benhanses said:

i tried it in an all tactics deck, which was pretty useless as when one got ahead of the other, the other hero caught up….nice and thematic but pretty useless. actually it worked well once when i had legolas doing all the killing and then had bard with black arrow and about +4 from the keeping count.

rich

Veteran of Nanduin needs an ability based on a wounded dwarf or something like that.

Then again, honestly Battle-master is op and that's the problem. If Battle master wasn't around Veteran would see more play.

richsabre said:

EAXCTLY what I had in mind…

Humorously, I had started typing out about the only scenario that I thought it might be useful, and it was pretty much the same as you described above… lol. Pretty much "benching" one of your heroes from attacking for multiple turns in order to get the other one built up a lot… kind of crippling your own deck's usefulness that way, in my mind.

benhanses said:

The only use I see for it is in a quest with Battle keyword. Slap it on your main attacker and one on some support hero. Attacker will pump up the other hero, who will be more useful in questing. It doesn't help Keeping Count to suck less, though.

Keeping Count is another card I always thought has an inverted phrasing (like taking initiative)…it would be useful if it was the contrary…the hero that kills gains +1 attack if the other copy has one less resource…this is really a bad card (also because you need to have two of them in play :/)

Rapier said:

I think this touches on the real problem of "Living Card Games." Since you get everything when you buy a pack/deluxe box/core set. you get the best, the average, and the terrible - but the cards seem built around the collectible game design philosophy where most people just play with whatever random cards they get, or the singles they buy/trade for to supplement. What that means is that when there is a good card in a new pack or box set, the older card it obsoletes has to be cut. There's rarely room for both.

Decisions about which cards to play also center around the spheres. If you are a solo player, you are running spirit or you are losing consistently. If you are playing with a partner, both of you are playing in tandem or you are losing consistently. Out of approximately 300 some cards that have been made, only about 50-75 of them are useable in 2 player settings, and I guarantee they revolve around spirit for questing, tactics for fighting, and lore for healing/card drawing. You can take out tactics if you are in it for solo play (again, for those looking for consistent win percentages).

Ultimately, the solution is to give the spheres more independent strengths rather than top-down design that forces players to build their decks the way the designers create them.

Actually if you can build a good deck you can win solo even without spirit (maybe not 10/10 but 7 or 8 /10)…When I play solo I almost always use at least one tactics hero (sometimes two) and still I get to win 3/3 or something less in most scenarios. The eagle build is awsome if you add Leadership, and starting with a threat lower than 29 allows you to win consistently (maybe not in scenarios like RTM or JTR) without heavy modifications. I built tons of decks and I have come to the conclusion that spirit is essential in multiplayer but not so in solo, while without tactics you can almost always say farewell when the scenario instructs you to kill one or more enemies (most of the times large trolls), without spirit you can do fairly well in quest heavy scenarios (just add celebrian's stone, gandalf+sneak attack, faramir, dunedain quest and so on)…the only problem is when you have to cancel a nasty treachery, but in many scenarios the vast majority of treachery cards deals a damage to exhausted characters, raises your threat by one or two, reveals an additional card…not so bad (in solo play)…it's quite different if you get a sleeping sentry or something as nasty, but it happens that you can't cancel even when running a spirit hero due to a test of will being the only cancel in the game (with the difference that running one of them in solo means you have a lower amount of total HP to absorb damage)…I really think one can build almost any deck with his chosen combination of heroes and spheres if his strategy is good and he swaps a few aimed cards for every scenario. And about the 50/75 cards thing you mentioned I have to disagree completely. While in solo the pool might be smaller (yet I used at least more than twice the numbersyou've given), in multi we used almost all of them except for the very bad ones (wich were bad even in the very beginning)…