Elf Weaknesses

[TelTura]

Elves do not appear to have many, if any, outright downsides (correct me if I have overlooked something).  Hobbits lack damage bonuses, Dwarves lack much burden removal, Gondor lacks much condition removal, etc.  But Elves just do everything.

Which is perfectly compatible with the lore!

And entirely broken mechanics-wise.  Without a weakness to exploit, all you can hope to do is get even more swole than they can, and it's a fool's errand in some formats.

So what are some things that one could do in a theoretical new set, with new cards, with the intent to carve out an obvious chink in the Elven armor?

I've thought of a few ideas, but most of them are rules-based, as in things like "You cannot play cards when your opponent has more cards than you", which doesn't help when talking about patching the existing game.

Some thematic thoughts: Elves have been around for basically forever, and the only reason they don't storm Mordor blades a-twirling is because they're sorely outnumbered (thus the rule concept above).  But part of the reason they didn't take out Sauron and his forces already is because they've spent thousands of years just hanging out; they are used to just tending their gardens and are slow to go to war.  They've ossified a bit, grown inflexible.  This concept is pushed to the extreme in other media concerning Elves, but even within Tolkien it's a bit of a recurring theme.

Some possible ways to build Elves (in a new set) so that they have built-in weaknesses orbiting around the concept of being inflexible:

1- Alter most or all abilities to be super-specific.  "Make a minion strength -1" becomes "Make an Orc bearing a hand weapon strength -1".  "Discard a shadow condition" becomes "Discard a support-area condition costing an odd number of twilight".  The Elves have lore, but it doesn't always apply to the current situation.  Building decks becomes all about anticipating your opponents' choices and thinking one level higher than they do.  Or else getting steamrolled because none of your specific counters worked.

2- Remove strength bonuses.  Elves have had years centuries to get swole.  They've gotten as powerful as they care to get.  Alter all pumps and weapons to not grant strength bonuses to Elves, and grant other abilities instead.  Crank the strength of most Elves up to Aragorn-level to compensate (maybe a bit beyond depending on the Elf-lord), but then that's it.  Nothing else should be able to make em stronger than they already are. 


Any thoughts on these weaknesses, or thoughts on other ways that Elves might be designed to have obvious flaws that must be worked around when deckbuilding (and that might be exploited by your opponent)?

[Phallen Cassidy]

The things Elves lack are defender bonuses and overwhelm protection, for what it's worth. But I'd say they're the top culture in every format except Towers. One of the problems with them is there are no viable counter cards, while every other race/culture has several decent cards that specifically target it. Closest you get is Moria Scout (no, I'm not forgetting about Bitter Hatred), and You Bring Great Evil famously works on everyone else (didn't Legolas have an arrow pointed at him too?). If you wanted to build a deck that does really well against one specific FP or Shadow culture you could do it for all but the Elves, which doesn't make sense considering the well-documented hatred that all the baddies of Middle Earth have for the them.

I think Elves should've been the Free Peoples counterpart of Nazgul: expensive and powerful. Elves should pay a premium on twilight because of the access to tools that they have, because they're secluded and powerful. Would a true "Great Elf Warrior" have been able to make it to Mount Doom? Could be, but you can be sure that even as stealthy as Elves are he would've drawn more attention than our Hobbits. Archery is already among the best ways to deal with swarm (the main reason to have defender bonuses at all), they're plenty capable of winning skirmishes against beatdown decks, they have access to burden removal (and resistance-increasing measures), they strike down conditions, they heal at an alarming rate -- at least make them pay for it. This also compliments what you mention about them being outnumbered: sending an Elf should have a greater cost than sending a Man because there are fewer of them, and they can't be replaced.

As far as inflexibility, I don't think any culture should be pigeonholed into a rock-paper-scissors role. I imagine the immediate result would be that every Elf dons a role similar to that of Sam, Son of Hamfast: you pick the one that patches up a weakness in your deck (in this case, also including some of those neat Elf support cards), ignore the rest, and if you don't need it in a certain match-up then you have an extra companion for the dead pile. Because Elves will only have access to utility, why make them the focus? Then the moment you try to allow them to become a more self-sustaining option, the utility cards you've written before become gears in an unstoppable machine (see Stand Against Darkness, Curse Their Foul Feet, and Foul Creation).

I don't know how you'd handle the second suggestion, so I can't suppose how that might turn out. I will say that almost everyone loves the skirmish phase, and it's hard to see how this doesn't cut that out entirely. Unless you mean to keep the strength-reducing effects of cards such as the text on Long-knives of Legolas. But what's the difference between -1 for you and +2 for me? If they're given higher-than-average strength, they already have some innate protection against overwhelming that strength bonuses would provide. They're also better equipped to overwhelm minions, which is what strength reduction does. If anything that could turn out worse than strength bonuses (but better than having both available).

[TelTura]

The things Elves lack are defender bonuses and overwhelm protection, for what it's worth.

Ah, I see.  Piddly things, considering they handle those situations just fine in other ways, as you point out.

One of the problems with them is there are no viable counter cards, while every other race/culture has several decent cards that specifically target it.

Specific culture hate is something I'm struggling with at the moment. One the one hand it's often thematic and often an easy band-aid solution, such as in this case, but on the other hand if it's overtuned then it's possible to dumpster an entire culture with just a couple cards, such as what Flaming Brand did to Nazgul almost single-handedly.  Things that target archers is a decent proxy, but then again not every Elf deck needs to go with bows to dominate in skirmishes.  It's a tricky question, because if an anti-Elf Shotgun Enquea was created that could be easily used by anyone, then we might end up with the reverse problem of Elves sitting where Nazgul in FOTR are now. 

I think Elves should've been the Free Peoples counterpart of Nazgul: expensive and powerful. Elves should pay a premium on twilight because of the access to tools that they have, because they're secluded and powerful. Would a true "Great Elf Warrior" have been able to make it to Mount Doom? Could be, but you can be sure that even as stealthy as Elves are he would've drawn more attention than our Hobbits.

Agreed.  One of the rules-based fixes I toyed with was "Every card you play is twilight cost +1 per card you can spot", but just manually keying up the costs of everything could have much the same effect.  Make all 0-cost cards at least cost 2, and then maybe double the existing curve?  Elrond is 8, Arwen is 4, etc.  Legolas (besides Greenleaf) is among one of the least problematic Elves, so he can probably stay at 2.  It could be interesting if nearly all Elf companions were pushed to the point that it would be difficult to include any of them in a starting companionship, meaning that mono-Elf would be inadvisable to start with.

Oh, another related idea: a loaded keyword similar to Aid, where you have to pay a certain cost every round to keep the card around.

As far as inflexibility, I don't think any culture should be pigeonholed into a rock-paper-scissors role. I imagine the immediate result would be that every Elf dons a role similar to that of Sam, Son of Hamfast: you pick the one that patches up a weakness in your deck (in this case, also including some of those neat Elf support cards), ignore the rest, and if you don't need it in a certain match-up then you have an extra companion for the dead pile.

Yeah, you're probably right.  The game can be a bit heavily skewed towards "this was won in the deckbuilding screen" as it is, and super-specificity is either going to not get used or get used all the time.

I don't know how you'd handle the second suggestion, so I can't suppose how that might turn out. I will say that almost everyone loves the skirmish phase, and it's hard to see how this doesn't cut that out entirely. Unless you mean to keep the strength-reducing effects of cards such as the text on Long-knives of Legolas. But what's the difference between -1 for you and +2 for me? If they're given higher-than-average strength, they already have some innate protection against overwhelming that strength bonuses would provide. They're also better equipped to overwhelm minions, which is what strength reduction does. If anything that could turn out worse than strength bonuses (but better than having both available).

The idea was to let Elves keep their minion-strength-reducing abilities, yeah.  Pumps would say "Make a minion skirmishing an Elf strength -1" instead of making the Elf strength +2.  Most of the time this is exactly the same, you're right, except in the case where shadow also has access to strength-reduction.  If the Shadow player hits you with an equivalent to Enduring Evil, nuElves would have no way of directly undoing that.  And the lower your strength is made, the easier it is to overwhelm you (as Elvents clearly establishes today).

It might not be enough on its own, but combined with increased twilight costs it might serve to give Elves more of a skirmishing identity while also making sure that all the shadow +strength pumps in the world will be able to be used with all the extra twilight around.

[Durin's Heir]

Elves were superb fighters... but almost always refused to fight. Unlike war-thirsty Dwarves, and proud and valiant Men. Most Elves should be allies only, they were pathologically pessimistic about the struggle against Sauron and instead preferred to leave to Valinor (Noldor and Sindar, settled in Rivendell and Mithlond) or seclude inside their forests and fortresses (Silvan Elves, of which everyone except the royalty was in Lórien and Mirkwood). So most Elves should have a skirmish/assignment penalty, like Unhasty Ents do. Or just be allies.

The problem with Elves being OP is NOT in being able to do everything, it's in doing everything AND too easily. Gandalf the Wizard (not the culture) does everything too (heal/prevent wounds, remove burdens/threats, discard conditions/possessions/artifacts, reveal hand, choke, wound, damage, pump... everything but liberate sites) but needs much more resources than Elves (vitality, cards and twilight), AND to get a much milder result. Look at Shadow Between vs Moment of Respite for instance: Gandalf needs twice the resources to do exactly the same (restore vitality, of which plural Elves have tons more than a singular Gandalf). Or Forearmed vs SotSF. Or Elven Bow (permanent, efforless) vs Terrible and Evil (temporary and very exerting). Or Galadriel LR vs Roll of Thunder... Elves were always given the upper hand. Manyfold.

Agree that their twilight cost should be much higher, since were so scarce. But sadly that's far from enough.

[Inspire]

I'll challenge the premise a bit here. From sets 1-9 there wasn't a primarily Free Peoples that was Tier 1. Granted, early in the game's life the card pool was so thin that few mono-cultural fellowships were viable, but until set 10 (or maybe 9, but that's debatable) lagged behind other cultures in the skirmish phase which typically necessitated that they be combined with another culture (generally ). Elf/Man was the preeminent Free Peoples of 1-7, 1-8, and 1-9 formats, with doing the heavy lifting in the skirmish phase and providing support via direct wounding, healing, and condition removal. Glorfindel and Gil-Galad were reasonably important additions in set 9, but it wasn't until the introduction of Cirdan in set 10 that became proficient enough in the skirmish phase to become the standalone powerhouse that it currently is in Movie - which frankly seems like an issue with the design logic of a particular card rather than a fundamental design problem with the culture itself.   

[Legion]

I think the issue is only in 2/3 cards:

Fellowship Block: Elves have many tools, but an all elven deck is always rubbish. The backbone of last alliance decks is Aragorn: if he dies early, you lose. If Legolas dies early, you still have a decent chance against most deck-types. However, there is one Elven card that holds the deck together. Without it, it's honestly unplayable.

That card is Secret Sentinels. Even if it lost the additional discard on spotting an orc, the whole setup would instantly fall apart. You would lose to Moria swarm and Archery (and likely Sauron Grind) every time if you are relying on The Seen and the Unseen to remove the Goblin Armouries (or UtWE/Orc Bowmen). Uruks don't really worry about the Elves: it's Aragorn and Boromir that hurt them (I so love Lurtz's Battle Cry when Arwen takes on a Troop of Uruk-Hai). Nazgul suffer against this deck type, but again, it's the Gondor cards that do that (HttWC, NSttS, Aragorn's Bow, Horn of Boromir and Flaming Brand). If you think changes are needed to balance the meta, it's those Gondor cards that need adjusting first (though Galadriel's ability should only work on site 6 allies tops).

In Towers, the Naith Elves are both fun and strong, but definitely not overpowered.

Then came GLR. She shouldn't have been made, but without her, Elves are not dominant in movie (tier 1, but no better than Dwarves, Last Alliance (which only use Elves for Secret Sentinels and its namesake) and Rainbow Wounding). She is the only reliable source of Possession Discard for Elves: without her, see how they always lose to Corsairs and really hate Grond.

In Expanded, GLR was replaced by HKotN. This time, removing him makes elves drop right out of the top tier. Totally unplayable in non-casual. With him, I found that they still lose to Grond and Corsairs. The lack of possession discard is a huge hole.

[TelTura]

Elves were superb fighters... but almost always refused to fight. Unlike war-thirsty Dwarves, and proud and valiant Men. Most Elves should be allies only, they were pathologically pessimistic about the struggle against Sauron and instead preferred to leave to Valinor (Noldor and Sindar, settled in Rivendell and Mithlond) or seclude inside their forests and fortresses (Silvan Elves, of which everyone except the royalty was in Lórien and Mirkwood). So most Elves should have a skirmish/assignment penalty, like Unhasty Ents do. Or just be allies.

I actually agree with this sentiment.  I feel like Decipher flinched away from allies after they screwed up with OP Elrond and Galadriel allies, but as GLR shows they didn't learn the correct lesson which was "stop making Galadriel OP", lol.  Putting Elves as primarily allies would help somewhat, since it would make their primary weakness "doesn't contribute to skirmishes" in a way. 

An Unhasty analogue is one I've thought about for a while, something like Fading that would grant penalties the more characters that were assigned to skirmishes.

I also think (tho this is a mostly separate discussion) that pushing all Elves into the same culture was a mistake.  Split 'em into Rivendell, Lothlorien, and Mirkwood, and then so long as you culturally enforce properly (no more "spot an Elf"), one could stand to make the costs for their sweeping abilities more stringent, with less overlap.

Agree that their twilight cost should be much higher, since were so scarce. But sadly that's far from enough.

Yeah.  A good first step, but not enough on its own.

I'll challenge the premise a bit here. From sets 1-9 there wasn't a primarily Free Peoples that was Tier 1. Granted, early in the game's life the card pool was so thin that few mono-cultural fellowships were viable, but until set 10 (or maybe 9, but that's debatable) lagged behind other cultures in the skirmish phase which typically necessitated that they be combined with another culture (generally ). Elf/Man was the preeminent Free Peoples of 1-7, 1-8, and 1-9 formats, with doing the heavy lifting in the skirmish phase and providing support via direct wounding, healing, and condition removal. Glorfindel and Gil-Galad were reasonably important additions in set 9, but it wasn't until the introduction of Cirdan in set 10 that became proficient enough in the skirmish phase to become the standalone powerhouse that it currently is in Movie - which frankly seems like an issue with the design logic of a particular card rather than a fundamental design problem with the culture itself.   

This is a good argument to make, albeit I would counter that early elves were so broken they had to add the Rule of 4 and got a lot of their most powerful cards X-ed.  So Elves never recovered from having their strongest cards getting kneecapped, until even more broken cards were introduced that never took a nerfbat to the knees. 

That said, I would still prefer if cultures had some sort of identity, with rigid design rules that define what they can and cannot do (without great cost).  This would help prevent the endless deluge of OP Elf-lords, if there is an obvious blind spot that they must work around. 

Even if the Elven culture isn't OP as a whole, it does tend to produce OP individuals, and I think a lack of well-defined weaknesses is part of why this is.

I think the issue is only in 2/3 cards:

Fellowship Block: Elves have many tools, but an all elven deck is always rubbish. The backbone of last alliance decks is Aragorn: if he dies early, you lose. If Legolas dies early, you still have a decent chance against most deck-types. However, there is one Elven card that holds the deck together. Without it, it's honestly unplayable.

That card is Secret Sentinels. Even if it lost the additional discard on spotting an orc, the whole setup would instantly fall apart. You would lose to Moria swarm and Archery (and likely Sauron Grind) every time if you are relying on The Seen and the Unseen to remove the Goblin Armouries (or UtWE/Orc Bowmen). Uruks don't really worry about the Elves: it's Aragorn and Boromir that hurt them (I so love Lurtz's Battle Cry when Arwen takes on a Troop of Uruk-Hai). Nazgul suffer against this deck type, but again, it's the Gondor cards that do that (HttWC, NSttS, Aragorn's Bow, Horn of Boromir and Flaming Brand). If you think changes are needed to balance the meta, it's those Gondor cards that need adjusting first (though Galadriel's ability should only work on site 6 allies tops).

In Towers, the Naith Elves are both fun and strong, but definitely not overpowered.

Then came GLR. She shouldn't have been made, but without her, Elves are not dominant in movie (tier 1, but no better than Dwarves, Last Alliance (which only use Elves for Secret Sentinels and its namesake) and Rainbow Wounding). She is the only reliable source of Possession Discard for Elves: without her, see how they always lose to Corsairs and really hate Grond.

In Expanded, GLR was replaced by HKotN. This time, removing him makes elves drop right out of the top tier. Totally unplayable in non-casual. With him, I found that they still lose to Grond and Corsairs. The lack of possession discard is a huge hole.

So some of this touches on what I mentioned above, that Elves tend to produce OP individuals for whatever reason, and giving them canonical weaknesses can help prevent those before they happen.  Your last sentence here actually make me think, however: Elves are powerless to change the world.  They are able to defend their own little havens, and provide much aid to those who need it, but they are too few and too faded to go out and remove evil influences.

In the context of the game, Secret Sentinels and GLR have had huge game impact largely because of what they were able to remove from the table.  If Elves are redefined to be incapable of removing conditions or possessions, this would be both thematic and remove some of the lynchpin OP cards (tho not all).  The biggest problem with this is the fact that a number of freeps cultures seem to be defined around not being able to remove conditions, so someone has to pick up the slack. 

A full solution probably involves chopping up "condition hate" into multiple categories, and having each culture excel at sniping a particular kind of condition, or using a particular resource to do so (exertions, cards out of hand, cards off your deck, whatever). 

Anyway, I didn't mean for this to veer into a discussion of how to fix existing broken cards (tho that's an important topic that should be addressed), but how to put structure into place to make new cards moving forward less likely to be lolbroken.  For elves, I think this is shaping into a combination of much higher twilight costs, less of a focus on skirmish dominance, and shifting their focus to condition defense rather than offense.

[Phallen Cassidy]

Specific culture hate is something I'm struggling with at the moment. One the one hand it's often thematic and often an easy band-aid solution, such as in this case, but on the other hand if it's overtuned then it's possible to dumpster an entire culture with just a couple cards, such as what Flaming Brand did to Nazgul almost single-handedly.  Things that target archers is a decent proxy, but then again not every Elf deck needs to go with bows to dominate in skirmishes.  It's a tricky question, because if an anti-Elf Shotgun Enquea was created that could be easily used by anyone, then we might end up with the reverse problem of Elves sitting where Nazgul in FOTR are now. 

Flaming Brand is a tempting example, but I don't think it's fair to put it in the same group of cards as the rest of the targeted counters. Instead, it's one of many generally useful cards with utility to boot. In Fellowship block, it still makes sense to include Flaming Brand if you know with 100% certainty that you will never see a Nazgul hit the table. A free permanent +1 strength buff is already too good to pass up. If it granted no strength and instead gave +3 strength / +1 damage against Nazgul, then it has the potential to become a useless card and a bad draw; worse if it cost even 1 twilight, since you can't just get rid of it without consequence. Make it +5 strength / +2 damage against Nazgul only and remove the ability to bear another hand weapon? Now it's a counter card. Same effect in the end against Nazgul (a little better, since it wraps up the bonuses from Aragorn's or Boromir's sword in one), but a totally different experience for any other deck.

As an aside, Decipher struggled somewhat with card text that was generally useful and mildly effective, often either leaving them too weak / expensive or adding extra text and making them too strong. Flaming Brand; Elrond, Lord of Rivendell; Galadriel, Lady of Light; and Saruman, Keeper of Isengard were the worst offenders and banned because of it. If any of these cards had half the text they would still be worth using, but instead it's harder to find a reason not to include them if at all possible.

Agreed.  One of the rules-based fixes I toyed with was "Every card you play is twilight cost +1 per card you can spot", but just manually keying up the costs of everything could have much the same effect.  Make all 0-cost cards at least cost 2, and then maybe double the existing curve?  Elrond is 8, Arwen is 4, etc.  Legolas (besides Greenleaf) is among one of the least problematic Elves, so he can probably stay at 2.  It could be interesting if nearly all Elf companions were pushed to the point that it would be difficult to include any of them in a starting companionship, meaning that mono-Elf would be inadvisable to start with.

A culture should be defined in the cards, not the rules. It's a rare deck that starts with a fellowship other than characters that they intend to keep (Saved from the Fire decks being the only exception I can think of), and might be too difficult to pivot from whatever that may be to Elves in order to justify pivoting at all. I don't think there's an easy one-size-fits-all solution to apply here. Many cards are reasonably costed, but get overshadowed by the ones that aren't. Maybe some conditions play for free and carry Strider's text, while others are expensive and require you to prepare for what may come before you risk playing it. Perhaps instead flatly increasing a companion's twilight cost, it costs an extra 1 per burden you spot (go first and start weaker or go second and start stronger?). An added cost of playing Galadriel could be revealing your hand. Costs come in many forms, twilight is an obvious one but not the only one.

I actually agree with this sentiment.  I feel like Decipher flinched away from allies after they screwed up with OP Elrond and Galadriel allies, but as GLR shows they didn't learn the correct lesson which was "stop making Galadriel OP", lol.  Putting Elves as primarily allies would help somewhat, since it would make their primary weakness "doesn't contribute to skirmishes" in a way.

An Unhasty analogue is one I've thought about for a while, something like Fading that would grant penalties the more characters that were assigned to skirmishes.

Interesting, I think the fact that most of the Elves are allies is the heart of the issue. Elves get some of the best conditions too, littering the support area with tremendous utility at a one-time cost. Unlike Dwarf, Hobbit, or Gandalf allies, Elf allies have near-complete access to the Elven toolkit (and, as in the case of Secret Sentinels, exclusive access to some). You can make the Elf portion of any deck whatever you need it to be, with almost no regard to how big that portion is. Which is the point of this topic: Elves have no weaknesses. Even for decks where Elves only take up 5 card slots (3 Elrond, Heir to Gil-galad; 2 Vilya), those 5 cards have a tremendous impact on what the Shadow Player can deal out. Elrond, Heir to Gil-galad isn't particularly troublesome or overpowered on his own, but he gives your deck whatever it needs without offering more resources to the Shadow player to compensate. It's not one card here or there, it's the sum of having everything at your disposal without really having to pay for it. Endless pools of vitality to exert, nigh on invincible characters to spot, and no long-term costs.

If you're talking about starting from scratch, I don't think restricting assignments for Elves will work unless there are no Elf allies. Greenleaf is the most popular Elven companion there is precisely because he doesn't fight, skirmishing was their cultural weakness in Fellowship Block. Otherwise you'll have a culture of hard-to-use companions and either a bunch of really good events with the line "Spot an companion to" at the start or the same problem Elves have now. Same as the super-specificity, now that I think about it. Decipher tried these things and here's where it got them. Relegating an entire culture to the support area is untenable because 1) they'll be easy for any deck to include and abuse unless they're not worth using at all and 2) it will be too tempting to let the culture branch out into The Fellowship in the future, where its robust support area will mop the floor with adversaries.

I also think (tho this is a mostly separate discussion) that pushing all Elves into the same culture was a mistake.  Split 'em into Rivendell, Lothlorien, and Mirkwood, and then so long as you culturally enforce properly (no more "spot an Elf"), one could stand to make the costs for their sweeping abilities more stringent, with less overlap.

Huh. I'll be honest, I don't like this idea. Dunland is 50 cards (not all of which are worth using) and lame because of it, multiplying that by 3 sounds bad. But the Raider culture did very well as what basically amounted to 2 cultures with the same card template (I'm ignoring Corsairs because they are also small and lame, but in a far more sinister way). The difference is that minion cultures have to be self-sustaining to be consistent, trying to put too many different pieces together is difficult and self-balancing. Free Peoples sides are more able to pick the components you need from a few cultures and bring them together. If anything I'd rather see subcultures in the manner of knights and rangers, but this is less me thinking it's a bad idea and more personal preference (you should take everything else I say as law, obviously).

So as not to be entirely negative, here's are some things I would consider if I were so inclined. It's probably overkill to do them all, but these might be thematic and can give the culture a more unique identity:

• No, or very rare, damage bonuses. Elves have a unique access to archery to provide extra wounds already.
• On a related note, limit the amount of direct wounding they have access to in favor of the archery total. Blades Drawn, Feathered, and Lorien Swordsman are good examples of how to influence wound assignment without forcing it. Don't make archery an all-or-nothing game.
• I think the idea of fewer strength bonuses and more strength reduction is a good one after all. I recently played a game where a 7-strength companion overwhelmed my 3-strength minion and I didn't mind because of what it took to get to that point. As long as its harder to remove strength than it is to add it.
• Limit the ability of allies to directly and trivially interact with the board. No Rumil, Elven Protector or Orophin, Lorien Bowman, but the Rivendell allies are pretty mild. The Two Towers versions of both Elrond and Galadriel are interesting, too. Nenya yes, Vilya no.
• Require upkeep for strong allies and conditions. "At the start of your turn, add a threat / exert an Elf / discard a card / reveal 2 cards from hand at random." Make healing allies weighty in some way and allow the FP to crush itself under the weight of bringing all of Lorien with them wherever they go. Probably shouldn't be applied with the point above, you don't want to cost them out of usefulness either.
• Hyper awareness of burdens (or better yet, the Ring-bearer's resolve), for a culture pessimistic of how grim things are already. "If the Ring-bearer has at least 6 resistance, ..." By burdening the Ring-bearer with a few of the better effects (Galadriel tested Frodo, after all), you can force interesting choices both in the game and in the deckbuilder. Perhaps instead of removing burdens, this culture increases resistance (both permanently and temporarily), an under-explored idea in Movie block that started with Phial of Galadriel anyway. This is probably my favorite of the bunch.
• If there are going to be particularly strong companions, they should have text discouraging their winning skirmishes rather than encouraging it. I don't mind Legolas, Archer of Mirkwood because him winning a skirmish will require investment from the FP player or carelessness from the Shadow player. If you have a character like Glorfindel, consider "Each time [this companion] wins a skirmish, exert him." or "..., reveal your hand. The first Shadow player may discard a card from there." or "..., each Shadow player draws 2 cards." There can be interesting ways to mitigate these costs too, but that's the point: require investment. Give players a reason to have them on their team, but make it a choice.
• Somewhat similar, make self-sacrifice a feature. The Sauron culture has some good ideas to borrow (between this and the constant exertions, maybe Sauron is a better parallel than Nazgul. Aren't Orcs a mockery of Elves anyway?). For example, "Discard an condition to ..." These guys are passing up The Undying Lands for this.

[TelTura]

Flaming Brand is a tempting example, but I don't think it's fair to put it in the same group of cards as the rest of the targeted counters. Instead, it's one of many generally useful cards with utility to boot. In Fellowship block, it still makes sense to include Flaming Brand if you know with 100% certainty that you will never see a Nazgul hit the table. A free permanent +1 strength buff is already too good to pass up. If it granted no strength and instead gave +3 strength / +1 damage against Nazgul, then it has the potential to become a useless card and a bad draw; worse if it cost even 1 twilight, since you can't just get rid of it without consequence. Make it +5 strength / +2 damage against Nazgul only and remove the ability to bear another hand weapon? Now it's a counter card. Same effect in the end against Nazgul (a little better, since it wraps up the bonuses from Aragorn's or Boromir's sword in one), but a totally different experience for any other deck.

So I have a friend who is a Magic: The Gathering buff, and one of the lessons he tells me that Wizards learned very early on was to avoid color hate like the plague, for many of the reasons that you mention: if you don't play against that color, it's a dead card; if you do play against that color, it just straight-up counters them, little they can do about it; and if you stick it as a side-effect on an otherwise flexible card (such as what Flaming Brand did) then you remove any interesting decision-making, both in deckbuilding and during play.  What I mean is: there's no interesting decisions to make when it comes to Flaming Brand.  If you have Aragorn in your deck, you include it.  If you have it in your hand, you play it. 

Likewise, if you have dead culture hate in your hand, you discard it.  If you have live culture hate in your hand, you play it (with perhaps some nuance to timing).   On top of that, if the culture hate is overpowered, it gets included all the time and makes that culture impossible to play.  If the culture hate is underpowered, no one ever cares to include it (Weight of a Legacy, anyone?). 

It's too swingy.  It's rocket tag, to borrow more terms from other games.  Either you miss and do nothing or you smear your opponent on the ground with no counterplay. 

This is slightly orthogonal to the discussion, but I think the way to take Flaming Brand was to give it bonuses against fierce minions, not Nazgul.  Up the twilight to 1 at least (just because 0 cost is a cancer), and then remove the anti-nazgul clause and replace it with something like 'discard this possession to make a minion lose fierce until the regroup phase'.  This makes it thematic and useful against Nazgul, but also against others, while also introducing interesting decisions that the original sorely lacks.

Likewise, I feel like countering strategies should be about countering strategies, not cultures.  The altered Flaming Brand above beats back beatdown decks, but does much less against corruption decks.  The OG Flaming Brand defeats both one flavor of beatdown and corruption, while also working against any strategy that Nazgul are involved with in the future.  It's a Fully General Counter, even if it was nerfed to only grant +1 extra strength against Nazgul.

For all these reasons I'm leery about introducing cards that just counter cards.  Why should one card be able to take out telepathy, and archery, and -strength skirmishers, and ally support, and and and.  It's a band-aid solution that modifies as few cards as possible, but that's not what I'm in for: moving forward, we can control the entire ecosystem, so let's try and be a bit more nuanced in our design conventions rather than take the easy way out.

As an aside, Decipher struggled somewhat with card text that was generally useful and mildly effective, often either leaving them too weak / expensive or adding extra text and making them too strong. Flaming Brand; Elrond, Lord of Rivendell; Galadriel, Lady of Light; and Saruman, Keeper of Isengard were the worst offenders and banned because of it. If any of these cards had half the text they would still be worth using, but instead it's harder to find a reason not to include them if at all possible.

Agreed. Hopefully those of us on digital platforms will have more room to walk back poor decisions and issue nerfs/buffs in a more flexible manner.

A culture should be defined in the cards, not the rules.

Admittedly that was part of a concept that toyed with adding loaded rules to all cultures, not just Elves, but I agree that it's probably too hamfisted of a solution.  At some point we can come up with some better definitions of what "culture" even means, and then it will be easier to figure out how to define that using just the cards.

It's a rare deck that starts with a fellowship other than characters that they intend to keep (Saved from the Fire decks being the only exception I can think of), and might be too difficult to pivot from whatever that may be to Elves in order to justify pivoting at all. I don't think there's an easy one-size-fits-all solution to apply here. Many cards are reasonably costed, but get overshadowed by the ones that aren't. Maybe some conditions play for free and carry Strider's text, while others are expensive and require you to prepare for what may come before you risk playing it. Perhaps instead flatly increasing a companion's twilight cost, it costs an extra 1 per burden you spot (go first and start weaker or go second and start stronger?). An added cost of playing Galadriel could be revealing your hand. Costs come in many forms, twilight is an obvious one but not the only one.

True, there are more varied costs than just twilight, and I'd like to see more costly cards in general, since cool power plays are what we're here to see.  That said, thematically it makes sense for Elves to be the Nazgul of the Free People's side and just flat out cost more than the other races, so in this case I don't see a problem with tentatively stepping in that direction.

Interesting, I think the fact that most of the Elves are allies is the heart of the issue. Elves get some of the best conditions too, littering the support area with tremendous utility at a one-time cost. Unlike Dwarf, Hobbit, or Gandalf allies, Elf allies have near-complete access to the Elven toolkit (and, as in the case of Secret Sentinels, exclusive access to some). You can make the Elf portion of any deck whatever you need it to be, with almost no regard to how big that portion is. Which is the point of this topic: Elves have no weaknesses. Even for decks where Elves only take up 5 card slots (3 Elrond, Heir to Gil-galad; 2 Vilya), those 5 cards have a tremendous impact on what the Shadow Player can deal out. Elrond, Heir to Gil-galad isn't particularly troublesome or overpowered on his own, but he gives your deck whatever it needs without offering more resources to the Shadow player to compensate. It's not one card here or there, it's the sum of having everything at your disposal without really having to pay for it. Endless pools of vitality to exert, nigh on invincible characters to spot, and no long-term costs.

If you're talking about starting from scratch, I don't think restricting assignments for Elves will work unless there are no Elf allies. Greenleaf is the most popular Elven companion there is precisely because he doesn't fight, skirmishing was their cultural weakness in Fellowship Block. Otherwise you'll have a culture of hard-to-use companions and either a bunch of really good events with the line "Spot an companion to" at the start or the same problem Elves have now. Same as the super-specificity, now that I think about it. Decipher tried these things and here's where it got them. Relegating an entire culture to the support area is untenable because 1) they'll be easy for any deck to include and abuse unless they're not worth using at all and 2) it will be too tempting to let the culture branch out into The Fellowship in the future, where its robust support area will mop the floor with adversaries.

So one easy solution to that last point is to just, y'know, follow our own rules.  If we decide that Elves are 90% allies, then we mean it and just, like, don't make any Elf companions without some stringent restrictions.  We also have the advantage of being able to undo mistakes if we really screw up on that front, since we're not dealing with physical cardboard.

The pools of vitality is one valid concern, however, and allies could probably frankly do to be more like most Gandalf and Shire allies, with vitalities based around their abilities and not also managing to be able to soak up three wounds in combat.  Decipher tried to address this with "exert twice to X", but frankly just reducing Elrond's vitality to 3 or even 2 would have achieved the goal better. 

As for spotting requirements, well, that's one of the reasons to divide them out into multiple cultures.  Make Mirkwood focused on combat, Lothlorien focused on telepathy, and Rivendell focused on healing, and then you no longer are able to do literally everything with any elves you like.  You now have to, specifically, spot "2 [Rivendell] Elves" or whatever, meaning you can't use those particular allies to also trigger your combat spots, etc. 

Huh. I'll be honest, I don't like this idea. Dunland is 50 cards (not all of which are worth using) and lame because of it, multiplying that by 3 sounds bad. But the Raider culture did very well as what basically amounted to 2 cultures with the same card template (I'm ignoring Corsairs because they are also small and lame, but in a far more sinister way). The difference is that minion cultures have to be self-sustaining to be consistent, trying to put too many different pieces together is difficult and self-balancing. Free Peoples sides are more able to pick the components you need from a few cultures and bring them together. If anything I'd rather see subcultures in the manner of knights and rangers, but this is less me thinking it's a bad idea and more personal preference (you should take everything else I say as law, obviously).

So part of this comes down to the question of what, exactly, is a culture? Are they nations?  Factions?  Races?  Particularly weird individuals?  Thematically they're all over the place, so no answers there. 

How about mechanically?  We've got Raiders and the post-shadows Shadow cultures that show us what it looks like when a culture is just a container to hold keyword-enforced subcultures.  Rohan and Shire are more self-cohesive, at the expense of being built more around individual cards than clearly-defined subcultures.  I think these show two ends of a spectrum.  I think that the Rohan/Shire end of the scale is a better place to be in, where a culture is clearly based around certain concepts but new cards can play with those concepts in different ways without putting up clear walls. 

There is one advantage to the Raider style, and that's the ability to have fallback cards (in theory).  If you already have a small cache of weapons, pumps, and basic conditions to use as a base for your chosen subculture, then you can spend time fleshing out what makes that subculture interesting, instead of wasting card slots on even more +2 possessions and +2/+4 event pumps.

Let's do some analysis of Raider for a moment.  Doing some queries against my local database, I get the following numbers:

-- 145 Raider cards total
-- 36 cards mention " Man" (11 of these are Southron cards, 1 is Corsair)
-- 3 cards mention " Minion"
-- 25 cards mention Easterlings
-- 69 cards mention Southrons
-- 16 cards mention Corsairs

(this supports what you say about Corsairs indeed being small)

So if we were to theoretically divide these into three distinct cultures without losing access to the 36 generic cards (i.e. we copy Gathering to the Summons into three new cards: Marching to the Summons, Riding to the Summons, and Sailing to the Summons, etc), then those cultures would have counts more like this:

-- 108 Southron cards
-- 64 Easterling cards
-- 55 Corsair cards

In effect, there are 55 cards that could be used in a Corsair deck, before even considering splash.  That's quite the jump up from the 16 cards that are explicitly made for them!

But an even better solution would be to leave the generics as generics, and just let a Southron card say "Bearer must be a Man", which could then be included in a Corsair deck or an Easterling deck or, heck, an Isengard Men deck.  There is a serious lack of race-enforced or even non-enforced cards in this game.  Why does a #$&*@! sword need to be enforced?  Can't it just be a +1 hand weapon that literally anyone can carry? 

(Flaming Brand is why this trope isn't used by Decipher, but, again, they learned the wrong lesson.  "Don't make OP culture-hating cards" is the lesson, not "Generic enforcement is a sin".)

I went into this in a bit more detail here, but the TL;DR of that blog post is that if there were a bunch of possessions, events, and basic conditions that said "Spot a Man" or, heck, "Spot a Companion" or just didn't spot anything instead of culturally-enforcing literally every weaksauce pump, then we could easily introduce a Dunedain culture without needing to get to the ~60 cards or so before it feels fleshed out.

Likewise, do the same for Elves in this instance.  Have some glue cards that do in fact just play on Elves or spot Elves or whatever (and let there be a host of cards with no enforcement at all!), but then put the juicy bits behind a [Rivendell]/[Lothlorien]/[Mirkwood] wall.  If you want telepathy and deck-manipulation, then you'd better have 3 Lothlorien Elves to exert, but you won't be able to double-dip and use those same elves when you need to exert 2 Rivendell Elves to heal someone. 

Basically, we're trust-busting the Elven Monopoly.  By chopping them up we remove the problem of "the culture that does literally everything", but by giving the weaker workhorse cards less enforcement (or no enforcement), we give each culture a foundation to stand on without being completely hamstrung.

So as not to be entirely negative, here's are some things I would consider if I were so inclined. It's probably overkill to do them all, but these might be thematic and can give the culture a more unique identity:

• No, or very rare, damage bonuses. Elves have a unique access to archery to provide extra wounds already.
• On a related note, limit the amount of direct wounding they have access to in favor of the archery total. Blades Drawn, Feathered, and Lorien Swordsman are good examples of how to influence wound assignment without forcing it. Don't make archery an all-or-nothing game.

Agreed, I like this.

• I think the idea of fewer strength bonuses and more strength reduction is a good one after all. I recently played a game where a 7-strength companion overwhelmed my 3-strength minion and I didn't mind because of what it took to get to that point. As long as its harder to remove strength than it is to add it.

Agreed.

• Limit the ability of allies to directly and trivially interact with the board. No Rumil, Elven Protector or Orophin, Lorien Bowman, but the Rivendell allies are pretty mild. The Two Towers versions of both Elrond and Galadriel are interesting, too. Nenya yes, Vilya no.

Yeah, Rumil is #$&*@!.  "Mail-order arrows from across Middle-earth, delivered directly to your chest cavity, in one phase or less or your twilight back".  I suppose when I made the assertion about Elves being restricted to being allies, I was assuming (but not stating) that we also restrict ally's reach to indirect rather than direct aid.  Allies should not be "companions except they can't skirmish" in power level.

• Require upkeep for strong allies and conditions. "At the start of your turn, add a threat / exert an Elf / discard a card / reveal 2 cards from hand at random." Make healing allies weighty in some way and allow the FP to crush itself under the weight of bringing all of Lorien with them wherever they go. Probably shouldn't be applied with the point above, you don't want to cost them out of usefulness either.

So this goes into one of the more far-reaching rules-based changes I want to implement for some theoretical 2.0 of the game, but I think Allies and Followers should be merged.  For every Ally, give em an Aid cost to be able to use their ability that turn, and/or a cost that you have to pay or discard them.  Elrond might be worth it for a bit, but if you have to discard two cards from hand every single move, well, you're six sites away and it's time to say goodbye.

• Hyper awareness of burdens (or better yet, the Ring-bearer's resolve), for a culture pessimistic of how grim things are already. "If the Ring-bearer has at least 6 resistance, ..." By burdening the Ring-bearer with a few of the better effects (Galadriel tested Frodo, after all), you can force interesting choices both in the game and in the deckbuilder. Perhaps instead of removing burdens, this culture increases resistance (both permanently and temporarily), an under-explored idea in Movie block that started with Phial of Galadriel anyway. This is probably my favorite of the bunch.

I particularly like the idea of a like "Discard this card if you can spot 4 burdens" sort of thing.  Much more of an actionable weakness than many of these others.

• If there are going to be particularly strong companions, they should have text discouraging their winning skirmishes rather than encouraging it. I don't mind Legolas, Archer of Mirkwood because him winning a skirmish will require investment from the FP player or carelessness from the Shadow player. If you have a character like Glorfindel, consider "Each time [this companion] wins a skirmish, exert him." or "..., reveal your hand. The first Shadow player may discard a card from there." or "..., each Shadow player draws 2 cards." There can be interesting ways to mitigate these costs too, but that's the point: require investment. Give players a reason to have them on their team, but make it a choice.

This is a good idea, too.  The Elf-lords didn't come along because they'd attract too much attention, which is pretty directly translatable to twilight, but no reason we can't also slap on more punishing downsides to what is traditionally a good thing.  Love it.

• Somewhat similar, make self-sacrifice a feature. The Sauron culture has some good ideas to borrow (between this and the constant exertions, maybe Sauron is a better parallel than Nazgul. Aren't Orcs a mockery of Elves anyway?). For example, "Discard an condition to ..." These guys are passing up The Undying Lands for this.

On the Discord we've been discussing how to handle condition discard, and one of the things that was brought up for Elves was to make them an attrition trade, trading 2 Elf conditions for 1 shadow, representing the sacrifice of their little havens to help banish the darkness.  The idea didn't stick (atm it's applied more to Gondor) but as a concept it still certainly holds thematic merit.



Anyhoo, whew, sorry for the giant wall of text.  Some of it's rambling, but I love having discussions like this, albeit it's a bit easier to do the back-and-forth on Discord than on here, lol.

[Phallen Cassidy]

I don't mind the text walls, but the forums do -- wouldn't let me quote your topic directly, haha.

Likewise, if you have dead culture hate in your hand, you discard it.  If you have live culture hate in your hand, you play it (with perhaps some nuance to timing).   On top of that, if the culture hate is overpowered, it gets included all the time and makes that culture impossible to play.  If the culture hate is underpowered, no one ever cares to include it (Weight of a Legacy, anyone?).

It's too swingy.  It's rocket tag, to borrow more terms from other games.  Either you miss and do nothing or you smear your opponent on the ground with no counterplay. 

I typed up a response comparing the interactions to Magic, but really it's totally unfair to LotR. I know only the basics about Magic and that I don't like it, so I'm letting my ignorance guide me here. In Magic it doesn't make any sense to have a deck larger than 30 cards because you will rarely get through half of it. Every card must be useful in a variety of ways because you could face a variety of things and not be permitted a response otherwise. If specification can't win you a difficult matchup quickly, it's useless (and if it can, it's overpowered).

In LotR, if you have a 60 card deck you can expect to see almost every single one of those cards in most games. That, in and of itself, sets such a profoundly different stage for what kinds of cards should and shouldn't be made. To expand on an earlier point, Flaming Brand isn't a counter card not only because it's always useful but also because Gondor men is already the skirmishing culture of Fellowship block. It's a pile-on card, those should never be designed. Fearing the Worst and Greatest Kingdom of My People also slide neatly into this realm of bad ideas and enable decks to do what they already do well even better against some decks (discarding and choking, in their case). People pick these because they are too strong. But a smart counter card fits thematically, serves a purpose, and helps the meta.

I'm finding so much open deck space with cards like Disquiet of Our People and Not Feared in Sunlight because it allows a culture to survive some matchups, if just long enough to try to get a kill with the Shadow side. Because they're situational and culturally enforced, it doesn't make any sense to try and make them pile onto strategies which already excel at these things. It also doesn't ultimately change the power dynamic: I get one site of not losing, rarely could it be called winning. I've lost at site 9 to Nazgul with Not Feared in Sunlight on the table because the first 8 sites were harrowing for me and my opponent made a very smart play to deal with it. I've also won because my opponent didn't know how to handle it, clogged his hand with Nazgul that would maim if played instead of kill, and couldn't draw anything for their FP.

It doesn't have to be the case that an anti-Elf card would immediately counter any Elf strategy. I mean, you could write it that way I'm sure, but I think you've also learned the wrong lesson if that's your takeaway. But hey, if you don't like counter cards that's your prerogative. I think you'll find that cards which counter strategies are really just versatile cards which counter cultures -- they'll get used more, and I say that's a good thing. All I'm trying to say here is counter cards have a place in this game, even if they wouldn't in others.

Not sure that's it's worth going into, but there are also a ton of awful counter cards. They're awful because they don't make any sense: in the case of Weight of a Legacy, winning skirmishes is simply not a concern of Sauron in Fellowship block. They're happy to do it, sure, but even overwhelm strategies are going to focus on burdens for Enduring Evil and disposable conditions for Orc Butcher and Orc Veteran. Why devote resources to winning more skirmishes every few matches if you don't care that you do it -- especially at the expense of other cards? If it were a Nazgul card, however, that could make sense. They struggle with a 'roid raging Aragorn tearing through their ranks, and dropping Aragorn from 16 strength matters. Not overpowered, but relevant.

So one easy solution to that last point is to just, y'know, follow our own rules.  If we decide that Elves are 90% allies, then we mean it and just, like, don't make any Elf companions without some stringent restrictions.  We also have the advantage of being able to undo mistakes if we really screw up on that front, since we're not dealing with physical cardboard.

Feel free to try this, obviously. I say it won't work because these cultures will each either be too useful and everywhere (why use my culture's stuff when Rivendell's is better?) or not useful enough and never seen (until a batch of cards breaks them). 3 support area cultures means you're playing whack-a-mole with 3 times as many targets. The best you could hope for is that Elf cultures only fit with one or two FP strategies and are rarely seen outside of them.

Suppose Mirkwood helps Shire not die so much. What's going to keep them from helping Rohan steamroll? If you nerf Mirkwood, now they don't help anyone. Nerf Rohan, now they're a less desirable choice through no fault of their own and every card you write for any culture has to be through the lens of "what could Mirkwood do with this?" Align their costs with Shire's strengths and they become Shire Elves, make them generally expensive and Shire might not be able to afford it either. How do you see getting around this?

So part of this comes down to the question of what, exactly, is a culture? Are they nations?  Factions?  Races?  Particularly weird individuals?  Thematically they're all over the place, so no answers there.

...

Basically, we're trust-busting the Elven Monopoly.  By chopping them up we remove the problem of "the culture that does literally everything", but by giving the weaker workhorse cards less enforcement (or no enforcement), we give each culture a foundation to stand on without being completely hamstrung.

It's a fair question and a good point. There's no need for me to suppose that Decipher found the perfect balance here if they struggled in so many other places. Some of your premise is wrong (I think only Corsairs and Ents are really suited for a single way of playing), but all the same what defines a culture is different from one group to the next. Three Elves might be better than one.

But an even better solution would be to leave the generics as generics, and just let a Southron card say "Bearer must be a Man", which could then be included in a Corsair deck or an Easterling deck or, heck, an Isengard Men deck.  There is a serious lack of race-enforced or even non-enforced cards in this game.  Why does a sword need to be enforced?  Can't it just be a +1 hand weapon that literally anyone can carry?

I went into this in a bit more detail here, but the TL;DR of that blog post is that if there were a bunch of possessions, events, and basic conditions that said "Spot a Man" or, heck, "Spot a Companion" or just didn't spot anything instead of culturally-enforcing literally every weaksauce pump, then we could easily introduce a Dunedain culture without needing to get to the ~60 cards or so before it feels fleshed out.

Thematically, enforcing everything makes sense because e.g. access to Dwarven axes and Elvish bows and Rohirrim spears is going to be restricted. Practically, I think this is headed into a very dangerous territory. Either the generics aren't as good at specifics in which case they're never used, or they are as good in which case they're always used. What's the in-between? Once you lay this groundwork, there's no gracefully going back.

But if you mean exporting more of a culture's second-hand stuff, that's a solid idea. Horse of Rohan vs Rider's Mount. Southron Spear, for example, could've been fine for any Man because it implicitly leans into their cultural competency -- Easterlings would have a harder time using it, but in some situations (Ents, for example) it would be a better use of twilight than Easterling Captain's text. The same was not true for Raider Bow or Raider's Halbred -- despite decidedly Southron-oriented text, neither of those possessions are famous for being used in Southron decks because it displaces their strength, it's a substitute for having any Southrons at all.

Or if you mean allowing a culture to suppliment others in the deck, I'm all for it. Signet  interactions are the most obvious examples of this happening, never really explored by Decipher in spite of the potential. An Honerable Charge, Stout and Strong, and Ring of Barahir are all good and versatile cards as long as you lay the groundwork.

If the purpose isn't to fill the card pool with generic cards but to allow cultures to interact a little more, then I'm for it. If you've got a Southron in your entourage willing to lend a spear, let 'im. A bunch of cards with no cultural home, however, will either stay homeless or fall into a home you don't want them to. I don't see the purpose of "Cultureless" cards of this nature.

So this goes into one of the more far-reaching rules-based changes I want to implement for some theoretical 2.0 of the game, but I think Allies and Followers should be merged.  For every Ally, give em an Aid cost to be able to use their ability that turn, and/or a cost that you have to pay or discard them.  Elrond might be worth it for a bit, but if you have to discard two cards from hand every single move, well, you're six sites away and it's time to say goodbye.

Followers were just the replacement for Allies, so it makes sense. You just have to watch out for how you handle it. Discarding a FP character isn't necessarily a bad thing, doubly so if the Free Peoples has control over it. Southron Commander is insufficient crowd control in Towers because the FP player can simply circumvent the rule of 9 by discarding less useful or exhausted companions and playing new ones next turn. As long as the up-front costs are worse than the upkeep (but no so worse that playing it at all is a drag), should be fine.

Anyhoo, whew, sorry for the giant wall of text.  Some of it's rambling, but I love having discussions like this, albeit it's a bit easier to do the back-and-forth on Discord than on here, lol.

Discord has its merits, but personally asynchronous chat does better for me

[Legion]

Excellent points all round! I agree with almost all of that (though I'd argue there are several ways to play Corsairs: Castamir focused, more balanced, or paired with Moria and swarmy).

I like the raider culture, but think your point about Southron Spear is perfect. The ideal cards for a split culture like that would obviously lean towards one strategy, but be theoretically useful to the others, but to an obviously lesser extent. Raider Bow is great for Southrons, but Easterling Captain obviously had more use for it, and I don't think Decipher really thought about that. It's much harder to design cultures like that.

[Cw0rk]

Beside Galadriel LR and Cirdan, I would consider Glorfindel being part of the problem as well. 9-3 companion for only 2 in a starting fellowship is quite something. While Cirdan is one of the strongest card in the late game, Glorfindel is probably the strongest companion to have at site 2.

[Legion]

In movie, Glorfindel is a very strong card, I agree, but I do not consider him overpowered except possibly against Nazgul. His real issue is that he doesn't really get any good gear (Elven Sword and Elven Bow). Greenleaf is almost always more useful as a starting companion, and I knew decks that eschewed Glorfindel entirely for Arwen, QoEaM (effectively as strong when combined with Greenleaf and more useful later in the game).

I'd say that after GLR and Cirdan, their strongest card is Glimpse of Fate. When that's on the table, the shadow player is really going to struggle. However, this does not change my opinion that the only problem in Movie is GLR. I don't like Glimpse of Fate or Cirdan, but any good movie block deck should have ways around them.

Elves are very vulnerable to surprise cards like Red Wrath or Fierce in Despair (for Southrons, Corsairs or Easterlings), and even heavy archery decks can't really double into Dunland. Besiegers also do excellently against them without GLR as they rarely have enough to get rid of all the engines. That's some of the of the strongest Shadows that I say elves generally have a bad matchup against, and Galadriel ring bearers often walk a tightrope against corruption as well. If you really struggle against elves, though, try a shadow of Mordor Guard, Mordor Veteran and Orc Officer (I call them the Red Eye Triumvirate). Even (especially) against GLR you should expect to decimate Elven (and, in fairness most other) fellowships at City Gates.

[TelTura]

I'm gonna respond to this out of order because I think you sort of realized some of my points before I had to make em, lol.

Thematically, enforcing everything makes sense because e.g. access to Dwarven axes and Elvish bows and Rohirrim spears is going to be restricted.

. . .

But if you mean exporting more of a culture's second-hand stuff, that's a solid idea. Horse of Rohan vs Rider's Mount. Southron Spear, for example, could've been fine for any Man because it implicitly leans into their cultural competency -- Easterlings would have a harder time using it, but in some situations (Ents, for example) it would be a better use of twilight than Easterling Captain's text. The same was not true for Raider Bow or Raider's Halbred -- despite decidedly Southron-oriented text, neither of those possessions are famous for being used in Southron decks because it displaces their strength, it's a substitute for having any Southrons at all.

Or if you mean allowing a culture to suppliment others in the deck, I'm all for it. Signet  interactions are the most obvious examples of this happening, never really explored by Decipher in spite of the potential. An Honerable Charge, Stout and Strong, and Ring of Barahir are all good and versatile cards as long as you lay the groundwork.

If the purpose isn't to fill the card pool with generic cards but to allow cultures to interact a little more, then I'm for it. If you've got a Southron in your entourage willing to lend a spear, let 'im. A bunch of cards with no cultural home, however, will either stay homeless or fall into a home you don't want them to. I don't see the purpose of "Cultureless" cards of this nature.

So it makes sense that Dwarves have their own axes, and it makes sense that the Rohirrim have their own spears that they made in their own armories, but in reality this is just a broad-strokes default and doesn't carry down to the individual level.  Orcs carry around trophies that they plundered from people they killed.  Thorin and Gandalf both famously stole Elven blades from Trolls who had stolen them from their original owners.  Glamdring and Sting are represented in this game as and , but let's be real: they're both .  The mithril mail is actually , the hobbit swords are actually , and who made Aragorn's Ranger Sword?  Himself?  It was probably too....but maybe he bought it from a blacksmith, or a Bree worker, or a Laketown merchant, or picked it up from a armorer!

(One could make the argument that cultural enforcement is about who has access to things rather than their origins, but in that case why are all the Lorien gifts ?  And I'm sure Gondor and Rohan have traded with one another; there's no reason to think that Gondor has access to super special swords that the Rohirrim just can't lift or find or obtain.)

I'm not in favor of having a 'neutral' culture, I think that's a waste of time (and art).  I'm more for the situation like you pointed out of Southron Spear being equippable by any Man in the vicinity who happens to be picking one up off the corpse of his ally.  War is messy business, and armies are not arrayed in uniform equipment, not in the sort of time period that Middle-earth is set in.  Sure, I got this sword in that one battle over the river, picked it up off a guy I brained with my club; it's pretty fancy and I think I'll keep it.  What?  What do you mean it's not the same color as my armor?  Don't make me stab you!

Practically, I think this is headed into a very dangerous territory. Either the generics aren't as good at specifics in which case they're never used, or they are as good in which case they're always used. What's the in-between? Once you lay this groundwork, there's no gracefully going back.

The in-between is new cultures and/or new strategies.  I don't expect Gondor Ithilien Rangers to ever want to use the generic non-enforced Rohan spear that's +1/+2 if mounted.  But a Dunedain culture that only has 15 cards in it, all focused on important companions and conditions and whatnot is gonna be thrilled to have easily-accessed simple cards to fill in the holes.  Over time such a theoretical culture would get its own stuff, but that's down the line, and in the meantime, they can use the slightly-cruddy workhorse cards that are freely accessible to everyone.

And hey, maybe there will be subcultures/strategies that could end up using them.  Some blacksmith culture that does something like "remove 3 possessions from the game to do X" could probably use extra fodder, etc.

Likewise, if you have dead culture hate in your hand, you discard it.  If you have live culture hate in your hand, you play it (with perhaps some nuance to timing).   On top of that, if the culture hate is overpowered, it gets included all the time and makes that culture impossible to play.  If the culture hate is underpowered, no one ever cares to include it (Weight of a Legacy, anyone?).

It's too swingy.  It's rocket tag, to borrow more terms from other games.  Either you miss and do nothing or you smear your opponent on the ground with no counterplay. 

I typed up a response comparing the interactions to Magic, but really it's totally unfair to LotR. I know only the basics about Magic and that I don't like it, so I'm letting my ignorance guide me here. In Magic it doesn't make any sense to have a deck larger than 30 cards because you will rarely get through half of it. Every card must be useful in a variety of ways because you could face a variety of things and not be permitted a response otherwise. If specification can't win you a difficult matchup quickly, it's useless (and if it can, it's overpowered).

In LotR, if you have a 60 card deck you can expect to see almost every single one of those cards in most games. That, in and of itself, sets such a profoundly different stage for what kinds of cards should and shouldn't be made. To expand on an earlier point, Flaming Brand isn't a counter card not only because it's always useful but also because Gondor men is already the skirmishing culture of Fellowship block. It's a pile-on card, those should never be designed. Fearing the Worst and Greatest Kingdom of My People also slide neatly into this realm of bad ideas and enable decks to do what they already do well even better against some decks (discarding and choking, in their case). People pick these because they are too strong. But a smart counter card fits thematically, serves a purpose, and helps the meta.

I'm finding so much open deck space with cards like Disquiet of Our People and Not Feared in Sunlight because it allows a culture to survive some matchups, if just long enough to try to get a kill with the Shadow side. Because they're situational and culturally enforced, it doesn't make any sense to try and make them pile onto strategies which already excel at these things. It also doesn't ultimately change the power dynamic: I get one site of not losing, rarely could it be called winning. I've lost at site 9 to Nazgul with Not Feared in Sunlight on the table because the first 8 sites were harrowing for me and my opponent made a very smart play to deal with it. I've also won because my opponent didn't know how to handle it, clogged his hand with Nazgul that would maim if played instead of kill, and couldn't draw anything for their FP.

It doesn't have to be the case that an anti-Elf card would immediately counter any Elf strategy. I mean, you could write it that way I'm sure, but I think you've also learned the wrong lesson if that's your takeaway. But hey, if you don't like counter cards that's your prerogative. I think you'll find that cards which counter strategies are really just versatile cards which counter cultures -- they'll get used more, and I say that's a good thing. All I'm trying to say here is counter cards have a place in this game, even if they wouldn't in others.

Not sure that's it's worth going into, but there are also a ton of awful counter cards. They're awful because they don't make any sense: in the case of Weight of a Legacy, winning skirmishes is simply not a concern of Sauron in Fellowship block. They're happy to do it, sure, but even overwhelm strategies are going to focus on burdens for Enduring Evil and disposable conditions for Orc Butcher and Orc Veteran. Why devote resources to winning more skirmishes every few matches if you don't care that you do it -- especially at the expense of other cards? If it were a Nazgul card, however, that could make sense. They struggle with a 'roid raging Aragorn tearing through their ranks, and dropping Aragorn from 16 strength matters. Not overpowered, but relevant.

I have to thank you for this.  I had to mull it over for a while, and I'll admit I fought it at first, but I think you're right when it comes to culture hate--it's not the existence of the hate that's bad, but a combination of "punching up vs punching down" and "punching to boost your existing strengths vs punching to cover your weaknesses" that makes it more nuanced than I was previously seeing it as. 

I put my thoughts from this in a handy grid.  Thoughts?

1- punching down to a culture you can already handle, making one of your cultural strengths even better is BAD (Flaming Brand)

2- punching up to a culture you have a hard time dealing with, but still by making one of your cultural strengths even better is ALRIGHT, but still KINDA SWINGY (O Elbereth, Gilthoniel)

3- punching down to a culture you can already handle to cover one of your cultural weaknesses is WIERD and WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT (Weight of a Legacy).

4- punching up to a culture you have a hard time dealing with while trying to cover one of your cultural weaknesses is GOOD because IT MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE, BUT IT'S STILL YOUR WEAKNESS BRO, THEY MIGHT JUST MANHANDLE YOU ANYWAY (Not Feared In Sunlight)


(Putting it like this makes makes it obvious why moving Weight of a Legacy to Ringwraith would work, as you say.  Maybe add "The game text of Free Peoples cards attached to bearer do not apply." Boom: counters athelas, counters flaming brand, counters last alliance, deals with a dreadful annoyance to the Ringwraith culture, and is even thematic with the whole "worried to do things isildur might have done because isildur did them" thing.  That gives me tingles; thanks for the theoretical model to put all this under!)

Feel free to try this, obviously. I say it won't work because these cultures will each either be too useful and everywhere (why use my culture's stuff when Rivendell's is better?) or not useful enough and never seen (until a batch of cards breaks them). 3 support area cultures means you're playing whack-a-mole with 3 times as many targets.

I think the result is going to divide the number of moles being whacked rather than multiplying; shifting Elves into separate cultures should also include shifting the cultural enforcement, meaning that existing Elf decks shatter as they find that it's harder to run a 3-culture deck than a monoculture even using the same cards, meaning players have to choose between compatible cards (or risk clogging with multi-culture).  Even if all three cultures end up just as viable (hopefully not), there's now competition between the three, meaning that there are now shades of strength/weakness that can be exploited by the appropriate counters.

The best you could hope for is that Elf cultures only fit with one or two FP strategies and are rarely seen outside of them.

Suppose Mirkwood helps Shire not die so much. What's going to keep them from helping Rohan steamroll? If you nerf Mirkwood, now they don't help anyone. Nerf Rohan, now they're a less desirable choice through no fault of their own and every card you write for any culture has to be through the lens of "what could Mirkwood do with this?" Align their costs with Shire's strengths and they become Shire Elves, make them generally expensive and Shire might not be able to afford it either. How do you see getting around this?

Same way that we get around balancing Gandalf rainbow decks and Elf/Man decks and literally any deck that isn't monoculture: on a case by case basis.  The specific example here doesn't have enough meat on it for me to speculate with, but in general there's no fundamental problem with having Elves split in three that is not already addressed with Men being split between Gondor and Rohan (or knights, rangers, Aragorn, and Rohan, which are the real divisions when you peel back the veneer). 

To be clear, the cultural rearrangement couldn't possibly be a small change.  Arguably it couldn't even be a change just introduced in "the next expansion".  This would require too many sweeping changes to a ton of cards for it to be isolated, and would need to include systematic changes to address all sorts of butterfly effects.  I included it as an aside because it's definitely related to the idea of identifying each culture's core identity (and also because the idea of a 2.0 that radically changes the game is never too far from my thoughts).  Really in such a theoretical world there would be other cultural shakeups as well: Gandalf into Fangorn/Bree/Laketown/Istari, Gondor into Dunedain/Gondor, Dwarf into Erebor/Iron Hills/Khazad-dum, Raider into the three Easterling/Corsair/Southron, and possibly some more than I'm forgetting.  This and other large changes (Ally/Follower merge, systematic cultural enforcement diffusion, site path redux, phase evaluation, etc), which I place in the same "2.0" thoughts in my head, would have so many knock-on effects that it's impossible to gauge exactly where all the dust will settle afterwards. 

But!  That was not the intent of this thread.  Long before any of those dreams could ever have a hope of feasibly becoming reality, we must first identify, clearly, what makes up each culture, so that we can be sure that the good parts are preserved, and the bad are addressed as neatly as possible.

It's a fair question and a good point. There's no need for me to suppose that Decipher found the perfect balance here if they struggled in so many other places. Some of your premise is wrong (I think only Corsairs and Ents are really suited for a single way of playing), but all the same what defines a culture is different from one group to the next. Three Elves might be better than one.

I'm glad someone else is willing to admit that there might be fundamental cracks in the foundation, lol.  Decipher did a lot right, but they did a lot wrong, too.

Followers were just the replacement for Allies, so it makes sense. You just have to watch out for how you handle it. Discarding a FP character isn't necessarily a bad thing, doubly so if the Free Peoples has control over it. Southron Commander is insufficient crowd control in Towers because the FP player can simply circumvent the rule of 9 by discarding less useful or exhausted companions and playing new ones next turn. As long as the up-front costs are worse than the upkeep (but no so worse that playing it at all is a drag), should be fine.

For sure!  "Do X or place in the dead pile" would probably be fine as well, even if it's a bit thematic-bending.

[Phallen Cassidy]

I definitely agree about Glorfindel, and GLR's twilight reduction. It's just an abuse of the starting fellowship, and for what reason? If GLR always cost 3, I wonder if she'd be more balanced. Glimpse of Fate is definitely a top problem, but every set 10 condition in that group was poorly thought out at best. I think the root of Elven evil goes deeper than just a handful of issuess, but an Elven strength that definitely is due to the top few cards is incredibly streamlined decks. There's often pretty obvious "best" choices to make (and little reason to explore others). A 9/3 companion for 2 and a companion for 0, but only as long as they're in your starting fellowship, means you're going to have them in your starting fellowship every time.

So it makes sense that Dwarves have their own axes, and it makes sense that the Rohirrim have their own spears that they made in their own armories, but in reality this is just a broad-strokes default and doesn't carry down to the individual level.  Orcs carry around trophies that they plundered from people they killed.  Thorin and Gandalf both famously stole Elven blades from Trolls who had stolen them from their original owners.  Glamdring and Sting are represented in this game as and , but let's be real: they're both .  The mithril mail is actually , the hobbit swords are actually , and who made Aragorn's Ranger Sword?  Himself?  It was probably too....but maybe he bought it from a blacksmith, or a Bree worker, or a Laketown merchant, or picked it up from a armorer!

I'm a little surprised you brought this up. Lets look at Sting, a decidedly Elvish dagger. Thematically it just belongs in the hands of a Hobbit. It is famous for being a Baggins heirloom, and if someone else has it then something very bad has happened. Practically, in none of its current incarnations would it be a good thing to allow an Elf to bear it. Change Sting to make that happen, and now it's a bad choice for Hobbits. You can litter cards with text such as "While bearer is a Hobbit, bearer is strength +1" or "Skirmish: If bearer is a Hobbit Ring-bearer, ..." But why? Now you've made a weapon that is implicitly culture-bound instead of explicitly. Allowing Merry or Pippin bear it feels wrong too, even though they also have hands and are Hobbit-sized. I've been drifting off topic, this and other thoughts are probably more general than this post should entertain. If you acknowledge that one culture might have too much going for it on its own, I can't see free access to other culture's stuff going well.

I put my thoughts from this in a handy grid.  Thoughts?

1- punching down to a culture you can already handle, making one of your cultural strengths even better is BAD (Flaming Brand)

2- punching up to a culture you have a hard time dealing with, but still by making one of your cultural strengths even better is ALRIGHT, but still KINDA SWINGY (O Elbereth, Gilthoniel)

3- punching down to a culture you can already handle to cover one of your cultural weaknesses is WIERD and WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT (Weight of a Legacy).

4- punching up to a culture you have a hard time dealing with while trying to cover one of your cultural weaknesses is GOOD because IT MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE, BUT IT'S STILL YOUR WEAKNESS BRO, THEY MIGHT JUST MANHANDLE YOU ANYWAY (Not Feared In Sunlight)

Interesting way to frame it. At first glance I'd say it sounds reasonable. I'm sure as you consider more counter cards you'll iron it out. Moria Scout, for example, both plays to a strength (free minion) and a weakness (can take an arrow). I'd Make You Squeak is neat because it makes choices more interesting for the Free Peoples player without really doing anything on its own, but I couldn't say where that falls in the grid. It's also not necessarily a counter card because when it was released there was always at least 1 Hobbit in play, but the focus on a culture over just the Ring-bearer is important.

It's only fair to note that I've seen maybe one other player use Not Feared in Sunlight, and I don't think I've seen anyone else use Disquiet of Our People (or Dwarf Guard. Redshirts are highly underrated). My playstyle is very different from everybody else, and because of it I believe there are still unexplored (or at least underexplored) decks that can compete with the best of 'em. Niche cards such as these are the reason why. In my Hobbit deck, I don't have to write off Nazgul games as a loss because I've found unpopular and potent ways of dealing with them.

Same way that we get around balancing Gandalf rainbow decks and Elf/Man decks and literally any deck that isn't monoculture: on a case by case basis.

I had been taking "Elves are support-area only" as your solution to existing strengths, when I realize now that may not be what you're saying. My two cents are that support-area only is an existing strength. Upkeep is perhaps a step in the right direction.