5 minutes ago, Alonewolf87 said:

Yeah, Caleb made a ruling with the example of Saruman and Pillars of the Kings. Basically any effect that lowers the value of your threat dial is "threat reduction", no matter which verb is used in the card effect. So Pillars of the Kings would not help you here.

That makes sense, even though it contradicts the rules of L5R. But then, L5R is a competitive game, where the "cannot be reduced" effect is probably coming from the other player's deck and shouldn't necessarily be favored over the "set" effect. Whereas here, the "cannot be reduced" text is almost certainly coming from the encounter deck, or is a penalty on powerful cards like Saruman and bypassing that penalty would make them OP. So it makes sense here to have a different ruling in LotR than the ruling in L5R.

3 minutes ago, rmunn said:

That makes sense, even though it contradicts the rules of L5R. But then, L5R is a competitive game, where the "cannot be reduced" effect is probably coming from the other player's deck and shouldn't necessarily be favored over the "set" effect. Whereas here, the "cannot be reduced" text is almost certainly coming from the encounter deck, or is a penalty on powerful cards like Saruman and bypassing that penalty would make them OP. So it makes sense here to have a different ruling in LotR than the ruling in L5R.

Also especially since they are different games, so I don't see why the rules of one should affect the other....

I am reminded of another topic where a poster was considering a couple of LOTR LGC cards extremely powerful by taking into account some rules used in the Arkham LCG (I think it was stuff like Infighting in regard to moving damage to Immune enemies since it targets the damage and not the enemy, which was quite wrong). There might be some common ground design-wise, but they are two quite separate things.

24 minutes ago, Alonewolf87 said:

Also especially since they are different games, so I don't see why the rules of one should affect the other....

I am reminded of another topic where a poster was considering a couple of LOTR LGC cards extremely powerful by taking into account some rules used in the Arkham LCG (I think it was stuff like Infighting in regard to moving damage to Immune enemies since it targets the damage and not the enemy, which was quite wrong). There might be some common ground design-wise, but they are two quite separate things.

If you look at the online rules reference for LotR and the online rules reference for other FFG LCGs such as L5R, you'll find a lot of rules in common, because FFG seems to be starting from a basic set of rule ideas and tweaking it to fit each game. E.g., compare the "Modifiers" entry in the LotR rules reference and the L5R rules reference , and you'll find that both games have almost the same Modifiers rules, and they also have practically the same rules for Cancel effects, for the word "Cannot", for the concepts of "Play" vs "Put into play", and much more. And the places where the rules vary, it tends to be in ways that make sense for that game (e.g., in L5R each player has two decks, the Conflict and Dynasty decks, so the play/put into play rules mention that fact, whereas that language is omitted in the LotR rules reference where there's one deck per player). That's why I wanted to verify whether LotR's omission of the "Set to X is not prevented by "cannot be increased/decreased" effects" language present in L5R was deliberate, because there's a decent chance that it wasn't, and in the absence of a ruling it would make sense to resolve an ambiguity the same way other FFG LCGs resolve the same ambiguity. Now that I know there's a ruling, my question has been answered; thanks for that.

Edit: And the reason I figured LotR's omission of that language present in L5R might not be deliberate is because LotR was FFG's first LCG, and the early years (I picked it up when it was first released) had a LOT of rules changes. In particular, the Modifiers rules went through a couple of iterations before landing in their final state, with some back-and-forth about whether lasting modifiers would be recalculated or not, for example. And so when I saw that the LotR online rules reference dated from 2018, and the L5R rules reference dated from 2020, I figured there might have been another FFG decision about how to treat modifiers in the past two years, which they just forgot to retrofit into their first LCG. Now I know it was a deliberate decision, not an omission.

My buddy and I ran my mining deck with this contract across from an erestor-elrond-denethor deck against Attack on Dol Guldur. Though it was severely under prepared for locations (we went in blind) mining works exceptionally well with this contract. I felt like the plethora of cards was less of a cost and more of a resource. I also did not toy around with side B as we ended the game at 48 threat.

In short-- this contract is a lot more fun in practice than in theory.

I'm guessing that Tactics Éowyn can't reduce starting threat by 3 when she's played with this contract. Contract hits the table first. Draw hand; mulligan; encounter setup window and finally player setup window.