New Format: Quest Format (work in progress) YOUR help requested!

[sgtdraino]

I'm a guy who has become disillusioned with Expanded, because I feel like a number of abusive strategies are really hurting creativity and variety in deckbuilding.

But at the same time, I really like having the largest possible card pool to choose from, when building my decks. Heck, if there were some way to tweek the rules so that is wasn't broken, I'd love to make every card legal again. But Open is, we all admit, reaaally broken.

Some folks are saying that Movie Block (essentially Standard before Shadows came out) is the best format. That may well be, but I really hate not having access to all the cards made after that. I'd also miss the mechanic of getting to choose what order you play your sites in... though at the same time, decks that really abuse site manipulation are one of the biggest problems I have seen lately.

So, what I'd like to do, is design a new format that draws from the largest card pool possible, while simultaneously putting a damper on highly abused or broken strategies that hurt creativity and make the game less fun.

One idea I've toyed with, is having a site path that combines sites from Fellowship, Towers, and King, to give the effect of traveling all the way from the Shire to Mount Doom. Not the French "Multi-path," but a site path where each player might have sites from all three blocks, played in order. If possible, I'd like to work a bit of the post-Shadows pick-which-site-to-play mechanic as well.

Here's one way it could work: Each player stocks a sitepath of 27 sites. 9 from each block. 1-9 Fellowship, 1-9 Towers, 1-9 King. When it is your turn to play the next numbered site, you may choose from which block you play it. For example, say the next site is Site 3. You could choose whether to play your Fellowship Site 3, your Towers Site 3, or your King Site 3. The catch is this: Sites must be played in Block-order. Any Fellowship sites played must come before Towers sites, and Towers sites must come before King sites. So, for example, if someone plays a King site at Site 3, only King sites could be played from then on... unless somebody replaced that King Site 3 with a Towers site, or Fellowship site.

Thoughts?

The next order of business, is enabling the largest card pool possible, while limiting the viability of abusive strategies. With this in mind, I'd like to hear what people think are the biggest abusive strategies currently employed. What do you see as problem areas?

For myself, site manipulation is a biggie (which I think this new site path mechanic would mitigate), as well as some of the crazier combinations some of the new "Skull" Men and Orc cultures are capable of. I've also been seeing some really strong Nazgul decks, to the point where I'd fully legalize Flaming Brand to check them a bit.

What do you guys think?

Again, the target I'm going for is as big a card pool as possible, close to Expanded or even Open,  but with rules that make the format more balanced, more fun.

[FM]

I think you'd be better off running Expanded with a gentleman's agreement on a ban list. Otherwise, a player would simply build a Movie-format deck and crush the format, since other players might try to squeeze out some advantage of an earlier site, and even base their strategy off it a little, and by simply sticking with King's site you cripple them badly.

[hsiale]

I like the general idea of creating a format with as many cards available as possible (or, rather, as many viable decktypes as possible). For me the way to do this is:

1. Take Movie Block format. Remove maybe Lady Redeemed and maybe Son of Hamfast (but maybe none of them, or just one, this is a thing that needs more thinking and testing). Add "Limit 2" to Dauntless Hunter. Remove The Shire Countryside and probably Saruman's Snows. This should be enough to start, hopefully no further problems will arise, if they do, they'd be dealt with somehow.

2. Go through sets 11-19 card by card. Filter out overpowered ones (or ones creating crazy combos). I believe it will be still possible to let through around 90% of WotR block and quite many Hunters block cards, enough to make set 11+ main deck types playable, but not superior to Movie Block decks.

3. Balance everything using the site path. Get rid of all previous sites. Create sets 20 and 21 - both consisting entirely of sites (60-80 in each of them). One contains numbered "old style" sites (let's say site 1 Hobbiton/Bree, site 2 Moria and nearby lands, site 3 Lothlorien/Anduin, site 4 Rohan/Fangorn, site 5 Isengard/Helm's Deep, site 6 Minas Tirith, site 7 Osgiliath/Ithilien, site 8 Mordor, site 9 Mount Doom), the other unnumbered "new-style" sites. Sites will of course be old sites with new game text - made with whole card pool in mind, so that it provides interesting site choices for each culture and deck type while balancing the whole format (by giving helper sites to decks that are a bit too weak and worse sites for strongest decks).

But before we do anything with this we need a player base that will welcome such work. So I feel the important thing to do now is:

0. Build a bigger player base ar Gemp-LotR. I think the aim should be to have clear majority of all LotR TCG players in the world play mostly at Gemp and this player base should mostly be people who never played anywhere else. Which needs two things: promotion and making the site more friendly to people completely new to the game. One thing I started doing (and plan to finish next month when I have more time available for gaming) is creating a detailed help for Gemp (and for LotR TCG as well), so that new people can get into game easier.

I feel such player base would be much more interested in a living game and doing new things will be easier then.

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BTW: the idea comes a bit from the multipath format - as i feel it's main strength is getting some decks back into play by giving them back site paths made with them in mind (FotR for swarm, TTT for trackers and so on). But I feel a completely new site path, made when all the cards are ready, will help more and allow for the richest format possible.

[dethwish07]

I think Hsaile's ideas are really good. I would be glad to participate in the creation of such a format. The main deterent that will crop up is popular consensus. Having spent my fair share of time lurking here, as well as on the trekcc and swccgpc boards, I'd say trying to get consensus among card players is like trying to herd cats.

However, it is possible that there is enough sentiment among the players to bring such ideas to life. Appealing to the movie block players will be key, as, from what I can surmise, they are the majority. Correct me if I'm mistaken. Either way, we need to make sure that this proposed format would be as palatable as possible to the various player sub-groups.

Anyway, you might can tell from my avatar, I'm no stranger to designing card games and have been working on various games since I first fell in love with the lotr tcg and the swccg. So, if I can be any help in the creative apsects or the technical and balancing aspects, please let me know. I'm a full time student with a job, but I'd be happy to put most of my spare time into such a project. It is certainly the foremost matter of whether or not we can achieve some kind of consensus.