A year ago I bought AGoT LCG tried it for a few weeks and sold it. Too complicated for me who had never played a card game with other than a standard 52 card deck. I got interested again a month ago, and with some encouragement here and a BGG I repurchased the core. I think I'm going to make it this time.

Anyway I got to thinking and realized that, not including big box expansions, FFG is releasing 120 new cards a year. My question is how do they do this? It seems like a monumental task. You have to find themes and characters from the books, translate them into playable cards and get matching artwork for them. The cards must not break the game and meld with over a thousand (?) cards that are already out there. From the player enthusiasim I'd say they're doing a very good job. But how in the world do they keep up? Should they go to every other month to keep the quality up?

Actually, it is 20 new cards per Chapter pack and is released 1 per month. So it's actually 240 per year without deluxe expansions!

The Old Man said:

The Old Man said:

According to cardgamedB this currently exist 1348 total thrones cards. And in my opinion they need to keep pumping out cards as fast as they do in order to make sure the game stays fresh. Otherwise people will get bored and move on. The main fun for me is finding fun and interesting combos in mixing the new released cards with the old cards.

Bomb said:

I knew I wasn't thinking right--240--even more incredible and it does seem, from the first reply, that they are doing a very good job of it. But eventually they'll run out of charactors and there be a card for every duck in the Baratheon moot!

We are a looooong way off from running out of available characters. According to Wikipedia, the appendix for A Feast of Crows is 63 pages long; there are thousands of characters, even if many of them are only mentioned in passing. And we get a lot of those barely-there characters in the LCG. Add in all the non-unique characters, plus multiple versions of the most significant characters, and we got more characters than we know what to do with.

And who the character is in the books isn't even necessarily that important. I frequently have to look up who some of the new characters are, but it's a card's ability, not who it represents, that ultimately matters.

240 card a year is fairly easy really. Compare this to any CCG out there that releases 3 sets per year and it pales in comparison.

The current magic block for example, will have 586 cards. (The first set having 264 cards, more than an entire year of AGoT by itself)