My Hunt for Gollum pack finally arrived yesterday!

I've experimented so far with some new cards in my Lore/Spirit deck. Bilbo + Berevor has been pretty powerful. But most of all I'm loving Song of Kings.

I added the three Riverndell Minstrells and the three Song of Kings to the deck, plus i splashed in some Stewards of Gondor and Sneak Attacks. It's proven a pretty powerful combination so far, being able to sneak these excellent cards into a Lore/Spirit deck! Having Steward of Gondor on Eowyn is great to be able pay for the (otherwise epxensive) Northern Trackers

Song of Kings is pretty cool. When I got my Hunt for Gollum pack I thought it would be fun to try to use all the new cards in one deck. Song of Kings made that possible. It took several tries, but I was able to successfully finish the Hunt for Gollum quest using a four-sphere deck.

I must concur about Song of Kings. It allowed me to construct a four sphere tournament legal deck that obliterates Journey Down the Anduin.

So far we have only used it to boost the ressources of a Leadership/xxx deck and it works totally great!

I can't really speak for Song of Kings, but Song of Wisdom has thus far been very useful (like you said, especially combined with Steward of Gondor).

When it says gain a leadership icon, does that mean you get that icon in addition to the hero's normal icon or does it replace it?

Or, another thought, does it just mean you can make your resource icon be from either sphere?

I believe it makes your resource from both spheres simultaneously.

Kiwina is correct. As for icons, you gain the icon. So now you have one more icon on that hero than you had previously.

Gotcha, but you don't get two resources, you get one that counts for both. Thanks for the clarification.

TheGrue said:

Additionally, your character now counts as belonging to both spheres (i.e., with Song of Wisdom a character becomes eligible for A Burning Brand).

The really nice thing about it is that it only costs 1, so you put 3 of those in a non-Leadership deck and you can grab the strongest cards out of that deck to supplement a deck that's not so good at questing/gaining cash.

I only have 1 Core Set(like the designers intended, I believe), so I use SoK's to access my +2 willpower card(the brooch for Aragorn), Steward of Gondors and a couple of Faramir's.

That goes nicely with my Tactics/Lore deck. Card draw + resources + damage/armor!

As much as I love the "song of..." cards for expanded deck options, I can't help but feel that they've cheapened the game a little. It makes the 4 themes pretty much meaningless. I also think they are making the game a lot easier than the designers intended. I wonder if these cards are coming way too early in the development cycle of this game.

Thoughts?

Style75 said:

I really like the game but, I have to say that I agree with you.I guess it is a playability/challenge issue. I think the songs make more cards playable in conjunction with eachother, however some of the mental challenges of finding those combos/techs get taken away by having some cards so easily accessible. But now that you know how easy it is to make cards work with the songs you can make more advanced combos. In a way it is even more of a mental challenge.

guys, I agree that they are quite overpowered. In our two player games, when i had them in my lore/tactis deck, with the Rivendell Minstrell's ability, its quite impossible not to get your hands on a song of Kings for instance, so that the other player who was playing leadership/spirit always gets tons of ressources.

quite overpowred i would say?! maybe we will limit them in our future plays...at least for the medium difficulty scenarios.

your thoughts?

Iver, I'm not certain how putting Song of ** on a hero results in "tons of resources"? You know that adding an icon to a hero doesn't grant them an extra resource, right? It just makes those resources usable for more than one type of card.

radiskull said:

what? really? Your kidding? I thought its giving you right that. LOL...ok, now that is one explanation.

still, why does it say exactly that: "Attached hero gain a [x] resource icon"

Why would that not grant you a ressource from that sphere when it says so?

it says "resource icon" and not "resource each turn." It just allows a hero of one sphere to play cards from another sphere as well. This is popular in multiple CCG/LCG's. In MTG, they had multicolored land cards. Same dealio.

Page 8 of the rulebook says, "Resource Icons: Found only on hero cards, these icons indicate the sphere(s) of influence to which resource tokens in this hero's resource pool belong. They also indicate to which sphere(s) the hero card itself belongs."

Also, under page 12, for the resource phase, it says, "Each player simultaneously adds 1 resource token to each of his heroes' RESOURCE POOLS. A resource pool is a collection of resource tokens store near a hero card. These tokens belong to that hero's pool, and can be used to pay for cards that belong to that hero's sphere of influence. Each hero has 1 resource pool."

The above says that each hero has 1 resource pool, so it only gains 1 resource per Resource Phase. Adding another Resource Icon does not add another resource pool.

Lightdarker said:

Ok, got ya! thanks.