I don't see any drawbacks on Bifur, yet his threat is 1 lower than it should be.

Splorfindel's drawback implies that he is going to exhaust for questing at least 7 turns throughout the game - which he never will, especially with the Light of Valinor coming in the very same pack.

No good reason? I would disagree with you here. Hobbits live in comfort and safety, they're soft. They wouldn't survive a week of the life Smeagol was leading. He's like Bear Grylls of the LotR universe. He's definetely tougher and stronger than any regular hobbit.

I like a more thematic explanation for his stats. He is clearly a good fighter in comparison to regular hobbits, and he can take quite a beating, but at the same time he is not threatening to the servants of Sauron and is good at avoiding notice. I'd argue that the sneakiest creature in middle-earth deserves an even lower starting threat, but also an even bigger downside. I don't feel that this card captures the sense of danger involved in having Smeagol in your midst.

You like danger, huh?

P.S.: Sorry, forgot to resize them.

These definitely feel more thematic. I presume you meant to keep the item attachment restriction. The second one might be unusable in many scenarios where you are bound to fail on turn 1 or 2.

Smeagol

Neutral Ally

Cost 2

Willpower 0

Attack 2

Defence 2

Hit Points 2

If all your other characters are exhausted, discard Smeagol from play. ​

Action: Exhaust Smeagol to cancel the travel effect of a location just traveled to.

Some more Dunland stuff.

I reworked Ruthless Advance to make way for new event:

And a bit of allies:

I'd play the stalker just so I could have that art on the table.

Now its my time to be nit picky =D

Ruthless Advance: Costed as much as it should be. This card is a late game card, that you will play turn 4-5 (first three turns you are trying to survive the quest). For 1 it would be too strong, for 3 it would cost too much.

Dunland Resolve: Similar to Boomed and Trumpeted, but easier to use. Reinforce the theme of Dunland and is a staple event of the archetype. Great card.

Youthful Stone-Thrower: Aggressive costed, strong and ranged. In a non-archery quest she is maybe TOO good, since 1 dmg every round to someone is totally feasible. Becomes insane when pared with Dunland or Booming Ent. Maybe OP. I would add some restriction to limit her since she is going to be used everywhere. My thoughtless suggestion would be "Can only be played if you control an Dunland Hero".

Countryside Stalker: Simple, elegant and good. One of those cards I wish existed.

These definitely feel more thematic. I presume you meant to keep the item attachment restriction. The second one might be unusable in many scenarios where you are bound to fail on turn 1 or 2.

I like the idea of Smeagol escaping though. It makes me want to combine some of your ideas into a Smeagol ally.

Smeagol

Neutral Ally

Cost 2

Willpower 0

Attack 2

Defence 2

Hit Points 2

​Cannot have attachments.

If all your other characters are exhausted, discard Smeagol from play. ​

Action: Exhaust Smeagol to cancel the travel effect of a location just traveled to.

And maybe an attachment:

Elven Rope

Neutral attachment

Cost 1

Attach to a hero. Smeagol cannot leave play except by being destroyed.

I prefer if the Smeagol ally ran from you, losing a hero is too much!

Also, the "cancel TRAVEL effect" is a sh*tty effect. Have you ever used Thror's Map? I have put it as one of in a lot of decks. I NEVER managed to trigger it for something useful. I would like the Smeagol effect to be better.

You like danger, huh?

P.S.: Sorry, forgot to resize them.

First Smeagol effect is cooler. I prefer him to cost 5 for having that effect, also would help with secrecy deck by costing 5.

His effect is costly, situational and bad. Seriously, some quests it can be useful. Most quests and most of the time even in quests with bad travel effect, you wont have the resource or you dont want to travel to the location you want to use it. Look Thror's Map.

For those quests like Ettenmoors, The Weather Hills, and all types of damage hate:

Cost too much for stats, slow, situational and unsynergistic with Dunland. You even have to exhaust him! The art is cool. Would be nice to rebuild this card from scratch.

OK, so IMO the main thing about the Dunlendings is that the only theme that kinda makes sense with quests like Helm's Deep is that only the Boar clan stood loyal to the Free Peoples. But on the other hand, it would be weird having Boar clan allies in quests like Dunland Trap. In any case, I decided to make a small Leadership glue pack for Dunland, focusing on the Boar Clan (great theme for quests like the Antlered Crown), noticing the lack of Leadership cards in John Constantine's post. I love the damage theme of the dunlending btw.

Talurc art is great. His ability dont work with Dunland. I would prefer him to be a non-dunland card. As a non-dunland card you could do something like "put into play a card that cost 4 or less". If you change his effect to be something else, I would suggest upping his health to 5 for flavor reasons. He is tough, but don´t mind about defense as a barbarian.

Boar Clan Champion: Too good for the cost. In my opinion he should cost 3 and "...deal 1 damage to a hero to..." to be cooler and more elegant card. Also, auto-damage for free is too easy.

Boar Clan Retinue: For 4 he is too easy to play. Maybe costing 5 would be more reasonable.

Savage Leadership: I would prefer if it did something else, global +1 attacks are boring. Yes, lots of conditions, but somewhat easy to achieve for a proper Dunland deck if we get the cards. As printed, can be playable if we have enough tools to damage people and enough easy to play allies to justify. If we dont have many tools to easily damage people or easy allies to play, maybe upping to +2 attack would be cool. Also, it gives the hero attached +1 attack as written, so we need to keep it in mind.

I'd like to see a tactics event that resulted in excess damage being turned into progress.

Heck, I'd like to have seen that be Tactigorn's ability.

Sorry, probably not what you had in mind, but still:

This card is too OP as written. It has no restrictions, cost really low and in any decent tactics deck, it can easily place 3 progress every turn, which is really insanely good. It can destroy active locations before nasty the end of turn trigger and other shenanigans.You can even put it in multiple heroes to place 6-9 progress every turn. Need some balancing in my opinion.

It has 2 restrictions. Tactics or Warrior hero is the first one, Limit 1 per hero in the second one. To place 3 progress every turn, you need to overkill an enemy by 3 damage. To place 3-9 progress every turn, you need to be overkilling enemy on a regular basis. The situations you describe are possible, but mythical and will never happen in an acutal game.

Would Saruman succeed at convincing Men of Dunland to side with the Free Peoples, the Rangers of Gondor would have a much easier time dealing with their rangerous stuff.

I closed the windows in the middle of my review =[. I dont feel like writing everything I wrote, so I will be more concise.

Dunland Ambusher: Great card, elegant.

Witch of the Raven: Maybe too aggressively costed for her stats in lore, since she has 2wp. Her ability is very rarely useful, since most of the time, whatever entered play will engage anyway. If it didnt, it wont engage next turn (unless 1 threat away from engaging). Most of the time to be useful you need + engagement when the enemy enter play or is a constant passive effect. Even then, it is not that good of a effect, so should be more aggressively applied.

Raid: Better the AMBUSH trap card from Land of Shadows. Should cost 2 and have some more restriction. Maybe "to play you must control a dunland hero", so it is still a really good trap, but can only go with Dunlands.

Reckless Berserker: Love it, staple dunland tactics ally.

Dunlanding Spearman: Make it cost 2 and maybe remove sentinel (not sure about the sentinel part). For 3, it is hard to justify since defending ally dies really easily. When you play a 3 costed ally, you want it to work for you the whole game. A 3 costed defender need to at least defend 3 times before being murdered. This can can at best defend twice (kill someone with 2 dmg, which is hard enough to achieve, then die a horrible death by blocking anything).

Enemy engagement cost is not used only for the engagement purposes, there are plenty of effects that are triggered and valuated based on the difference between your threat and enemy engagement cost.

It's not better than Ambush from Land of Shadows. It's different. With Ambush, you can have 2 ready 3 attack heroes kill off an enemy before he even attacks. With Raid that would be only 2 damage.

The trick with a Spearman is to kill something when it attacks before it get a chance to apply it's attack. With a recent event he can even then attack something else for 5.

It has 2 restrictions. Tactics or Warrior hero is the first one, Limit 1 per hero in the second one. To place 3 progress every turn, you need to overkill an enemy by 3 damage. To place 3-9 progress every turn, you need to be overkilling enemy on a regular basis. The situations you describe are possible, but mythical and will never happen in an acutal game.

Yeah, well, each copy trigger individually and don't care about the other copy. So you attach to 3 tactics heroes and overkill by 3 to trigger all of then. More realistic, you have 2 tactics hero or 1 tactics and one warrior and play two copies (but have 3 in deck). Three copies is very rare to occur, since you need to draw the third.

Limit 1 per hero is really easy to met and also the tactics and warrior, since it is a tactics card so you must have a tactics hero and most of the 3 atk heroes are warrior. That why I said no restrictions, since the currently restrictions are really easy.

Enemy engagement cost is not used only for the engagement purposes, there are plenty of effects that are triggered and valuated based on the difference between your threat and enemy engagement cost.

It's not better than Ambush from Land of Shadows. It's different. With Ambush, you can have 2 ready 3 attack heroes kill off an enemy before he even attacks. With Raid that would be only 2 damage.

The trick with a Spearman is to kill something when it attacks before it get a chance to apply it's attack. With a recent event he can even then attack something else for 5.

To be useful the + engagement, you have to have higher threat then the enemy and use the + engagement for something useful. If you threat is lower then the enemy, no need for the + engage. If you want to + engage the enemy in staging area, he had to be stuck there either with a card effect or his engagement is already higher then your threat. So the + engagement when you commit is a really rare occasion to be useful. You had to: Have lower threat (or use card) last turn to keep him there, now have higher threat then the enemy, have some useful application for the + engagement. Can you see where Im going?

Fair point. To be better you need to have probable 3-5 ready guys, so it kills something for free and you still have 3-5 guys to kill something else. More realistic, you doing 2-3 dmg, not enough to kill. You probable playing it for free and drawing one card via Damrod. If Damrod didnt exist, I would say fair enough, but because of him, I more inclined to make it cost 2. The Dunland restriction, forget it, my bad.

The situation Dunland Spearman example you made is the best possible scenario. I think it is hard to have his effect trigger a kill something. 3 cost is really steep, you really want a lot work to be done by the card to warrant that cost. The event is a bonus that you will probable don't need Spearman for it, since it can be used in heroes or with the Berserker, or with anything in your deck since it is a card you will use only if you heavy on Dunland characters. In realistic scenarios the Spearman is underwhelming and wont find many spots in decks.

I wonder how are you going to handle those other enemies at your doorstep if you're going to waste all your 3 heroes actions on attacking a single enemy for progress. Limit per hero prevents 3 copies sitting on a single hard hitter and boosts the action requirement, which is a lot. It's also creates a requirement of having exactly 3 different valid targets for it that are all going to be attacking for an overkill.

Boromir ally, Dagger of Westernesse, Farmer Maggot, Hobbit Cloak, In the Shadows, O Elbereth! Gilthonial!, Pippin, Sam Gamgee, Staff of Lebethron, Taste It Again!, Unseen Strike - they all highly care for the threat cost of the enemy. Especially if enemy in question is already engaged with you (and enemies sometimes engage you through card effects, regardless of threat or engagement cost).

The thing is - it's not forced. You're not supposed to trigger it if you don't want to. 2def/3health with Sentinel is a good deal. Even better knowing that Dunland is a trait that enjoys being hurt.

I LOVE that Raid trap!!!!

So, I've dedided to make a small revision...

...and to introduce a couple of heroes.

The Dunland Spearman is way too strong. Just compare him to Gondorian spearman. For 1 extra cost, you get +1 attack, +1 defence, +2 HP, and the potential to do 3 direct damage instead of 1.

Put him in a deck with Thalin and Spear of the Citadel and you'll never have to worry about attacking.

I like Ruthless Advance because it requires careful planning to use optimally.

If we are going that road...

Gondorian Spearman: 2cost, 0/1/1/1, 1 damage when defends.

Knight of Minas Tirith: 3cost, 0/3/1/3, an ability to remove something from the staging area before questing and possibly to kill it before it even attacks, monosphere though.

For 1 cost you get +2 attack, +2 health, and the potential to improve questing results and even to prevent some nasty "while in staging area" effects and further attacks.

I deisgned Dunland Spearman exactly with the Gondorian Spearman in mind. And for your information, I consider Gondorian Spearman an outdated design, that's why Dunland Spearman might seem so strong to you. No defender (a character with defense related ability) should be so flimsy as Gondorian Spearman. I doubt that hindering future defenders based on Gondorian Spearman is a good design road.

Dunland Spearman needs to keep the damage on him to output it, which means he needs to survive an attack by the skin of his teeth and then he either kills the attacker or dies trying. It's very risky and balancing on the verge kind of stuff.

The Knight of Minas Tirith has a one-time effect that requires you to have all tactics heroes. How does that compare to an ally that could potentially count for 2+ actions every round? (Defense is one action, and you would then need at least one attacker to kill the enemy. On top of this you get to ignore the shadow card)

The Gondorian Spearman stats and effect work thematically. Spearmen are on the front line against the charge. If the spear isn't enough to stop the oncoming enemy then he gets trampled and killed. The entire point is to use him strategically, not to just throw him in front of every enemy and deal massive damage. With hit point cards like Ent Draught your spearman ally could be taking out all the enemies in a scenario, including the main boss, before they even resolve their attacks. That doesn't seem balanced.

Easily. Sheer effectiveness. All Tactics heroes is not a big deal, it actually makes simplifies the usage (with 3 Tactics heroes you can play him as soon as you get him). Potentially is a strong word. That requires setup. Performing setup is what encounter deck usually is not allowing you to do. Knight of Minas Tirith is instant.

While I like the theme being represented by cards, I do not like when card has flaws intentionally just because it's thematic (or theme is used as an excuse for a bad card). Yes, spearmen screwed if someone makes it through their spears, however spearmen usually are capable in taking out more than just a single crow.

Once again - that's a lot of setup you're talking here. You need to attach all that stuff, you need to keep him damaged but alive. And also bosses are usually immune, so he won't be doing much against them.

Here is my thoughts on what you may percieve as more balanced: