19/2020 at 11:05 AM, John Constantine said:

5. Bad Starting Conditions

Oh boy, how many games are technically lost due to bad opening encounter draws. And if opening encounter draws weren't bad enough, you only start out wth 3 resources, with which you can't buy jackshit, but with which you are somehow expected to efficianly quest, attack and defend right off the bat. Players should either have more starting resources, or there shouldn't be so much encounter cards ahead of the first quest phase, unless absolutely necessary. Depending on a mild starting encounter draw to have at least the chance to play the game is not a very good design.

What frustrates my group the most is, Setup: Put X number of cards into the staging area where X is the number of players in the game.

These setups can end games before they start because you can reveal 4 enemies with the setup and then the encounter phase reveals 4 more enemies. Sometimes the setup doesn't even have enemies but enough 3+ threat locations that it's insurmountable without Rohan cards to wack the locations off the board.

Agree with Kjeld. Everything mentioned in OP list is perfect for the game. This game requires deckbuilding skills with thought out synergies in your deck to maneuver all issues you might come across during a quest. Some people may not be about the deck design aspect too much, which is almost half of what this game is, as well as very thought out decision making during each phase of a quest while playing.

The comments about the game being too difficult I definitely do not understand - I hate playing meta, in board games and video games. As soon as outlands came out and was overpowered I refused to play it. All this being said, most quests are very doable, many can be won with 95%-99% winrate and need nightmare to even be playable. Others are perfect on normal mode. I think it all comes down to how good of a player you are. If you aren't a very good player, then this game can be difficult to you.

Kjeld, yeah, I know, if you are so inclined, you can "snipe" the quests by building specifically for each one. I've done so myself. I recall building a Hobbit deck that had all the Black Riders in the frist LotR Saga quests engaged with me and attacking each phase, but being absolutely unable to strike through the fast hitching burning branded Bilbo with some +def signals. This deck turned the quest into a joke. The problem is, in my opinion, the game gives you a lot of toys, and when you try to play with them, it slaps you around, forcing you to either come back to the the usual suspect OP stuff, or "sniping" the quests, neither of which I enjoy. I think basic difficulty should be mainly reserved for people building regular/thematic decks, and the hard/nightmare stuff should be subject to sniping/abusing OP stuff. When almost every quest in the game has to be either abused or sniped - it's not that fun anymore.

Thaeggan, yeah, setup X situation also highlight the problem with the multiplicated encounter card effects, creating situation when you may as well start over without even beginning to play, not to mention creating a giant pressure at the beginning without establishing proper tools for players to handle it.

I'm sorry Khamul, but any attempt from your end to invalidate me as a player fades behind the fact that you think that everything I've listed is perfect for the game, so I can't really do anything for you here.

8 hours ago, BigKahuna said:

Each quest is unique and requires a unique deck(s) to beat it and the challenge of the game is building that deck for that quest. For the next quest you will likely again have to alter your deck

That was not my experience at all. I got into this game a couple of years ago and started collecting content whenever I could find some in my area. From basically the start (when we had only 1 Core Set, Khazad-dum + Dwarrowdelf, Heirs of Numeros + Againts the Shadow) me and my wife played together a 4 decks fellowship with 4 mono sphere decks, augmenting the decks when we got new cards (we switched SpEowyn with Arwen when we got The Dread Realm for example or added some Hauberk of Mail and Guarded attachment with Wilds of Rhovanion) but maintaining the same general backbone of synergies between them and we actually won all the quest of the game with those deck (only lone expection Mount Doom). And we are playing Elrond with no Vilya...

There have been quests where we cursed playing as 4 players and others where we were so glad for not having to use a single deck, there have been quest where it took us around 3 games to finally beat it, having to adapt our basic strategies to the current problem but playing as 4 you can have enough flexibility in your decks to bring a generic toolbox able to face almost any problem. For example we found Carn-Dum a relative breeze, thanks to the mono-spirit deck having Shadows Give Way as an event (which is still quite useful in a lot of other questo) that acts as a silver bullet against it. Instead we struggled terribly against The Wastes of Eriador which is generally considered a not-so-difficult one.

That's only to give our perspective and experience, perhaps shedding some light on other approaches.

2 minutes ago, Alonewolf87 said:

That was not my experience at all. I got into this game a couple of years ago and started collecting content whenever I could find some in my area. From basically the start (when we had only 1 Core Set, Khazad-dum + Dwarrowdelf, Heirs of Numeros + Againts the Shadow) me and my wife played together a 4 decks fellowship with 4 mono sphere decks, augmenting the decks when we got new cards (we switched SpEowyn with Arwen when we got The Dread Realm for example or added some Hauberk of Mail and Guarded attachment with Wilds of Rhovanion) but maintaining the same general backbone of synergies between them and we actually won all the quest of the game with those deck (only lone expection Mount Doom). And we are playing Elrond with no Vilya...

There have been quests where we cursed playing as 4 players and others where we were so glad for not having to use a single deck, there have been quest where it took us around 3 games to finally beat it, having to adapt our basic strategies to the current problem but playing as 4 you can have enough flexibility in your decks to bring a generic toolbox able to face almost any problem. For example we found Carn-Dum a relative breeze, thanks to the mono-spirit deck having Shadows Give Way as an event (which is still quite useful in a lot of other questo) that acts as a silver bullet against it. Instead we struggled terribly against The Wastes of Eriador which is generally considered a not-so-difficult one.

That's only to give our perspective and experience, perhaps shedding some light on other approaches.

I don't have any experience playing the game 4 players and officially its a 2 player game which suggests that it was never really tested/designed to be a 4 player game. I can however imagine with 4 players, the amount of synergy you can create would probably allow for a greater diversity in the decks which might not require you to alter them as much.

My experiences have always been solo or 2 player so I can only speak to that.

1 minute ago, BigKahuna said:

and officially its a 2 player game

In which sense "officialy"?

1 minute ago, BigKahuna said:

it was never really tested/designed to be a 4 player game

I think this might be a bold assumption.

Just now, Alonewolf87 said:

In which sense "officialy"?

I think this might be a bold assumption.

Its written on the box.

I don't think its a stretch to assume a 1-2 player game released as such is not tested for 3-4 players. Would you assume they tested the game at 8 players?

5 minutes ago, BigKahuna said:

Its written on the box.

That's only because the contents of one Core Set (mainly the Threat Trackers, which is kinda of a ludicrous thing I admit) are assumed to be enough only for 2 players, but the rules have always considered the game to be playable with 1 to 4 players (as you can find written in like the first or second page of the Rules booklet).

7 hours ago, John Constantine said:

They both actually are, and my feelings towards them are irrelevant. Even if they were two of my most loved game features, they create unhealthy game situations which you can't argue against. It doesn't make mathematical sense. Quests are easier in multiplayer, especially in early cycles, because of bad game design decisions. Off the top of my head, I think second stage of journey down the anduin has you revelaing 1 additional card each quest phase regardless of the number of players, so if you're solo - your encounter card count doubles, if you're four players - your encounter card count increases by 25%. If that's not an objectively bad game design decision in your book - I don't really know if there can be anything objectively bad for you at all, and just propose to agree to disagree. " Having elements of the game that scale against multiple players is IMO *good* design " - there is already an inbuilt scaling element: number of encounter cards on setup (sometimes) and per turn scales with the number of players. There is no actual need to scale and spread the effects themselves, because if in a 4 player game each player drew a card that affects each player, then players have essentially drawn 16 worth of encounter cards, and this is an objectively bad design outcome.

I presume your "they both actually are" is a claim that both locations and Doomed are "objectively bad". *If* you think that that inconsistent difficulty level for number of players is inherently the result of "bad game design decisions", then yes, inconsistent difficulty level are the result of "bad game design decisions". But that's a preference, not a law of design. And even if you think consistency of difficulty level is desirable (this is subjective, but common), I can't think of an interesting co-op game I've ever played that's actually achieved it.

More than that, you are here complaining about effects that scale against multiple players *despite one-deck play probably being harder*. If the problems you complained about were fixed, it would *increase* player imbalance, not reduce it.

Yes, the extra card in the second stage of JDtA is harder for solo players. So is the fixed amount of progress needed to clear the second stage. So is the presence of exactly one troll in staging at the very beginning of the quest. The quest is not balanced. But changing the second stage to reveal N extra cards *wouldn't* make the balance scale evenly, because the likelihood of location lock is much higher with 8 reveals than 2 reveals! Goblin Sniper, Brown Lands, and all the treacheries scale against multiplayer -- with N extra reveals it's quite possible the quest would be *easier* solo. LOTR has a mass of effects that work for *and* against more players, the end balance of a quest depends very much on how those pieces come together, and it's not always symetrical. I don't even think it's *meant* to be symetrical. My suspicion is that Escape From Dol Goldur was designed *specifically* to show new players sometimes you need to use more decks. That makes it too difficult for my taste as a solo player, but I can't say the designers "failed" to make the quest scale evenly when there's no evidence that was ever their goal!

But the fact that quests may scale evenly, or scale against less players, or scale against more players, only tells us that the rules system doesn't dictate player scaling. That's a matter of scenario design. And it literally *does not matter* how well or poorly balanced any past quests have been -- each *new* scenario will have player balance according to its own design. That's why "fixing" the problem with a reboot accomplishes nothing -- it does nothing to change balance for old quests, and it's not needed to achieve balance for new quests.

8 hours ago, John Constantine said:

It doesn't to you, it does to me. I see this as an evolution. Bad design elements get shaved off, better and more refined ones get introduced. Don't really see the point of Marvel Champions dropping locations altogether as a supposed fix to only one location problem. I didn't play MC, but I watched some vids, and if I remember correctly, the way questing there works is you just exhaust a character and progress immediately pops up. The concept of locations from LotR simply doesn't work there in any capacity. Also I'm fine with effects that affect each player in general, I'm not fine with the amount and power of them that are used in LotR. AH LCG also has effects that affect all players, but they are much more sophisticated and make sense.[/q]

This is presumably a response to my claim that changes to new co-op LCGs are not necessarily fixing design mistakes. *Any* effect that comes from the encounter deck is inherently strongly as player count increases. You were claiming in the OP this was a design mistake, now you are just complaining about their frequency and power? Sounds like it's not a *design* problem after all, just that their use of it is not to your taste.

Placing damage on the main villain is somewhat akin to "questing", in that the villain essentially has stages and damage placed is how you advance to the next stage of the villain and ulimately win the game. But damage can be and often is placed by card effect rather than the basic "attack" action, and the closest equivalent to threat is thwarting, where you *remove* progress the scenario places on the cards that make you lose (again, this can be a basic action). It's a simpler system than LOTR, and guess what -- in practice, it scales against less players, at least so far.

The closest equivalent to locations are the side schemes, which typically start with a fixed amount of threat that you need to thwart away to make it go poof. As there's no raise-your-threat-from-unsuccessful-questing element to the game, the role of traveling to a location doesn't make sense here, but the class of side schemes with the "crisis" icons mandate that you thwart them in preference to the main scheme -- filling the same buffer role that the active location does in LOTR.

It's a different game. It's not a "fixed" LOTR. If you squint hard you can see it as a streamlined LOTR, but that says nothing about whether the original design was flawed in any particular way. Designing Catan Jr. doesn't mean that missing elements from the original Catan were objectively badly designed.

I never said the encounter deck consisted of globalized effects dough. It's something you apparently thought I meant, which I didn't. The amount and power of them in this game is unhealthy.

8 hours ago, John Constantine said:

I don't see how Doomed situation can be addressed by the designers in any capacity except for crutches like Saruman's staff.

Because reboot would imply they would need to make new content by the new standards. There gonna be no disbalance due to the gap between god tier and thematic trash cards, there would be no 900 basic attack enemies with 1000 health popping on first turns to get you regardless of your threat, etc. Of course the designers do what they do - they're in this too deep. They can't just abandon their design philosophy at this point, or many previous points. Magic the Gathering is one of the worst competitive card games on the market, immensively outdated (I'm not gonna argue on this, I'll just say that a game which you can lose just because you didn't draw mana or drew too much mana is not a good game) and is in severe need of reboot and rules revamp, but it's never gonna happen. Why? Because they are in it too deep. If they do it, they will lose on profits, they will invalidate the collections of all the people who are bringing them money. So they're not gonna do it. Are they correct from the financial standpoint? **** yes they are. Are they correct from the gameplay standpoint? **** no they arent.

Saruman's Staff certainly makes Doomed more palatable for multiplayer, and in that respect might be a "crutch" for cards like Grima that were multiplayer-unfriendly. But *most* Doomed events among the player cards had "each player" effects to go with the each player threat raise -- which is certainly a well balanced way to address "the doomed situation". By undoing the doomed effect partially or completely, Saruman's Staff makes cards like Deep Knowledge and Legacy of Numenor much *strongeer* as player count increases. Do you deplore that as a bad design decision?

For quests, it's easy as pie for designers to "fix" doomed if they think it's a design mistake to raise all player's threat as a result of an encounter card -- don't use it. Use of the "doomed" keyword in a quest is *not* required, and the use of it varies wildly between quests. The most recent quest released has a grand total of one encounter card that uses it (Weary Lands, 2 copies [1 in easy mode]) and it's a whoppiing Doomed 1. The "doomed situation" for this quest is positively trivial.

I don't know why you think a reboot is required to create content according to "new standards" -- or why you think a reboot *would* change the standards the designers use in the first place. If they thought "new standards" were required, they can just use new standards. Certainly over the years we've seen changes in the way player cards have been costed, the average strength of enemies, and the variability of strength in the encounter deck.

In fact, the designers have done something much better (IMO) than gratitouslty invalidating a great mass of content in the hopes that their new incompatible card base will be better -- they've introduced new cards that make older, weaker cards better. Power of the Earth is actually *useful* in a Woodman deck. Beorning Beekeepr is seeing some use in Beorning decks. Hero Gwaihir is going to get Born Aloft and Meneldor's Flight played. Lothriel makes those cruddy discardable Gondorians worth considering. Tactics Bilbo even accomplished the near impossible task of making Spirit Pippin worth playing. I don't think designers are infallible (I'm one of the quickest and loudest to complain whenever their latest ill-conceived and unnecessary errata hit), but I think they've done a *remarkable* job of keeping old cards relevant, and I still enjoy playing old quests with new cards too. You'd prefer they errata the entire game out of existence to "fix" your subjective preferences, even when there's absolutely no guarantee that they would change things you don't like in the direction you prefer? I'll take a hard pass on that.

10 hours ago, BigKahuna said:

Each quest is unique and requires a unique deck(s) to beat it and the challenge of the game is building that deck for that quest. For the next quest you will likely again have to alter your deck.

[...]

A good example is Conflict at The Carrock. Most new players really struggle with this quest because up until you hit it, most of the quests leading up to it in that series don't really require anything particularly specific as far as design or strategy goes. Most halfway decent decks will do. Conflict At The Carrock is the first time when you must adjust your deck for a very specific challenge and most players that figure out can eventually beat the quest 100% of the time even on nightmare because there is a puzzle to solve here and once solved a quest that seemed impossible to beat becomes fairly easy to defeat consistently.

Playing one-handed and two-handed, I've never found rebuilding the deck to be a *requirement*. Generally I might take in/out a few sideboard cards, but the only two quests that have required to me to redo my deck are Escape from Mount Gram and Dungeons Deep and Cavern Dim. I've never had to swap out heroes to defeat a quest. (I don't play nightmare, though.)

Conflict of the Carrock to me isn't an example of a quest that wants a specific deck *design*, just one that requires a different strategy. Its easy start makes it easy to overquest, so a deck that's fully capable of winning the quest *if they use the right strategy* can tear through the first stage and then get stomped by four trolls. Once you know you need to turtle until you're ready for the trolls, there are a *lot* of decks that can win the quest easily and consistently.

@John Constantine I haven't read the whole thread here, but from what I've read regarding the difficulty complaint, it sounds to me like you're saying a casual player that devotes basically no time toward improving their deckbuilding or gameplay should still be able to win most of the time with any kind of "fun" deck they throw together. Personally, I don't see this is a flaw, because if it were true the game would have long ago lost most of the dedicated players who have been keeping it alive.

There's always a balance between making a game to hard, so that nobody wants to play anymore, and too easy, so that nobody wants to play anymore. The optimal for game longevity is obviously somewhere in the middle. But no matter where you set the difficulty, you disappoint some people that want it more in one direction or the other. That's inevitable. Clearly you are someone who wanted it to be easier. But if we step back and ask if it's an actual "flaw" of the game for the difficulty to be set where it is, I would point to its longevity being much longer than expected as evidence that it's not.

6 hours ago, Seastan said:

@John Constantine I haven't read the whole thread here, but from what I've read regarding the difficulty complaint, it sounds to me like you're saying a casual player that devotes basically no time toward improving their deckbuilding or gameplay should still be able to win most of the time with any kind of "fun" deck they throw together. Personally, I don't see this is a flaw, because if it were true the game would have long ago lost most of the dedicated players who have been keeping it alive.

There's always a balance between making a game to hard, so that nobody wants to play anymore, and too easy, so that nobody wants to play anymore. The optimal for game longevity is obviously somewhere in the middle. But no matter where you set the difficulty, you disappoint some people that want it more in one direction or the other. That's inevitable. Clearly you are someone who wanted it to be easier. But if we step back and ask if it's an actual "flaw" of the game for the difficulty to be set where it is, I would point to its longevity being much longer than expected as evidence that it's not.

I agree and some of the responses to me kind of support that.

For example when dalestephenson pointed out that to him adjusting decks for Carrock is not necessary. It may not be necessary for him, as he see's the games difficulty as lower, then I do. I for example have never been able to beat any quest on Nightmare mode, to me they are physically impossible to beat. Clearly that is a matter of skill, it could be a matter of card pool, an amount of games played, or even bringing over just general gamer experiance.

The game has to manage to be fun for me and fun for guys like dalestephenson under the same mechanic and same conditions.

This is why I always say that Arkam Horror is such a big let down for me, to me it does exactly what I don't want a game to be, its balance is meant to be "fun for everyone". Which is great but what that really means is that the game is stupidly easy even for guys like me, I can't imagine how boring it must be for the more experienced gamers. Me and my friends literally unboxed Arkham Horror (with the Dunwhich Legacy Cycle) read the rules, played our first run through the whole campaign and beat every quest on the first try under normal difficulty. It was the first and last time we ever played the game, its been collecting dust on my shelf ever since and I mostly regret buying into it so hard. And here is the thing, no one disliked it, it was fun, there just was no point in ever playing it again, it was kind of like a legacy game. You play it through once, you beat it and then your done with it.

Lord of the Rings on the other hand me and my friends are still trying to beat certain quests, we still have never successfully completed the Saga campaign. People come up with new Deck Ideas all the time and it kind of drive the game back to the table . The fact that we struggle with it, that it seems unfair sometimes or even unbeatable, that's what keeps us coming back.

8 hours ago, Seastan said:

@John Constantine I haven't read the whole thread here, but from what I've read regarding the difficulty complaint, it sounds to me like you're saying a casual player that devotes basically no time toward improving their deckbuilding or gameplay should still be able to win most of the time with any kind of "fun" deck they throw together. Personally, I don't see this is a flaw, because if it were true the game would have long ago lost most of the dedicated players who have been keeping it alive.

There's always a balance between making a game to hard, so that nobody wants to play anymore, and too easy, so that nobody wants to play anymore. The optimal for game longevity is obviously somewhere in the middle. But no matter where you set the difficulty, you disappoint some people that want it more in one direction or the other. That's inevitable. Clearly you are someone who wanted it to be easier. But if we step back and ask if it's an actual "flaw" of the game for the difficulty to be set where it is, I would point to its longevity being much longer than expected as evidence that it's not.

It sounds to you wrong. I'm saying that causal player that devotes his time to building a deck around theme/synergy that he likes instead of the usual OP stuff should stand a chance at beating at least a good portion of the quests. And, by the way, if the game had a better entry point and didn't obliterate newcomers with no chances in 2 out of 3 starting quests, I don't think there would be any need for deadicated players to keep it alive - they would be plenty of players of all kinds. AH LCG has four basic difficulties + Nightmare (Return) mode and it is going strong. Lowest difficulty is literally for people you've described - the ones who devote no time to building or improving their decks and gameplay. Medium difficulty is for regular players that I'm describing here, who like theme and synergies over min-maxing. Hard+ is where the game starts to putting pressure on you to play a certain way, and when it starts resembling LotR in it's default state.

And I in return would point out that if the tables were turned, it's longevity would be much longer, and people wouldn't have to wait ages for each individual pack to come out, because if the difficulty scaling was done right, the deadicated players would still have their experience with nightmare + bunch of inheritely harder quests, while regular players could still enjoy the game without feeling shoehorned to build particular deck with particular cards or suffer the consequences.

4 minutes ago, John Constantine said:

I'm saying that causal player that devotes his time to building a deck around theme/synergy that he likes instead of the usual OP stuff should stand a chance at beating at least a good portion of the quests.

Instead I think that's something quite possible to do in this game, especially with the later expansions which got a lot of new stuff to the table and breathed life in old cards. But let's not talk too generically, gives us a theme/synergy you like, define better "the usual OP stuff" and some quests you find too difficult to beat. We shall make some decks and show you what can be done do againts them.

3 minutes ago, Alonewolf87 said:

Instead I think that's something quite possible to do in this game, especially with the later expansions which got a lot of new stuff to the table and breathed life in old cards. But let's not talk too generically, gives us a theme/synergy you like, define better "the usual OP stuff" and some quests you find too difficult to beat. We shall make some decks and show you what can be done do againts them.

I stopped collecting and playing during the Dreamchasers era. My last box is Dreamchasers, and I don't think I've purchased any packs from that cycle. The last deck that I remember I've played was Arwen+Cirdan+Grima that the willpower part figure out on the table and specialized in cycling and resource acceleration to get heavy hitters out quickly. I remember Not being able to do much in any of the Dreamchaser quests with said deck.

5 minutes ago, John Constantine said:

I stopped collecting and playing during the Dreamchasers era. My last box is Dreamchasers, and I don't think I've purchased any packs from that cycle. The last deck that I remember I've played was Arwen+Cirdan+Grima that the willpower part figure out on the table and specialized in cycling and resource acceleration to get heavy hitters out quickly. I remember Not being able to do much in any of the Dreamchaser quests with said deck.

Ok, so starting from this basic idea if I make, for theme/synergies purposes, a couple of Noldor/Dunedain decks (one more focused on questing/location control, the other for combat duties for example), submit it to you to see if it's not "too OP" and then play them through the Dreamchaser quests and report my games could you take it as an indicator of sort of the actual game difficulty?

8 minutes ago, Alonewolf87 said:

Ok, so starting from this basic idea if I make, for theme/synergies purposes, a couple of Noldor/Dunedain decks (one more focused on questing/location control, the other for combat duties for example), submit it to you to see if it's not "too OP" and then play them through the Dreamchaser quests and report my games could you take it as an indicator of sort of the actual game difficulty?

A couple? How about just one?

1 minute ago, John Constantine said:

A couple? How about just one?

Ok, a single deck it is. Can it still be a Dunedain/Noldor one or do I have to go with a single "tribe" deck?

1 minute ago, Alonewolf87 said:

Ok, a single deck it is. Can it still be a Dunedain/Noldor one or do I have to go with a single "tribe" deck?

I don't recall any particular Dundedain synergy going on, maybe a few powerful cost efficient allies.

16 minutes ago, John Constantine said:

I don't recall any particular Dundedain synergy going on, maybe a few powerful cost efficient allies.

Is it a yes or a no for the kind of deck? How about Arwen, Cirdan and LeAragorn as heroes for example? For a pure Noldor one I could go with Arwen Cirdan and Galdor.