Hey! You might want to post the osgiliath tourney on the sub-forum site too.

Zjb12 said:

Good idea. I'll do that.

Wednesday Announcement: February 1, 2012

Having just launched the third 2 Player Tournament and the first ever 4 Player Tournament, I’m excited to announce that the next juicebox LOTR LCG Solo Player Tournament is also just around the corner!

The next three Solo Player tournaments will feature some new tournament mechanics, and I’ll be eager to hear your thoughts, feelings, analysis, and feedback - of all sorts.

Here’s the deal…

February 5-11, 2012
Scenario: Journey Down the Anduin
Deck Parameters: 1-3 CS + all SoM APs
Tournament Mechanics: Sets of 3*
Number of Players: Solo Player

*Sets of 3:
1)A valid result in this tournament consists of reporting your results from 3 back-to-back games, using the same deck for each of those 3 games. (Please observe the mulligan rule, and all other rules, from the LOTR LCG rulebook and subsequent official FAQ documents.)
2) After you post your results, the results from your 3 games will be calibrated using the RGun formula** to obtain your Weighted Result.
3) Weighted Results will then be ranked against other player’s Weighted Results in the Top Ten for this week’s tournament.
4) You may play and report as many games (in Sets of 3) as you would like (so you can try out different deck builds over the week).

**The RGun formula has been designed to value both Final Score (per game) and overall Win Ratio (from your 3 games, cumulative). The formula is: (Average Score of Games Won) x (Total Games Played/Games Won). For an expanded discussion on how this formula was created, you can read the thread called Measuring Success.

I can’t wait to try out this new approach, and I eagerly await your feedback on what your play experience is like as you tackle this challenge in 3 game chunks!

As always, thanks for playing,

juicebox

Play is hard to maintain as you get older. You get less playful. You shouldn’t, of course.
Richard Feynman
American physicist
1918–1988

What about Beravor? No restrictions?

leptokurt said:

I'm inclined to try the more open type build for a more combat heavy scenario and see how it goes (given that I'm wanting to run these next few trials as preparation for the possible launch of a Living Tournament system). Aside from unique tournaments that feature a variety of restricted lists in accordance with various themes or something, I'm disinclined to form my own "banned" list. My hope in this is to see what's possible within the current set of existing rules for the game. But, I hear your questions as thoughtful and coming out of some already thorough discussion on other threads.

I don't know if anyone has asked it this blatantly (well, maybe Glaurung has), but are we saying Beravor has "broken" the game?

I have never played this will of the west/beravor deck. I understand the concept, but can it really work when there are often so many other game elements going on, or do you basically only use beravor for this element of the game and never to quest, defend or attack? Would it be enough in tournaments to limit will of the west or does it need to be both that and beravor? P.S. I feel stupid asking this, but Beravor---who is she in the books? It is a she, right?

juicebox said:

IMO she does break the game, especially if you allow 3 core sets. Theres a 50:50 chance that you will get one UC in your starting had which allows you to draw 5 cards. Soon afterwards you'll have the second UV etc - you'll have your complete deck drawn in less than 10 rounds. In the meanwhile you start to play GG and Gandalf's, you get them back by using Will of the West, so your threat will be down to 0, you'll have SoG and tons of cards - how is this not broken? If you don't believe it, use muemakan's deck and try it yourself. Once you get UC you have almost won the game.

I know people say that Glaurung sounds like a broken record, and I myself don't agree with everything he says, but in this case he's totally right. Beravor doesn't have to be banned though, it would be enough to limit her ability to once per round, similar to Glorfindel's healing ability.

AGoT has the rule that no player can draw more than 3 additional cards in addition to their normal draw per round.. perhaps a rule like that would be appropriate for this game? (And an effect that "puts cards into your hand" doesn't count as "drawing".)

radiskull said:

Sounds fine to me.

leptokurt said:

I guess I want to see/hear something decisive from FFG, otherwise, we're just making up our own house rules.

juicebox said:

Uhm, we just changed the scoring system, but we will not have our own house rules in non-official tournaments, even if they make a lot of sense?

WE HAVE TO END BERAVOR'S RULE OF TERROR!

Or, to say it with Kant:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.

leptokurt said:

But, we're not changing the scoring system. Individual games are being scored the same. We're just creating our own method for ranking results.

I'm not against house rules (or what Kant said) either. Just - context matters. I'll share more thoughts on this later. (Have to make this one quick.)

House rules are house rules for a reason.. they are you OWN rules for making the game more fun for YOU. There is no way you will get everyone to agree on them.. drawing 2 cards a turn... crazy...

Juices idea is good, a scoring system that is FFGs own, using FFGs rules so everyone playing is in teh same boat and then using that tricky math to work out meta scores from a series of games played to give a better picture of deck strength and player skill.. GREAT idea for the community.. but if you add house rules it will be worthless.

As it stands, as muemakan has consistently shown, you win the tournaments with a deck that reduces your threat to 0 in about 10 turns. To do this you need these cards in your deck

1. Berevor and Unexpected courage (to draw your deck)
2. Will of the west (to cycle the combo cards)
3. Gandalf (and either sneak attack or zigil miner/Gildor)

I think the deck design is really clever, but for me it is not interesting to play. It almost doesn't matter what the quest is, the deck does pretty much the same thing and I don't enjoy playing it, so I choose not to play that style of deck and I accept that players using that style of deck will get better scores.

If you want to add rules to a given tournament to stop this sort of deck winning, then there are many (already suggested) ways to limit it, such as

1. Ban Berevor
2. Limit Berevor's action to "once per round"
3. Make Unexpected courage unique
4. Remove Will of the west from the game once played
5. Use a scoring system that doesn't include final threat in the score

Juicebox is very good and polling for opinions, and that it one of the reasons why we participate in his tournaments. At the end of the day, he decides what rules he wants and we decide if we want to compete using those rules. If all the top results are created using a draw/recycle deck then there might be a need to change the tournament rules so make it a more level playing field. I have confidence that, if this is the case, Juicebox will adapt the tournament environment accordingly.

booored said:

If everybody is forced to play Beravor decks, playing tournaments is useless, unless there are two entry lists - one for Beravor players, one for other players. And why is using house rules making the scoring system useless? I'm not sure what you're up to with this, to be honest. ZjB's tourneys for example were so fun to play exactly because he threw in some house rules.

As my name came up once or twice I feel the need to participate.

I used my Beravor deck in 3 of the 7 single tournaments I played in the juicebox series.

So I can play with other decks and do it when playing with friends as the deck is not that fun to play if you play just for fun.

In order to address the problem with this deck just ban Beravor. Nothing more has to be done. Let all the other cards be. There´s no need to restrict or ban Sneak Attack or Will of the West or Gandalf.

Just what I think.....

EDIT: I just read some other posts. The thing with a 2 sphere deck ( no cards from other spheres not even via songs) kills the deck also quite effectifly without banning anything.

So, I think part of what is tricky here is that I'm trying to accomplish two things at once...

1) I'm hoping that we as a community can refine this Living Tournament idea before launching it as a basic tourney system. When I consider setting up that framework, however, one of the goals I have personally is that it would facilitate playing the game as it is - or as it evolves (as designed by FFG). All available scenarios and cards represented, following all FFG rules and FAQ updates. I would hope that someone who has never played the game before would be able to purchases a core set, add some adventure packs if they wish, come to this site, and be able to jump right in the fun of a Living Tourney scene.

In my opinion, there are enough rules to learn in the game to have to further consider additional restrictions - and come to an understanding of why those restrictions where established. And that second part seems to be the bigger deal. We are all operating under limited insight as to how this games works and doesn't work (including the game designers), but if cards are to be banned for an ongoing system of tournaments that is set up to facilitate building decks from the entire available card pool, I want for the game designers to be the ones to make that call. That's kind of their job, as how I see it.

Yes, submitting scores in Sets of 3 (or whatever the final decision is regarding number of games in a Set) would be in addition to the expressed FFG rules. However, in my mind, we are simply creating a tool for helping to more satisfactorily rank player results in comparison with one another. Further, players would not have to do their own math to calculate their final meta/weighted score... they would just play three games and report the results. I want it to appear simple - even though we all (those of us who have been active in these discussions up to this point) know it's been a complicated road getting to this point.

If FFG changes the scoring system again (like they have already done once) or initiate a new rule (limited drawing mechanic for example) or create a banned list (ahem, Beravor), then we'll have to discuss at that point how that would impact our Living Tournament system, but I imagine that certain posted results in the Living Tournament system would need to be invalidated at that point or at least *'d with a note that the particular result came before the change.

2) That said, I'm also wanting to continue to offer juicebox Tournaments. I primarily view these tournaments as a way to experiment with various scenarios - placing interesting parameters and restrictions and what not. Recently, the tournaments have been a fairly straightforward "restricted" run through of the SoM cycle. I wanted to run that through to its conclusion for continuity and to learn together from the play-as-published experience. However, I have some ideas (thanks to great input from this online community) for future tournaments that would be more highly based around certain themes and would hopefully offer new twists on old scenarios. I see timed tournaments (a week, a month, or a weekend - like Zjb12's recent events) as ideal settings for exploring various interesting restrictions, theme tournaments, nightmare variants, etc... we are really only limited by our imagination. This is the setting in which I would want to experiment with various "house rules." Some juicebox Tournaments (especially the more experimental ones) may turn out as a flop, a great success, or somewhere in between. The fun (for me) will be in the trying, the discovering, and the sharing in that process together.

The tricky part (as I mentioned above) is that for this month, I wanted to offer a few almost "open build" tournaments with the main variable being the # of games played in a Set in order to get a feel for how that is experienced as a tournament mechanic. For anyone who's interested in giving it a try, the feedback will be quite helpful in "play testing" this mechanic in preparation for settling on a Living Tournament structure. Also, the first juicebox Tournament for Solo Player featured Journey Down the Anduin with only one Core Set allowed - so this will be a very different play experience.

All that said, I think the concerns about Beravor and the current FFG rulebook are quite valid. I hope it's on FFG's radar. In setting up future juicebox Tournaments (like from March onward, specifically), it will certainly be on mine.

Memetix said:

Agree 100% Lets make petition to FFG and Stop this Beravur VALAR DRAW!

radiskull said:

Aga this make sense. Let me ask: This is additional rules which one come later by necasseary or this rules was from begining?

That's not entirely straightforward to answer. This rule was NOT in the game from the beginning of the CCG days. Eventually they added the rule (in a FAQ/errata document) once it was clear that draw was being abused, and it seemed to help. (And there are a mix of "draw" effects and "take the top card of your deck and put it in your hand" effects, the latter aren't affected.)

However, when they "reset" everything to the LCG, they included this rule. So as far as the LCG was concerned, that rule HAS been there from the beginning.

until people start recording their games with a camera or live in lackey and posting on YouTube I simply do not believe a lot of the "super" low scores.. I honestly think that the majority of people play completely wrong rules. Tragic for example was playing the Elenore could cancel 2 treacheries in a row with Elanor using UC.

This game is complex, and many scores.. especially the ones claiming outrages scores and people saying "this is to easy ban this" I simply do not believe they are playing correctly, and if they are they are only posting a small fraction of there games, witch are mostly catastrophic fails. Juices meta score system is supposed to claim this fixed.. but in the aJTR thread one player posted a 5/5 score... this isn't possible, in fact it was latter revealed he was using illegal cards.

This is the BIGGEST hurdle FFG has to get over when considering Torny play.. not ban and restricted lists and more and more rules on top of ****. They need to make a event were every single table has a judge. This is a co-op game, meaning no one is checking on you. This is a terrible burden on a event manager and oen of the mani reason that this game will never see torny play.

booored said:

As we know tournaments system made for 2 players team. So is quite easy to judge tournaments then. Each team each step will get another team as opponent team. So each step only 1 game for 1 team. Cose 1 game can take up to 1 hour so there is no time for another try(that cose im against all this idea: 3 play against every quest and combine the scores...... physically there is no time for this on real tournaments).So first team play, second team watch and judge. After they change.

1 step 1 game for each team.Best scores win. Then next step you can get anoter team as opponent, if you win you get another team who is also win so your judgment with every step will be more proff. And losers play with losers. Actually i cannot see any other solution for this game, otherwise there will be total cheeting around.

You righ Boored about : Players many times get rules wrong and play wrong. Even Traggic the B many times play wrong and he1 is one of the most active players so what we can say about others....... I long time already want to start my video session but dot really have time for this. But really want to do this.

About me :Sounds like broken record. Yes maybe but i know one thing: Water with time thin the stone. So i talk about Beravur for 6 months and now not only me, Many players start to talk about ban and errata for Beravur. So here is a part of my will too. Step by step and game will be really cool. I love the game and just want to make it better.

booored said:

Uh, what? He used cards that you made up a restricted card listwith a house rule (which is why by your own standards all of the results of your tournament are useless). I think it's clear that no deck will reach a 100 percent ratio for JtR, but with that Beravor deck you will get on average a far better win/loss ratio than with any other deck. And I'm speaking about decks that use only one core set, not three.

If we'd follow your logic our civilization would have no progress at all. Invent traffic lights? Hey, why make driving even more complicated than it is?

Also I have to say that I played enough games with muemakan to say that he's competent enough to play by the rules. His "outrages" scores are all vaild scores, though of course he played a lot of games to get them.

IMHO the simplest way to run a LoTR tournament is....da da da...like a duplicate bridge tournament. Take two hero decks assign one northh and one south and a quest deck. Players then MUST play with the decks assigned and thepotioins they are in. NOrth players go first. the tournament when they send youy to the next station assigns one of your team to north and one to south.

then after you have gone through say 8 or 12 stations however many players there are. you average out the scores. That way all of the players are playing the same decks with the same qusts. Forcing them to work with the cards given, since LoTr much like bridge, is going to be limited on the numbers of cards availale this could be challanging. if you limit it to 6 stations and you have 24 players.. you make four sets of 6 stations. Make it illegal, much like in bridge, to watch another game in process.. And go from there.

Further more, you can thwo more wrenchs into the works by of course varying the kinds of cards enoucntered on the qu3ests instead of following the exat symbol. My suggestion would be of course to have 48 cards repsent 16 cards of color specfici foreach heros resource and 2 gandal cards. These decks are then built and give players 5 minutes to look at their decks and shuffle them and play out that scenario

after the 6 rounds have been scored the team with the lowest average has won

that is just my suggestion

Videtta said:

The problem of this way is that it takes away the deck-building element of a LCG, it just challenges the participants on their skill on card-playing.