Hi everybody,
I started expanding my collection about a year ago, but with all the business of life, couldn't get any friends to play. Now, I've figured out what seems to be a better strategy for bringing in some friends. They choose a starter deck to play (based on favorite characters), and then we slowly make edits and add new cards. Opening some boosters also helps.
The main point of this topic though, is to discuss what format everybody finds the most diverse. When I first came back, many people suggested sticking to Fellowship, which I had planned on, until the drive to include Rohan, Dunland, Raider, and Gollum seemed like it needed to be included. I only tinkered with my Fellowship cards, thinking about decks/adventure
paths, etc, yet my desire to play with the "full" culture options always lingered. Fast forward to last Saturday. My buddy was interested in Faramir (being one of his favorite characters). So, I gave him that deck and I played the Witch-King starter with the ents. We had a blast. I'm not sure if I was used to Fellowship too much, but not always expecting a Balrog at site 5 seemed like it brought new strategies to the game. We decided to play Towers Standard, and I've been messing with a ent/shire deck for my Free Peoples, and trying to figure out what Shadow I want to play (I've always been die hard Moria archers, so changing it up will be good for me to experience new parts of the game). I'm also going to house rule some Reflections cards...if the event portrayed is from a previous movie/book, it will be allowed within that block. So, I can use Huorns,
Merry's Dagger, etc.
Overall, I'm curious about how people view Towers Standard vs Movie. I do miss the Fellowship site path immensely, mostly because of ways to pull Bilbo, all the forest and rivers, and overall Moria site support. I do feel that this is probably not all it's cracked up to be, especially with the strategies of
the Prancing Pony and what not. At some point, I know I will want to expand into the RotK phase (really looking forward to Ringwraith orcs, Gorbag, Shelob, and Sauron Uruks), but for now, TS seems like it gives a ton of options as I try to pull more friends in for some multiplayer fun.