Skilled Play

By darthweasel2, in The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

So here is a weird question I am not real sure how to frame. I got a couple core sets and a couple miscellaneous add ons. Played a bit, then went away from it for a few years. Recently got back into it. Enjoying it but I can tell that my skill level is not as high as it could be.

Part of it may be my approach. For example, on A Passage Through Mirkwood, I plan my first turn around having a clear board. I routinely quest for 4-5 progress tokens. I see other people who consistently add 1-2 tokens at most and who leave maybe the Spider alive or locations in the engagement field they could travel to. And as I watch their results, I know they are better players than I am but I have not yet put my finger on the why. What I am missing.

Clearly it has to do with making skilled plays. I don't mean the brutally obvious...Sneak Attack/Gandalf, for example. Others I think are a bit more subtle...people love to use Henamorth (sic) to see the next card off the deck, which is clearly more powerful than in two handed or more, but can still give good info. But that presumes you know how to use that info...has to be more than just "this is top card off the deck, quest for..."

What do you consider some of your most skilled plays? Do they primarily come in the deck building phase or the play phase?

Example, I am playing a too high starting threat Aragorn/Legolas/Bard the Bowman in one deck and Eowyn/Frodo/Bifur on the other. The plan was to either feint or, preferred, Forest Snare the troll. In five or six games, I have not drawn into the snare once. Fortunately, I have found other ways to beat the scenario almost every time (except once when after the game I started thinking I might have forgotten to add threat the next to last turn and if I did, I lost that one as my threat was 49) Taking an undefended troll attack using Frodo to bump threat and then unleash the Legolas /Bard with Black Arrow first turn was fun...but that seems like an unwise strategy to rely on. More skillful play would mean I would not need to lean on unlikely opening card draws.

I am considering swapping out Berevor for Bifur, but then I will be much more reliant on Song of Wisdom popping up sooner or I will not be able to play the cards anyway....unless I luck into a Steward of Gondor in the first couple turns. But those are clearly deck building problems.

What are some game play things you do along the lines of Henamorth to see the future to help you get through the scenarios? I suspect I tend to use too much brute force (quest with Eowyn/Frodo/Bifur/Aragorn, pop up Aragorn) and not enough finesse. I am looking for a head start on being a better finesse player essentially.

A largest element of skill that find crucial for this game is understanding the flow of the quest and and leveraging that against the flow of your deck.

This comes most often when advancing quest cards. Knowing when to advance and how to have your board state properly leveraged for that moment are key.

I have a pretty good success record against the last two or three cycles of the game. It took me about that long to get a groove I guess! I played for years thinking the game was impossibly hard and why would anyone ever want to increase its difficulty with Nightmare decks. Meanwhile other people in the community were complaining that the game was too easy. Were we playing the same quests!?

I got there after the Angmar Awakened cycle concluded I think. Part of it is experience in building decks-- this was my first game anything like this, by a long shot, and it took me a good long while to get decent at deckbuilding. There are many resources out there for learning how to do that. But you're asking about in-game decisions, I think, the skill that happens during the game, and not outside of the game.

Main difference in my playstyle is how deliberative I have become. I am usually planning out the rest of the round before I commit to the quest, thinking about likelihoods. I'll estimate how much threat is likely to be revealed by the encounter deck (which can go wildly wrong, that's the nature of the game), and think about how many enemies I'm going to have and what I'll likely need in order to defend and defeat them... only then am I comitting characters to the quest. Then I'll have a long pause again during the encounter phase so I can map out what is likely to happen once cards have actually been revealed. It's a slow playstyle, and slower because I play 2-handed. Adding scry to my decks is very synergistic with the way I play, but WAY TOO TEMPTING for me to plan everything exactly, so I rarely use scry. The game takes for-e-ver.

The other part of "skill" for me is recognizing what you can do with your board state, if you get a little creative. For example, when finishing Fortress of Nurn recently, I had a moment where I had I think 3 enemies engaged with my combat deck, which included Gimli. One of the enemies was a big troll. I was going to be one shy of being able to defeat it, which on that round was my priority. I didn't have anything in my hand or any attachments to move around. But I had Gimli, who has his own built in attack boost. He was not at full power, and could take more damage in order to have more attack strength. But there were no enemies on the board who Gimli could tank undefended and survive. So, I used healing from three sources (Glorfindel, a Dunedain Remedy, and a Warden of Healing) to bring him to full health, took some undefended attacks (the other two enemies I think? I can't recall the exact board state), getting me exactly the number of attack points I needed to defeat the troll. Any other play would have kept the troll engaged another turn, which means the next round would have played significantly differently. To be able to do plays like this, I favor decks with lots of "moving parts," I guess is a good descriptor, rather than just a big ally swarm which might be more straightforward to play but less flexible in how it reacts to the encounter deck.

Hope all that is helpful to you in some way.

There is a key concept in Magic the Gathering that translates extremely well to Lord of the Rings. In Mike Flores' seminal article 'Who's the Beatdown?' he talks about the importance of role assessment. The gist is that you must play differently when you are ahead in a game vs. when you are behind. A huge part of this is risk management:

When you are ahead (in terms of resources, board state, etc.) you really want to cement your favored position. You should therefore try to play conservatively, taking fewer risks, and preparing for cards that could potentially wreck you (i.e, 'playing around' them). In other words, play with the worst case scenario in mind.

If you are behind on the other hand, you need to take more (calculated) risks. This can mean taking attacks undefended, or opening yourself up to devastating treachery effects, as long as this lets you make more efficient use of your cards and potentially sets you up to be in a better position in future turns.

To give an example: Recently, I had a 2-handed game of Into Ithilien where I had already developed my board and got attacked by a 5 Strength enemy. I could have chump blocked with an Envoy of Pelargir, or blocked with my Gildor Inglorion ally. I thought that blocking with the Envoy would be the better option, since Gildor was a more valuable ally and could die if the enemy flipped a Shadow card that increased its Strength. I quickly realized what a horrible mistake I had made when the Shadow card turned out to be Blocking Wargs. It killed my 1-toughness ally before damage was dealt, thus causing the attack to go undefended. Coupled with a 5-Strength attacker, this meant a dead Hero. My board was well developed at this point, and I could have afforded to lose Gildor, but not a Hero. Playing around Blocking Wargs would have 100% been the correct decision here, but I missed it because I was not mentally prepared for the worst case.

That said, blocking with the Envoy could have been the correct decision if my position in the game had looked differently. For example, if I had very few allies and/or really needed Gildor alive in order to set up future Vilya turns. In that case, I should have just played as if Blocking Wargs didn't exist and blocked with the Envoy.

I think that a lot of strategic decisions in this game boil down to identifying what encounter cards you can afford to play around. Over time, you will develop a feeling for when it is correct to take more risks, and when to play conservatively. Learning the encounter decks also definitely helps with that.

been figuring out a few. Long ago in a galaxy far far away before many of you were born I played a lot of the early CCGs like Spellfire, BattleTech, Ultimate Combat, Doomtown, Raw Deal...deck building was never my favorite but it is definitely an important part and I have been working on building decks that are synergistic instead of just "oh this is a good card", I got past that syndrome years ago.

I have learned some of the surface level deviousness like Gandalf's Search+Zigil Miner to get key cards, stuff like that. I have mostly been playing 2-handed which covers a lot of sins that get exposed when I single deck.

Working on a "I don't really have enough cards yet" dwarf deck, and it has potential. When it gets Narvis Belt and Steward of Gondor out early (wow, you get good cards early and it works? shocker!) it can deal with questing and still handle minions. But missing either of those and it is either/or...so I can choose how to lose. Working on the moves within the deck. I can see the framework...and getting better at, instead of clearing the staging area every turn regardless of travel, using Northern Tracker to clear the dangerous ones, little things like that. But there is no question solo exposes my weaknesses.

Side question; I have deliberately not done a lot of quest anaylsis; I have I think 9 quests at the moment (and some are far too difficult for the card pool I have at the moment) so one way to keep them fresh is to not memorize which ones have deadly treacheries which keeps them fresh...and sometimes causes me to lose a character (shadow made me discard defending character...grr) so it might be time to start looking through first. The real question is; how important is it for a casual player to build the deck to the scenario?

On 11/6/2020 at 10:15 PM, darthweasel2 said:

I have learned some of the surface level deviousness like Gandalf's Search+Zigil Miner to get key cards, stuff like that. I have mostly been playing 2-handed which covers a lot of sins that get exposed when I single deck.

If you have the Foundations of Stone pack, you'll find that Imladris Stargazer is more efficient than Gandalf's Search as a Zigil Miner combo card, if you're only interested in the resources rather than the card draw. And if you want the card draw, Foundations of Stone also includes Daeron's Runes, which is a better card draw option than Gandalf's Search as well. If you don't have Foundations of Stone, I think you'll want it for your dwarf deck, and you'll probably ditch Gandalf's Search once you're finally able to get a copy of Foundations of Stone.

I ended up getting several packs and have been going through them breaking down what they do. Actually going into deck building mode with specific approaches instead of more "I have bunch of good cards and am going to figure out how to use them". Played several games, had fun, now time to get more serious. Forgot how much fun this game was