It's one of my happiest, most comforting internet-based moments when I swing by the House and it's still right here, full of years of information and dreaming about a topic 99.99% of the world never even knew about even as it was happening. So many games die and never get a proper burial - LotR TCG has a home still, which means I have an audience here who will
immediately understand the full breadth of emotions I recently felt and am now writing down as a story, which begins in March of 2002.
Mines of Moria released that month. I loved playing Dwarves already and a holdover fondness of creatures from SWCCG made the Watcher in the Water an appealing mechanic to me. I was hyped as #$&*@! for the game's first expansion set. Scrye Magazine was still a thing, and preceding the set's debut they put out their March issue: on the front cover was the back of Gandalf the Grey, just squaring off against The Balrog.
What caught my eye first though was the text along the left side of the cover:
"Hot Balrog Card Inside" centered above the
beautiful TCG logo that always draws my eye - even next to Peter Jackson.
I was 13 years old and the magazine in my hands was telling me that I was about to have The Balrog before
anybody else...! God, I can still remember the weight of the magazine, the frantic dewrappering, the crispy pages palmed through irreverently as I looked for the insert...
And I had a Balrog. For a moment, right there, I forgot all about the problems in my little world. I admired my first promo card more than any other card I'd ever pulled. More than my foil Wicket; more than LSJK; more than any rare in Cloud City that wasn't red! The promo cards in LotR got me
into LotR - into the culture, the habit, the chase. I'd already fallen in love with the mechanics, but throughout FotR I'd still be playing and trading SWCCG most of the time.
But then I got collecting the LotR promos. And SWCCG was over.
It was a lot of fun hunting down the previous 9 promo cards after claiming #10
Durin's Bane and maybe it was over too fast. After that I just kept apace with new promos, and trading for some of the more expensive ones was a tricky challenge but I somehow found a way. (I really don't understand why promo sets appeal to me so much, but I repeated the same strategy in
DHE a few years later.)
I had some legitimately rare and valuable cards. I was proud of my little collection. I displayed them and I played them. Some of them did get a little beat up, but that's because I wanted to use them! They became a minor yet comforting corner in my adolescent life, a building stream of gradual success. I stayed with the game as long as I was comfortable doing so - in that last block, I bought a few packs of The Hunters, a box of T&D, and a play set of Age's End (although I hated the set with all my heart. What a #$&*@! endcap.)
Also for whatever reason Decipher drastically ramped up promo card releases, ballooning to some ungodly number in a little over a year. I bowed out as soon as it got dumb. I was happy with my collection and I wasn't really playing card games anymore so it didn't bother me. In fact I played a lot less of just about everything, as the sudden pressures of adulthood squeezed simple happinesses out of my life. I moved a lot, and I got hurt, and I limped into a distant town with a lot of darkness in my heart. I lived alone and I drank a lot, determined as I was to think my way out of my pain or drown it under a malaise of drugs. My home neglected around me.
At several points over the span of those two years I drunkenly sorted my cards or inventoried them to be sold to some fictional Samaritan going door to door looking to purchase large plinths of defunct gaming coasters. More than several times this happened although I recall very few such agoraphobic alcoholic benders. They happened, and it rarely made sense.
I do - kinda - remember nonchalantly throwing a whole bunch of useless and empty starter deck boxes into the trash - but I used starter deck boxes to store my promos at the time, so I assume I just didn't notice some of those boxes had cards inside. Whoops.
Ever since, whenever I've been going through any of my closet of cards, I'd keep watch for a ragtag group of beloved promos, just in case, maybe, I misplaced them but simply hadn't found them yet. I reorganized every box several times as I've sold-away this or that, and never found the promos. I had to accept that they are gone.
Good news!
It happened a few weeks ago. I'm slowly preparing to move, and my crusade to sell the bulk of my old collections has been in a higher gear of late. I've also been slowly redoing the room the card closet abuts, which clearly means busting everything out for a nostalgic look again.
My promo collection was lost between a stack of Warhammer 40k cards in a box full of other such putrid nonsense. Seven years on, and there they are. My
Durin's Bane!
Black Rider foil signed by Kyle Heuer! I cried immediately and deeply, and without remembering having done so I understood why these had been tucked away with 40k, those cards I hated so much but could never throw away because of
their origin and what they still mean to me.
But that's another story.