I was very disappointed to realise that what was achieved with Warhammer Invasion and A Game of Thrones was NOT used for LotR.
After opening the base set I realised, that the set had only 1 or 2 copies of certain cards.

Of course one could say: "You don't need 3 copies - it's coop after all" and that is true - but what is also true is, that that vastly effects deckbuilding, because you just can't count on drawing one of the copies in reasonable time, thus limiting your deckbuilding options for creating a "solid" deck.

Come on FFG - are you serious?

I have to tell you that I do agree... it's a pity! Because some of the best cards, e.g. for Spirit are not included 3x... e.g. will of the west, dwarven tomb... GANDALF!!!! (in every deck 3x)...

I ended up buying 2 core sets... as I want to support this game anyway... I think it has potential... bought one in English, German... and I'm thinking about buying a third one... in French maybe... at least I'll have an ample amount of TOKENS and threat dials

regarding the future expansions: I think they are planning on putting in 3 copies of the relevant cards... bar the encounter deck and quest deck, I think...

FloLeBlanc said:

Neither of those games' Core Set came in "3 of every card" either, or at least W:I didn't, don't know or care about AGoT. Ditto for Call of Cthulhu, which had a Core Set of 1x of each, didn't have duplicates of any kind.

Then I must have misread the announcement that came out that time - not having that for a core set is very weird though.

Dam said:

Although it shames me to agree with a person that doesn't care about AGoT (fie on you, sir!), I can confirm that with a few exceptions (basic resources mostly), the AGoT Core set comes with one copy of each card.

FloLeBlanc said:

It is only the packs and expansions that changed. Core sets never will change. FFG reps have let us know about this too and answered why. This has been debated to death. Let it rest.

It's really my fault not knowing every single thread that ever has been started on these forums - I'm very sorry.

The initial announcement (for when they switched to 3 copies of each card in a pack) said that they would not be doing this for Core Sets, because having more of the same card means having less different cards overall. And Variety is already low with the current LOTR Core Set set-up.

Thank you for the info.. well I guess due to the fact that it is full coop we will houserule it to "maximum 2 copies - 34 card decks" (that should fit the maximum 3 copies 50 card decks approach, as long as there are no cards that may be included only once in a deck)