The Last Homely House
Middle-Earth => Archives of Minas Tirith => Topic started by: Dori on April 17, 2021, 04:03:37 PM
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We all know that players have discovered and developed strategies that may not have been intended by Decipher, but I'm wondering about the alternative. Were there strategies that the game designers intended and created cards for but that never gained any traction with players? There are random cards here and there like Alive and Unspoiled that make me wonder if they're intended to be part of some particular strategy that nobody uses.
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I'm quite interested in this as well, as this will be helpful for the PC to address in future releases.
Glancing through the first few sets, I get this:
- Watcher in the Water
- Nazgul/Isengard burden
- Stealth/Search interaction
- Aragorn/Arwen stuff
- Isenorcs in general, tho they're more complete than most of the above
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What's your metric of "never took off"? I think there are enough Nazgul burden decks to say that it did, same for Isenorcs. I'm not sure I have a good metric myself though. I'd say a strategy never took off if:
- Successful execution requires divine intervention
- "Successful" execution doesn't put you any closer to winning
- There are enough cards to make players to want to build a deck around it, but not enough to make that possible
I guess that's a pretty low bar?
Watcher in the Water (before Ages End, of course) is a textbook example of the first and last. A fine-tuned Watcher deck would struggle to make an impression on a starter deck, and then even if you do lasting damage you've got use something else to finish your opponent off. Even with Evil-smelling Fens and Foul Things, you can put something up for 3 sites tops before you're just out of cards.
Uruk Discard is a good example of the second because it plays subpar minions and doesn't actually hurt the FP until the last card in the deck is gone, whereas Sauron discard can hurt the FP by taking away an event and slow their roll by taking away the Shadow cards they were saving. This deck is at a clear disadvantage until the end of the site path, at which point it's only at a mild disadvantage. Some other ones that stand out to me are:
- Rohan mill
- Southron burdens
- Southron site control
- maybe Beasterlings (e.g., Easterling Ransacker)
- Sauron weapons
- Sauron Wraiths
- Bouncing Smeagol
- Nazgul initiative
Some of these are great strategies in sealed though, does that count for anything?
I don't know if stealth/search is a strategy per say, but it definitely got left behind. I think what does exist is undervalued by players too, Wariness and Relentless win games for me at site 5 all the time. On a related note, every card concerned with The One Ring comes to mind. Resistance Becomes Unbearable makes the Nazgul ones decent, but the Isengard and Sauron ones are just awkward. I think they were going for something interesting (there's danger to using The Ring) but the approach was all wrong and no card even references it after Fellowship block (except ARBs).