Movie block vs Shadows and beyond

[Alazzar]

I only ever played through set 12 (though have since rounded that out to set 13, as Bloodlines cards are dirt cheap), but I didn't really see how they "ruined" the game in that time frame.  Sure, they made some broken cards, but that was a problem they usually fixed with X-listing.

Granted, changing to the new shadow cultures in sets 11+ was pretty lame, but they did a few things right as well.  The site path, for example -- being able to choose which site you play on any given move adds  more decision-making to the game, and more decision-making = more fun!

Yes, the game was better in 1-10, but I didn't think it was too horribly ravaged when I was playing 11 and 12.  Maybe that's just me.  =P

[ket_the_jet]

I hated the site-path changes personally. A Mod can move this to a new topic, but I am posting it here.

Explain how the Fellowship can start at Mount Doom, and then move to Helm's Deep, then finally get to site nine at Bag End! It doesn't make any sense to me and really caused the game to lose a lot of its purpose.

Movie Block (Standard, pre-Shadows) was amazing. It was where the game was supposed to end and it is where the game should have ended. Decipher took away all of the coolness of each shadow culture and combined them onto crappy templates. I liked the idea that meshed with . Or playing Southrons, Easterlings, Corsairs, and Dunlenders all meant something. Sure, you can build decks in Movie block which combine them, but it is much tougher.

The culture most of all should have never changed. Saruman built his own army, and it is a shame to get them thrown into the Cirith Ungol crowd...

...I don't know...I could keep going, but I won't. Certainly Hunters and beyond is where the broken cards are, but Shadows is where Decipher first ostracized a lot of their players.
-wtk

[MR. Lurtzy]

I liked the idea that meshed with .

I never realized that until now.

[Gil-Estel]

And then you start building decks according different sets of rules. Culture bound, specific card centered, that is where the fun is. I mean, I won recently a game with forced march and Enqeua Duplicious Captain, adding 7 burdens at once.....mhuahaha. I love competitions where you try to build the best LTTG deck ever, that is so much fun, onorthodox methods of winning this game. Love it!

[Gil-Estel]

My opponent has an orc out and I end my turn with thin and stretched adding a burden. Can he the play the ring is mine! or is the minion discarded first?

To also contribute on topic...no you can not

[Treebeard13]

They ruined the game, or made it difficult to keep the game alive by their decided lack of support for a very loyal player base.  Even before the Ages End announcement there was very little support form Decipher.  The forums and/or the tournament page would go down and stay down for weeks.  They stopped supporting even the local tournaments let alone the larger conventions.  The last GenCon Indy convention where there was any LOTR attendance (about 30 - 40 players - 2006) was not even run by Decipher, it was run by a volunteer and Decipher gave him a few cards to hand out.  Shortly after Ages End came out the Message Board and Tournament page went down and was never fixed.  Then on top of this tremendous decline in support of the player base you had some very poor sets come out.   I really didn't mind the site path change or the new cultures it was simply that Decipher turned its back on thousands of players who spent a lot of money to support them. 

Chuck

[ket_the_jet]

Not to keep this off topic, but another big blow to their fan base was making entire blocks illegal. When you look at Star Wars: CCG which doesn't have a single banned card (it creates new cards that act as silver bullets against overpowered cards), that's a cool idea. Even maintaining an X-List and R-List is a good idea. But telling a group of pretty loyal players that their work in two-plus years of collecting sets 1-6 didn't matter anymore? Well, that's just lazy.

I am so glad that my hiatus from the game (I stopped playing some time around my senior year of high school, I started again this summer) included the time that this insanity arose!
-wtk

[Alazzar]

I remember when the news of set rotation hit, and I remember how much it SUCKED.  But, at the same time, I can understand the necessity of it.  I mean, there's a reason Open format is a mess (I don't actually play it, but I gather it's something short of "balanced") -- in a game where players will search for abusive combinations of cards, letting your card pool continuously expand only results in restrictions placed on your card designs.

By that, I mean, Decipher would have had to worry about how a card in, say, set 11 would work with the cards in sets 1-3.  Maybe there'd be an overpowered combo there, so they'd have to nerf the card they're designing or maybe just scrap it entirely.  By limiting the card pool, they're given more flexibility in their designs (and there's less chance of an oversight, where a crafty player finds an obscure combination that breaks the game).

I'm pretty sure that Magic rotates sets as well, though I don't know about other CCGs... isn't it kind of standard practice?

Once again, I remember thinking it was a pretty crappy deal when they announced rotation.  But, just like every time they announced something I didn't think I'd like, it didn't take me long to accept it (and, in many cases, didn't take me long to agree that they'd made the right decision).

As far as the later stuff goes (anything that happened after set 12), it sounds like Decipher just didn't give a crap about the players.  That sucks.

[Elgar]

So I asked my son about this - his credentials are that he finished 7th at the Worlds in 2004 when a lot of people still played.

Thin and streched is an end of turn action.  If the free peoples player decides to move on then no burden is placed at that time because the turn has not ended.  When the player decides to reconcile "the Shadow player discards all minions in play ( and cards borne by them ), and your turn ends". [Comprehensive rules 4.0]  At that point end of turn actions would trigger.  The burden is added for Thin and Streched but since there are no minions The Ring is Mine! can't work.

Neat scenario though!
Chuck

long time no talk, Chuck.  That is if I've got the right person (did your son happen to get in that year because *I* had a deck list error?  OSGILLIATH CHANNEL why do you haunt me!)

[ket_the_jet]

I'm pretty sure that Magic rotates sets as well, though I don't know about other CCGs... isn't it kind of standard practice

Magic does rotate. That is a major reason that I have never purchased Magic cards and really have no intention of purchasing them (I did trade for three starter decks from Sweet_Stuff so that I could play with a friend, but I won't be purchasing more).

I think the issue I had is that this could've been avoided. Don't think the cards will work with older cards? Build them so that they will! It's an easy solution in thought, maybe takes more effort in practice. I think that is the betrayal a lot of people are talking about.
-wtk

[Alazzar]

I think the issue I had is that this could've been avoided. Don't think the cards will work with older cards? Build them so that they will!
-wtk

See, this is what I was getting at, though.  By having to ensure the new cards worked with EVERYTHING else that had EVER been printed, the designers would be tying their own hands.  It would limit what they could do, because maybe they wanted to make a card that did X, but that wasn't an option because of how it would work with something from Mines (or whatever).

And yeah, I definitely think a big part of it is how hard it would be to take into account all possibilities.  I mean, players were able to come up with broken combos even in cards that were standard-legal (Fruit Loops, anyone?).  Decks like these just happened to be stumbled upon by a few very creative deckbuilders -- even the other top deckbuilders in the world didn't come up with the idea, so how are we to expect the designers to see these broken combos?  The bigger the card pool gets, the harder it is to spot these errors.

And it's not like the cards become completely useless once they're rotated out -- there's still always block play and stuff.  =P

[ket_the_jet]

X-List a few particular cards. Gondorian Captain had to be X-Listed two sets after he came out because of Base of Mindolluin. But that's okay because they realized the potential brokenness of that one, specific combination!

Honestly, if they thought that the old cards hamstrung their new ones that much, they should have stopped making cards for the game.
-wtk

[Treebeard13]

long time no talk, Chuck.  That is if I've got the right person (did your son happen to get in that year because *I* had a deck list error?  OSGILLIATH CHANNEL why do you haunt me!)

Same Chuck - PM sometime and bring me up to date on how life has been treating you these last couple of years.

Chuck

[Treebeard13]

I didn't really have a big problem with a number of the changes that caused people to gnash their teeth.

The site path I just looked at as challanges that happened to be named after locations in Middle-earth.  Wasn't crazy about the new cultures.  If you could keep all the fellowship cultures the same and Nazgul (although dropping Nazgul Orcs) then why change the minions?  I do agree that it would become increasingly harder to make sure cards would work properly for all blocks whether they were rotated out or not.  It became an impossible challenge when you reduced the staff to one game designer and upset all the play testers so that they left.  At first I didn't really care when they stopped making a complete alternate foil set - but in hind sight I think it cost the game a lot of collectors who were also players.  A number of people on the old Decipher boards claimed to hate Reflections - I again thought it added some neat strategy elements.  The new minion cultures also added some new strategies - but not much that I could see requiring a new culture.

That's my rambling.  I still think that, not without some effort, a relatively small percentage of cards could be errated and you could have no cards banned and have them viable for all the major formats.  I would suggest starting with the Fellowship Block - probably the easiest.  Fix the cards in that set - with knowledge that it will also have to fit with the remaining sets.  Come up with the erratas, open to the group for play testing and then finalize.  When completed move on to the Tower Block.

Just a thought.
Chuck

[ket_the_jet]

The site path I just looked at as challanges that happened to be named after locations in Middle-earth.  Wasn't crazy about the new cultures.

Why not just remove the One Ring from the game then? Just have the Fellowship get to site nine? Every preceding block, site nine was closer to Mount Doom than site eight, etc. And the idea that you could play a game without leaving the Shire and actually ending up at Bag End! Well, that's just terrible. 

If you could keep all the fellowship cultures the same and Nazgul (although dropping Nazgul Orcs) then why change the minions?

The rationale that was used is that no one played Rainbow minions decks. Well, an easy solution would be to make minions that worked well in rainbow minions decks. Hate and Anger is one of the coolest cards ever printed if there were more low-cost Uruk-Hai for a great swarm. Just an example, but more of those would've been great. And even when they did combine all of the orcs into one culture, how many people played , , , and decks? There were just fewer cultures in the rainbow!

I do agree that it would become increasingly harder to make sure cards would work properly for all blocks whether they were rotated out or not.  It became an impossible challenge when you reduced the staff to one game designer and upset all the play testers so that they left.

I agree. Decipher had some bad stuff happen, but they should have just hung up this game.

At first I didn't really care when they stopped making a complete alternate foil set - but in hind sight I think it cost the game a lot of collectors who were also players.

That is true, a lot of people did stop collecting. They decided that the Masterworks idea would be a great way to sell more packs--and it did for the later sets. But my near-foil decks are just so cool to look at and I am still trying to finish them...they could still be selling cards to me!

A number of people on the old Decipher boards claimed to hate Reflections - I again thought it added some neat strategy elements. 

I have played Dwarves since the Fellowship block. And let me say, it is much more competitive with Reflections. In fact, with the exception of Gimli, Feared Axeman, all of my dwarven companions are from Reflections. I like the alternate Ring-Bearer idea and they came up with some cool cards in that set. I am one person who has no qualms with Reflections (outside of opening up a box and getting 16 copies of Vilya, Ring of Air!)

That's my rambling.  I still think that, not without some effort, a relatively small percentage of cards could be errated and you could have no cards banned and have them viable for all the major formats.  I would suggest starting with the Fellowship Block - probably the easiest.  Fix the cards in that set - with knowledge that it will also have to fit with the remaining sets.  Come up with the erratas, open to the group for play testing and then finalize.  When completed move on to the Tower Block.

Absolutely! Or, just X-List a number of cards from those sets. It still wouldn't be as big an issue as having no access to those sets at all. I don't think the number of X-ed cards would even be that high. There would certainly be obvious ones--The Shire Countryside, Legolas, Dauntless Hunter, etc., but I think it would be a relatively short list.
-wtk