Yep I’m ok with that though hahaha

Let me rephrase the question "at what point will the community be satisfied?"

At what point will people who enjoy a "Living Card Game" that continually expands its possibilities wish that game to die and never expand again?

Never. So what? Yes, it's true that the possibilites already exceed what can be done in a lifetime, but I can think of *nothing* I enjoy where I hope there will never anything new to enjoy and explore, just because I enjoy the things I already have so much. I know that day will come, "East or West all woods must fail". But I see *absolutely* no reason I should anticipate it with gladness!

Right, its ok to dream and hope, so long as that hope doesn't become complaining or an ungrateful attitude. I think theres a line between wanting more in a good manner and just being bitter or complaining.

Not accusing you guys of that though, just stating that there is a right and a wrong attitude in regards to this subject.

I totally understand being able to dream of course, I like to do so myself at times.

[double-post]

On 7/18/2020 at 6:04 PM, MikeGracey said:

The problem is you can say that we haven't been here yet or explored this archetpye to its fullest yet, but at what point will the community be satisfied? It seems to me like they will never really will be. No sooner is the latest cycle 'spoiled' than people are talking about things they don't have, rather than the things we did get.

Yea, I think it's safe to say we all suffer from Dragon-Sickness. Can never have too many LotR: LCG cards in one's hoard.

Pictured Below, an LotR: LCG player holds their collection lovingly:

I can imagine at least some of the LotR:LCG players also played MECCG in the mid to late 90s. Very funny reference. But also funny that you reference a MECCG card to describe Dragon-sickness of LotR:LCG when the LCG model doesn’t really promote hoarding like the CCG model does. I have the complete player card set (thus far) of LotR:LCG including 3 of all player cards in the Core set (I don’t have a few standalone scenarios and don’t have any nightmare sets) and I might still be hanging onto more MECCG cards (mostly commons and what not) than LotR:LCG cards. Just saying. 😀

Sorry for the squirrel of my first comment. I am fine with finishing with the content (areas explored) that we have, but I am “not fine” with the player card collection that we have. At least from a solo perspective it would be nice to be able to play all 13 dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf in a solo deck. Maybe introduce a hero named Dernhelm that is the same threat as Eowyn, so you could really thematically play Helm of Secrecy. Stuff like that. So if creating content and quests is too difficult and time consuming, maybe offer player cards packs. And of course, no one likes watching something stop.

On 7/30/2020 at 6:15 AM, bdavis969 said:

Sorry for the squirrel of my first comment. I am fine with finishing with the content (areas explored) that we have, but I am “not fine” with the player card collection that we have. At least from a solo perspective it would be nice to be able to play all 13 dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf in a solo deck. Maybe introduce a hero named Dernhelm that is the same threat as Eowyn, so you could really thematically play Helm of Secrecy. Stuff like that. So if creating content and quests is too difficult and time consuming, maybe offer player cards packs. And of course, no one likes watching something stop.

Yea, and really FFG could just continue to release player cards indefinitely and that would be fine. There are, what.... 116 quests already available? With four Custom Scenario-Building sets on top of that? New quests are great and all, but new player cards are where the real excitement always is. I can build a Gwaihir deck right away and start having fun with it, but's going to be probably years before I get to the Vengeance of Mordor cycle... I've been playing this game a lot over the past year (and it's been my go-to Pandemic game) and I'm still only at Druadan Forest in the HoN Cycle.

1 hour ago, EBerling said:

Yea, and really FFG could just continue to release player cards indefinitely and that would be fine. There are, what.... 116 quests already available? With four Custom Scenario-Building sets on top of that? New quests are great and all, but new player cards are where the real excitement always is. I can build a Gwaihir deck right away and start having fun with it, but's going to be probably years before I get to the Vengeance of Mordor cycle... I've been playing this game a lot over the past year (and it's been my go-to Pandemic game) and I'm still only at Druadan Forest in the HoN Cycle.

I couldn't agree with you more. I started December of 2017 and have played about once a week since then and still have 2.5 cycles to go. I wouldn't mind some simple booster pack setups, maybe 12 cards (3xeach sphere) without a hero.

I totally disagree.

I can count on one hand the cards that are really missing in the card pool right now to feel "complete" for me. I could see how a cycle worth (or two) of player cards could fill the gap in a few archetypes. I would welcome player cards, for sure.

But no.

You could tackle the 116 quests with one deck if you want. You wouldn't play 1 quest with 116 decks though. You would get soooo bored.

To play this game, you need quests way more than you need player cards.

Most of the discussion is about player cards, because it's still a deckbuilding game. But about excitement? I've seen more threads over the years of "where do you think the next cycle will be?" rather than "what archetype do you think they will bring?" (barring people wanting some specific character or item). Some people accept player cards spoilers but not encounter spoilers. The contrary is rarer IMO.

So nope. At this point, with contracts, MotK, Thorongil and Helm of Secrecy, the player deckbuilding options are infinite. The quest pool is only 116 quests. The game's variety is all about quests.

More quests is what we need.

Quests.

Quests.

Quests.

There are two things that come to mind for me which FFG hasn't done with this game yet but which could really spice things up and give new life to old cards.

1. Create a saga-like mechanic tying together all 9 quests for each expansion, with boons, burdens, treasures, and so on to add an RPG-like element to the game. This has been discussed many times in the past, and would have a lot of player appeal. It's also highly modular, allowing players to dip in however much or for whichever cycle they want. This would also be an opportunity to "fix" older quests (like many in the Shadows of Mirkwood and Khazad-dum expansions), as some of the Nightmare scenarios have done. This would be easily doable with a standalone expansion pack for each cycle.
2. Standalone or in combination with #1, it would be very interesting if FFG created unique challenges that combined novel quests with interesting deck-building or even gameplay restrictions or rules changes. There are many, many examples of custom fan-made challenges, and it would be cool if FFG were to bring all if its design and develop resources to bear on this idea. A while back they issued a Designer's Challenge , " Three is Company ", which could be a model. That challenge received pretty favorable reviews, if I recall correctly, but FFG never did another one.

4 hours ago, banania said:

I totally disagree.

I can count on one hand the cards that are really missing in the card pool right now to feel "complete" for me. I could see how a cycle worth (or two) of player cards could fill the gap in a few archetypes. I would welcome player cards, for sure.

But no.

You could tackle the 116 quests with one deck if you want. You wouldn't play 1 quest with 116 decks though. You would get soooo bored.

To play this game, you need quests way more than you need player cards.

Most of the discussion is about player cards, because it's still a deckbuilding game. But about excitement? I've seen more threads over the years of "where do you think the next cycle will be?" rather than "what archetype do you think they will bring?" (barring people wanting some specific character or item). Some people accept player cards spoilers but not encounter spoilers. The contrary is rarer IMO.

So nope. At this point, with contracts, MotK, Thorongil and Helm of Secrecy, the player deckbuilding options are infinite. The quest pool is only 116 quests. The game's variety is all about quests.

More quests is what we need.

Quests.

Quests.

Quests.

Totally untrue, imo.

The majority of players i know have not yet played all of the quests, while trying out most, if not all of the major archetypes. Quests, in general have better replayability than a player deck. They're less player dependant and as such, there's more variance.
Majority of the game happens in the player deck, no matter how you look at it. It's how you play the game. While there's some tailoring against the scenario, players make decks to achieve some results using different playstyles. It defines the experience much more than the scenario.

I would also risk saying the whole "infinite" deckbuilding thing is a bit of overstatement, imo. When you stop looking at the combinations of cards and start looking at actual deck foundations avaiable, the amount shrinks to around 40-50 (just spitballing numbers, but i bet it's around here) viable strategies, like "a cotw deck with repeating events, a secrecy with ally swarming with very good tale/timely aid, a boromir fire/blood, fellowship rush, trait deck swarms, etc, etc". While you can make a gondor swarm in variety of ways, it does not create a distuinguishable enough experience for the player to feel like there's a lot of variety going on.

I ran through your thought experiment and i believe it would be much more enjoyable to run 116 different player decks against a single solid quest than vice versa. Your own strategy you're executing can burn you out, the uncontrollable encounter less so, as you're still getting your puzzle.

If you think about it, the player cardpool is actually still not that big and same staples are the foundation of most solid decks. This is not a criticism as the game couldn't take ToW's or steward's ban because it was designed around their existence, but after almost 10 years the core set staples have no real competition.

It's almost impossible to bore yourself with 116 quests, while the cardpool does feel claustrophobic to me at times. As you feel like you "mastered" the "big" archetypes you're really just push to crappy gimmick decks. And i love them of course, but tbh i feel we still need more player cards, even at the expense of the 116th and 117th quest, as 1 single staple player card can reinvigorate the pool (contracts) the way a quest cannot provide.

Why not both? More quests and more player cards hahaha

18 hours ago, Kjeld said:

There are two things that come to mind for me which FFG hasn't done with this game yet but which could really spice things up and give new life to old cards.

1. Create a saga-like mechanic tying together all 9 quests for each expansion, with boons, burdens, treasures, and so on to add an RPG-like element to the game. This has been discussed many times in the past, and would have a lot of player appeal. It's also highly modular, allowing players to dip in however much or for whichever cycle they want. This would also be an opportunity to "fix" older quests (like many in the Shadows of Mirkwood and Khazad-dum expansions), as some of the Nightmare scenarios have done. This would be easily doable with a standalone expansion pack for each cycle.

It's really surprising to me that this hasn't been done. Everyone I've talked to seems to love the Campaign-aspects of the Sagas and really wants something that makes the "stakes" of a non-Saga games a little more interesting. So much could be accomplished with even just a 50 card pack (this would give you one Campaign Reference Card and 4-5 Boons/Burdens for each of the 9 Quests in a cycle). This wouldn't really take much more work, from FFG's perspective, than the Custom Build-a-Scenario packs they've been releasing over the past year.

22 hours ago, banania said:

You could tackle the 116 quests with one deck if you want. You wouldn't play 1 quest with 116 decks though. You would get soooo bored.

I guess I'm the exact opposite, in this regard. I would get exceptionally bored playing the same deck for 116 quests. I was trying to do a "The One Deck" Gray Wanderer deck, and I almost disliked my deck after running through just the first 22 Quests (through Heirs of Numenor) and had to put it down. That's not even 20% of the quests in the game. I'll certainly return to it at some point, but I really needed a change of pace with some radically different decks. On the other hand, I'm sure I've played some quests more than two dozen times, as I've got a lot of different decks and play not only solo but with two other groups of players. I'm sure I've played Journey Along the Anduin (my go-to first test quest for a new deck) at least 100 times, and I am positive that I'd have much more fun playing Journey Along the Anduin for the 100th time with a new deck than I'd have playing the 100th new quest with the same single deck.

All of the groups I play with tend to grab our decks and then try to run them through a cycle, or at least a series of linear quests. I honestly don't know how other players/groups would decide what to play... like do so some people build a deck and think "man I really like Encounter at Amon Din and The Redhorn Gate, so I'm gonna take this deck against those two quests..." I suppose the difference may be in how people approach deckbuilding. I tend to be more in the "The One Deck" kind of camp, and build decks that are intended to take on host of quests, while other people view deckbuilding as something you do with a particular quest in mind. For people who build decks AGAINST each individual quest, since with that approach you're basically looking at each quest as a challenge to unravel and beat, once that's done... maybe it doesn't have much replayability because you've already built and proven what you think is the best tech against that quest..? For me, I view deck-building as an exercise in trying to build decks (especially thematic ones) that are robust and flexible enough to tackle an entire cycle worth of quests... so for me I find myself happily replaying the same cycle of quests over and over because the novelty is seeing how a new deck responds (or fails to handle) to the challenges of those quests, and a series of quests are the metric by which a deck is evaluated.

There are still lots of archetypes I have never even tried, and lots and lots of unexplored variations of archetypes I have tried, so I don't think lack of variety in Player Cards is pressing issue. But if we were to be graced with new content, and I had to pick either new player cards OR new quests, hands-down I know I'd get the most excitement and mileage from new player cards, because I'm sure I could play the existing 116 Quests for an eternity and not get bored with the game. And having a 117 or 118 or 222 available quests wouldn't really change that much. Having another twenty heroes or six new contracts or thirty new attachments... that however would certainly be felt and appreciated.

1 hour ago, EBerling said:

Having another twenty heroes or six new contracts or thirty new attachments

Honestly, more contracts are probably the single most efficient means to mix up the game. This could be a vehicle for accomplishing my second point above, especially if the contracts started messing with not just deck-building and player rules, but also the encounter deck rules. Imagine a contract that gave a big player boost, but also let the encounter deck reveal an additional card per round. Or a contract that allowed players to have two active locations at a time, or one which introduced a variable "traitor" element into the game which could strike you at any point unawares. Myriad possibilities are possible through the existing rules-modification framework provided by contracts.

5 hours ago, Kjeld said:

Honestly, more contracts are probably the single most efficient means to mix up the game. This could be a vehicle for accomplishing my second point above, especially if the contracts started messing with not just deck-building and player rules, but also the encounter deck rules. Imagine a contract that gave a big player boost, but also let the encounter deck reveal an additional card per round. Or a contract that allowed players to have two active locations at a time, or one which introduced a variable "traitor" element into the game which could strike you at any point unawares. Myriad possibilities are possible through the existing rules-modification framework provided by contracts.

About the traitor element.

Welcome Smeagol hero.

32 minutes ago, MikeGracey said:

About the traitor element.

Welcome Smeagol hero.

Exactly -- imagine if there were a way to create a similar dynamic for any hero, for any quest... Could be very cool.

I've long been saying how insane it would be for them to not at least bring it back when the Amazon series airs, we've seen with the Witcher the amount of profit that can be generated by a mainstream series drawing attention to a property.

To a somewhat lesser extent, Journeys in Middle Earth also seems to be a focus of theirs, drawing attention to not only LOTR properties of theirs, but even their invented characters.

I just don't see how or why they'd stop the LCG forever under such circumstances.