So this is an interesting discussion; I'm glad I stumbled onto it. Both of Decipher's other major propertied games have players' committees that produce new cards (the Star Wars CCG Players Committee and the Star Trek CCG's Continuing Committee, serving both editions), but
the Lord of the Rings TCG does not.
Our goal is to be able to play
the Lord of the Rings TCG.
To do that, we need two things: a vehicle and other players. As Dovla indicated, we have an excellent vehicle (the GEMP program and server), and we have a community: not large enough to maintain a forum, but large enough to find games.
We can compare our community with Star Wars's: from the 24th of September to the 23rd of this month, GEMP Star Wars saw 312 players play 3,427 games. 81.2% of these games were played in the ‘Open' format, which features ‘virtual' cards produced by the Committee, then 12% of these games were played in the ‘Premiere-Death Star II' format, which might be seen to mirror our Movie.
In the same time-frame, GEMP LotR saw 463 players play 5916 games. 51.5% of these games were in the classic Fellowship format, followed by 23.3% Movie and 12.4% Expanded.
It's difficult to compare with either Star Trek CCG edition because the Star Trek CCG, to my great chagrin, uses LackeyCCG, not GEMP, and I'm not aware of any statistics on games played.
Compared to our peer games, then, Lord of the Rings playership is very healthy. This suggests that no change is needed.
I would be interested to know, though, from some of our players who have been around from the beginning, what the trend is in our playership. More than present playership, this would suggest whether change is needed.
Ultimately, however, the decision to create new cards can only be based on one consideration: would we enjoy doing it?
That it would be fun to make our own set of game cards and play with them is reason enough to take on the challenge.
Conversely, without a sufficient number of people who want to so enough to invest the time in it, any such project would never get off the ground.
So the question really is how many members of the GEMP community would be interested in a coordinated dream card project, including time spent programming the cards into GEMP?
The dearth of forum dream card activity suggests few, though the Hobbit Draft Game does suggest a few (I'm not aware of the details of how that project was carried out or by whom). If anyone here is interested in that, I'd suggest raising it in the GEMP chat (repeatedly, so no one misses it). This site isn't heavily trafficked.
A last suggestion: if anyone is interested in such a project, I'd counsel starting small. Why not make a handful of cards (say, two dozen) for one of the game's most popular formats, then run a couple leagues in which players are invited to try them out (similar to the recent Revised Towers Standard plus 9, 14, 16 league)? This would allow interested community members to gauge their own level of enjoyment and commitment to such projects while also gauging player appetite for new cards for constructed play. If the response is lukewarm, we'll have had fun for a few months. If it's warmer, we'll have the seeds for something bigger.
I have more thoughts on what the design philosophy for such hypothetical cards should be, but they're best saved for another post if anyone ends up being interested in a project of this specific scope.
Thanks for reading,
THH