In this series, I will concentrate on certain card design (not art) which I find unfortunate.

I will start with two Spirit cards from the core set, Dwarven Tomb and Unexpected Courage. They come to mind quickly when I see two newer cards from the Against the Shadow cycle, Map of Eärnil and Steed of the Mark. And these new cards are what I call "well-designed" but their only problem lies in the cards above which make them bad tactical choices.

If you compare Dwarven Tomb to Map of Eärnil, the former is just better. This I could accept in an inter-spheral comparison but not within the sphere. Dwarven Tomb costs what Map of Eärnil does at its best (not taking into considerations wild coop combos like Desperate Alliance). Tomb is also an event which makes it easier to play. And it can recover any Spirit card, not just events. Finally, it can successfully recover response events whilst the Map can only recycle action events.

Players with long experience tend to fear power creep. This above is an example of the opposite when there is a new card that is way, way inferior to an old one. Does inferior means better design? I would say so in this case, because the Map is perfectly playable, recycling cards like Elrond's Counsel, The Galadhrim's Greeting or Stand and Fight can be very useful, so there seems little arguing that the Map is not strong enough. And that in itself is a good argument for the Tomb being too strong a card. And the fact it only appears once in the core set is no salvation.

The other comparison, Unexpected Courage and Steed of the Mark. This one may be even more extreme. Steed is cheaper by 1 but to use it, you already lose the resource advantage the first time you use it. Then, the use is way more limited, with the Courage a hero can do any two actions, be it quest, combat or ability. With the Steed he can only quest and do one more thing (afterwards). This is already a huge difference but it goes far further. For some reason the much more able card, the Courage, has no restrictions, and can be played on any hero, whilst the Steed can only be attached to Gondor or Rohan heroes.

Now, is the Steed good enough? Well it is not an obvious winner but I feel it can be super useful. As they say in the preview, for one resource you make any Gondor or Rohan hero a Core Aragorn, not bad. Plus, soon we might see some Mount synergies coming from the partly Rohan cycle. So where's the problem, you see it, the Courage.

Solution? As much as I hate to say this, it is errata. Far less potent cards have got it already, so here's time now for these two. Hope others are with me, and ffg are reading...

Wait, to say errata is not enough, right? We need to know how to shaft them. It is not easy but for the Courage, I give two solutions. The first is in accord to what core set card distribution does. Why not print "Limit 1 per deck" on Unexpected Courage. I wouldn't say unique because it doesn't make much sense, thematically, and the designers have been very good with those, maybe save Light of Valinor which also makes little sense being unique (but it helps keep the balance of the power of the card). The other solution could be the cost though I wonder if errata ever goes that way, having a text missing or added is one thing but having something else printed is a bigger problem - unless we finally get the reprint of the cards changed by designers after we had bought them.

As for Dwarven Tomb, I think it is even harder here. I wouldn't want this to become another Dwarven synergy card as we have gotten quite too many of those already. Limitation on the cards it pulls could also be a trouble: if it only works for allies, it would be probably inferior to Stand and Fight. However, it could only work for attachments, after all the thematic ground of this card could be the Book of Mazarbul. So yeah, this is where I would go: dig the grave for a Spirit attachment.

Please, share your thoughts if you feel like...

I agree that some of newer player cards are inferior compared to the old ones.

I think the problem is that right after Dwarrowdelf Cycle, developers got really concerned with power creep and decided to ton everything down, which resulted in this situation.

We've seen some crazy powerful during Dwarrowdelf Cycle.

I'm still unsure what was the process between development of Zigil Miner and Stargazer and their (well Zigil Miner's) errata.

It wasn't even an unforseeable card interaction; they were working as intended... it's just that their intended use broke the game's resource system 5 minutes after they were released.

Even though there were no Dwarf heroes or very little Dwarf allies during Dwarrowdelf Cycle, most Dwarf power houses relies on cards from that Cycle.

We are not Idle and Lure of Moria in same Cycle? Not to mention Legacy of Durin which has potential to (and very often) draws half a dozen cards in single phase.

Not to mention Spirit Glorfindel, who was clearly meant to be used with Light of Valinor and became single powerful hero by far.... to abuse Elrond and Vilya you atleast had to eat high threat cost of 13, price you 'paid' for abusing Spirifindel and Light is 1 threat per Glorfindel questing if you couldn't manage to find Light of Valinor after Glorfindel quested 7 times.

Then we have Against the Shadow Cycle, where almost every card is designed to be outshined by old cards (with exception of Outlands)

Even the iconic hero like Boromir had his ability split into the card itself and an attachment that came out 6 adventure packs after.

It's almost like designers are so afraid of power-creep we are having power-crawling-backwards.

As you suggest in this thread, series of simple yet effective errata on bunch of old cards may be solution (example I could think of would be make Gondor trait requirement for Steard of Gondor, not added effect), but as a forgetful guy I wish FFG would take another, more difficult path to solve this solution; controlled power creep, boosting power level of 'weak' cards to be roughly same as 'powerful' cards... but that process will probably take another Cycle or two and one slip-up and we would be in worse situation than we are currently in.

I find your last paragraph excellent. I wanted to address Steward of Gondor in the next series, and I would have the same solution. There should have been a requirement for the Steward, not a bonus to an already superb effect.

Also, making weaker cards effective is certainly a great feat, but one that is extremely difficult to achieve. Still, since the errata already does, and is bound to, exist, it can do with a couple fit entries.

yes, i agree. the core set certainly had some winners which i doubt we shall see the likes of by the time the game ends. steward was what i was writing when you posted the subject yourself

it is an interesting case to have power 'shrink' in a game. i have usually found that recent packs have power cards that only really gain their power from core set or similar time packs.

as to the question of which should happen - strong cards lose power or weak cards gain power...that is an interesting question. as you say, it is more difficult, and perhaps more destructive to the game, to make weak cards more powerful, rather than powerful cards weaker. i do feel many gamers will be angry at the prospect of having many of their favourite power combos destroyed so ffg would have to be very careful with the errate

rich

Seems to be a typing error here. Fixed below.

^{Errata is a 4-letter word. If you think something is too powerful, don't use it. Or house rule it. I could understand if we were talking about a game with a sanctioned tournament format, but asking the designers to solve your personal problems with certain cards - especially in a casual game like this one - really isn't fair to the hundreds of other players.}

^{That said, I'm sure the designers didn't expect that many people would own more than 1-2 core sets, so that is how they balanced the cards you say are too powerful. Personally, I think they are fine. The fact that the designers made inherently weaker versions of other cards doesn't mean they should retroactively do something to force people to try to use them.}

That was already discuss already….

Also thinking about Lore Aragorn with a new doom cards from VOI he will be crazy powerful…….

So for me UC should be unique or Limit once per hero. Also Cards like Will of the west we are not idle or legacy of Durin long time crying for errata.

I try play Legacy of Durin like: exhaust LOD to draw card when you play a dwarf. And is still pretty powerful even that way.

Without errata or kind of ban or restricted list game will look very odd after VOI will be release. Will see what happen? Or maybe new Encounter cards will be so powerful? Im doubt about that….

^{Errata is a 4-letter word. If you think something is too powerful, don't use it. Or house rule it. I could understand if we were talking about a game with a sanctioned tournament format, but asking the designers to solve your personal problems with certain cards - especially in a casual game like this one - really isn't fair to the hundreds of other players.}

^{That said, I'm sure the designers didn't expect that many people would own more than 1-2 core sets, so that is how they balanced the cards you say are too powerful. Personally, I think they are fine. The fact that the designers made inherently weaker versions of other cards doesn't mean they should retroactively do something to force people to try to use them.}

First we have a tournaments system already , second one we have quest log a well. And last balance in the game should be. It is not kind of weird if game mechanic have some crazy holes like this ? Sounds not serious for me……The game should be healthy no?

We must to have some kind of main stream of the game with fair rules to play with other players or not?

Boris, your arguments are simply breath-taking. "I think they're fine." Point taken, end of discussion, well done!

Yet, your advanced vocabulary doesn't remind me of elementary school, so I am a bit lost there. Have you been around much? Errata is not fair? Maybe, but if you followed this game, you'd know it happens quite regularly, whether you find it fair or not.

What I find not fair is creating two cards that do the same thing, one being clearly better than the other. That is paying twice for one card basically. And that needs be fixed, in my opinion.

Unexpected Courage and Dwarven Tomb are bad examples for me. I only have one copy of these, so I am very happy to get additonal opportunites to ready my heroes. That's why IMO you don't have to limit UC, but you just only use one copy. I could not imagine to play with three copies of such a powerful card.

In both cases I'd say that it doesn't really matter if they're better than their predecessors, as you might just want to have them in your deck to increase the chance to draw a card of that kind.

One thing they could have done is to use the secrecy keyword again. Make the Steed secrecy 1, and it's an excellent choice for most spirit decks. Or something like "SotM" cannot be removed from the attached character.

Eventually, Ellareth has been making an excellent point about power creep.

Thanks Richard, I too find it interesting what core set holds: some of the strongest and weakest cards in the game so far. Lack of foresight maybe? Surely understandable as it is hard to predict what shall come... and the change of the main designers might have played a role, too.

Thanks Glaurung, for once I completely agree with you. The game should be healthy. I don't buy the stuff like "if you don't like it, don't play it." I pay it, and I want to play it by the rules, and I want the rules to make sense.

Thanks Leptokurt, you might see you contradict yourself there, first saying UC needs no errata, then that you could not imagine playing with three copies of it. But this is the case exactly. In a tournament settings - and this is really no hypothesis - it is too late to be saying to your "opponents" that they should be of good sport and use a single copy of UC. Even if each of them only has a single copy of the core set, they would have two copies of it for coop. In the end, you basically agree with what I wrote: "Limit 1 per deck." They really could have gone that way from the start: making the cards than only came once in the core set limited as such.

^{Errata is a 4-letter word. If you think something is too powerful, don't use it. Or house rule it. I could understand if we were talking about a game with a sanctioned tournament format, but asking the designers to solve your personal problems with certain cards - especially in a casual game like this one - really isn't fair to the hundreds of other players.}

This.

We in our group use house rules. And only restrictive ones.

For expamle on this subject: we have access to 3 core sets, so we can use every "power card" multiple times.

One of our house rule states that every card that gets the stamp "power card" is limited to 1 per deck.

In our case that includes obvious cards like Gandalf, UC & SoG which are discussed here.

You can make your own rules as this is not PvP.

Errata = the last resort to close loopholes that really break the game.

And even then you can choose to ignore errata's and play however you like.

Nobody cares anyhow how you play, as you play at your own table in your own house and can cheat all you like.

Bottom line: if you don't like it; restrict yourself, don't restirct everybody.

.

But this is not the point. Really, do not pretend like the errata is not there, it is. And it will most likely grow in number whether you like it or not. Now, I could tell you the same thing, if you don't like the errata, just don't use it, don't play by the rules if you don't feel like, don't play the game if it's too bad.

But then again, you basically said that later, just as you said you use the same trick I had suggested.

I'm happy letting people solve their own problems here. Noccus presents a solution that is entirely workable. The only problem is that it's a solution which is not printed in black and white, so you might not like that solution if you feel unsatisfied when playing with rules that are not officially sanctioned.

Playing Devil's advocate here, but the reason we've had the erratas before were due to things that actually broke the game. Not made things less fun, but made for combos that sort of made for things not fun. 5 or so resources per turn in spirit? Infinite combos? Those are actively bad for the game. It may be that some of the older cards are a bit too powerful (and I know that spirit Glorfindel is pretty OP), but they do not break the game. See Tales From the Cards article about breaking the game in relation to Dain: http://talesfromthecards.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/is-dain-broken/.

That said, I think with The Voice of Isenguard, we might well see some power creep, at a price. None of us really know what the future holds, but I'm optimistic! But hey, if there's errata, there's errata. I trust the designers to fix their game.

Power In The Earth...

Has anyone ever seriously used this card to good effect?

http://www.lotrlcg.com/Card/Focus/1056

GrandSpleen, yes, thank you, this is what I meant, some people just like to play according to the rules, not making them up. I have tried house rules in many a game, it never felt satisfying.

Zalrus9, thanks for participation. I guess my point is not about cards being broken, what concerns me is "dead" cards or "obvious" cards. I hate having two cards of the same sphere knowing that choosing one of them is ALWAYS beneficial in terms of the game mechanics. The above examples may not be spot-on, but they are pretty close. As for Dain, he shall be the next subject, I consider him bad design also because there is no other candidate to choose instead of him when making a Dwarf deck, there is no one to challenge his position.

Power In The Earth...

Has anyone ever seriously used this card to good effect?

http://www.lotrlcg.com/Card/Focus/1056

Good example.

In this thread I mostly see two types of people.

Those who want to follow or exploit the rules to death (like enforcing tabletalk rule like jerk or not applying any kind of self-controlled restriction) and still have enjoyable game,

and those who doesn't mind house-ruling or self-restricting a bit (like playing double-handed or ignoring/self-errata-ing certain cards) to tailor the game to be enjoyable.

former clearly wants things to change, but only wants developers to change them,

latter clearly doesn't see need for things to change officially since coop game can be changed unofficially.

If developers does not change the game because we can house-rule to change the game to each of our satisfaction,

former group would be happy (since they already are happy) but latter would be unsatisfied.

If developers does change the game because people want the game as whole (the game, the whole game, nothing but the game),

latter group would be happy (since they got change they wanted) and former group could continue to apply new house-rules or ignore new errata and be satisfied..... sounds like a win-win (or win-neutral... but defeinitely not win-lose)

So I'm really confused as to everytime group of people express their want for something to change (with reasonable reasons) why another group of people wants to (or feel the need to) tell them off.

As for errata being reserved only for cards that somehow obseletes a game's mechanism,

I agree that is how the things should be, but would also argue that that is not the case with this game.

Maybe it was true for first set of errata, but the cards that have received errata later didn't actually break the game or if they had potential to break the game they still do but is just little bit more difficult (Feint and Master of Lore being exception... although I don't believe Master of Lore errata was a good call.)

What is interesting is that we actually have a sort of backwards-errata with Ravens of I-forgot-what-it-is-called Hill.

I refuse to believe developers were careless enough to let one of the few defined word (reveal) slip through their fingers.

I believe that developers saw the danger of letting people make progress tokens on active quest using Event card Action so made that card high risk danger (revealing instead of just looking), but then people complained enough that they changed it.

Funny thing is even if the Ravens still had the wording reveal instead of looking, it wouldn't really hurt that French-deck-that-can-win-the-game-in-first-round much at all.

I agree that errata should be issued with care, but disagree that it should only be issued when core mechanisms are in danger... it can be (and there are cases) where errata was used to bring the cards down a notch (or bring the card up a notch)

I'm happy letting people solve their own problems here. Noccus presents a solution that is entirely workable. The only problem is that it's a solution which is not printed in black and white, so you might not like that solution if you feel unsatisfied when playing with rules that are not officially sanctioned.

I agree. More concerned about what the new rules or erratas might look like than the current unbalances (I just play this game for fun).

What if the there was a collaborative forum based created set of additional rules/erratas? Would this be helpful, for people wanting changes? That it wasn't just your own house rules - Then people could choose to play easy mode, normal mode or forum mode?

Power In The Earth...

Has anyone ever seriously used this card to good effect?

http://www.lotrlcg.com/Card/Focus/1056

Haha - No!

So I'm really confused as to everytime group of people express their want for something to change (with reasonable reasons) why another group of people wants to (or feel the need to) tell them off.

Same here, I am confused. It really seems some people willingly disobey the rules, and then they are afraid for them to change because it would spoil it for them. Talking of paradox.

What if the there was a collaborative forum based created set of additional rules/erratas? Would this be helpful, for people wanting changes? That it wasn't just your own house rules - Then people could choose to play easy mode, normal mode or forum mode?

You know, this is basically what I was trying to find out. I wanted to see if people agree about certain arguments. And then, had it succeeded, perhaps even hope ffg would go and think and maybe change things up a bit.

I don't think I will be too self-confident if I say that we here are among the best play-testers ffg can get. And the designers know themselves they make mistakes. So I think it is not bitching but rather nice to tell them collectively (and for free).

However, I see there is not a real consensus. Or there might be about the cards, more or less, but there is none about the corresponding action (or the results of the inequality).

And finally, as for ffg errata: No, it has little to nothing to do with breaking the game. Master of Lore is a perfect example of a card with very limited potential, not allowing any loops (it had always been the other cards), yet it got shafted and is now rubbish. Such errata I dislike but still obey.

I follow all the errata as well. I also don't proxy cards. I like the purity of having the cards in hand and playing them "as intended" by the designers, but I am sometimes puzzled.

And as for Power in the Earth - they should errata that one to make it useful. My suggestions:

• Make it 0 cost, OR
• Make it reduce the threat by 2, OR
• add: "If the threat of the attached location is ever 0, discard it." OR
• add: "draw 1 card."

And finally, as for ffg errata: No, it has little to nothing to do with breaking the game. Master of Lore is a perfect example of a card with very limited potential, not allowing any loops (it had always been the other cards), yet it got shafted and is now rubbish. Such errata I dislike but still obey.

Yes I wish that they would either un-errata this one... or at least reduce the cost to 2!

because of where I live in the world, plus deliveries going astray, it can be six months be months before I get a pack. - still waiting for Black riders, 3x orders failed to arrive. Currently on order from two separate places, will give away second copy - if it actually arrives)...

So by the time I get them they can already be errata-ed an,d in Master of Lore's case, semi useless before I get to play