Hi everyone,
Recently came across this site after deciding to start collecting and playing this game again. Listening to the Prancing Pony Podcast reignited my love of LOTR/Tolkien and I want to get back into TCGs based on the property. Longtime TCG player but fell out of them for too long. I thought about playing the MECCG but too much of a learning curve for me at this point. Plus, something about this game just draws you in, I am sure you all understand.
Anywhoo, I had some questions about how to get started that I hoped you would be able to help me with. I think I found the right forum for this topic but please let me know if it should be moved elsewhere.
You found the right place!
1) It seems to me that there is quite a schism between cards based on the movies and cards printed afterwards (assuming Wikipedia can be believed). Do people even play using the newer sets? I will say the new sites mechanic kind of rubs me the wrong way.
People do in fact play the post-Shadows formats less, but they aren't dead formats:
FOTR is far and away the most popular at half of all virtual games played, and Movie is a third, but Expanded is there at 10-15% of the total.
The site changes rubbed me the wrong way at first, but I've grown to appreciate it. The culture rearrangement tho, screw that noise.
2) Is the deck building and tournament structure setup like Magic, meaning there are block formats, a format with a few more sets included, and a format with every card legal?
There are somewhat more than a dozen formats; at the time that the game was active it was fairly close to how Magic does things, but since Decipher up and died, there's a lot of interest in maintaining formats from different periods of time:
- FOTR/TTT/ROTK cover three sets each for their respective movie (1-3, 4-6, 7/8/10)
- War of the Ring and Hunter block are the next groups of 3-set chunks (11-13, 15-18)
- Movie block covers all pre-Shadows cards in sets 1-10, using ROTK sites
- Expanded permits for cards from any block (using Shadows+ sites) except for an X-list of banned cards
- Open is the same format as Expanded with no X-list and only a very slim R-list of restricted cards
- "Anything Goes" is a sort of non-format that permits you to use any sites you like, with no restrictions whatsoever
Besides these there are a bunch of historical formats that represent snapshots of the Standard format at various times, such as Towers Standard, etc.
3) If there are defined formats for the game now, what types of formats are most popular? Last I played was before ROTK and I had very few people to play with even then.
I suppose I answered this already above. FOTR, then Movie, then Expanded, then the rest.
4) I presume no one mixes cards from the Shadows sets and the "movie" sets. To me this would be good to know so I know what cards I want to buy.
You can in Expanded/Open, but those formats (Open especially) have a stigma of it being nothing but broken combos. People pull their punches intentionally to avoid using all the broken combos available.
5) Do some people play for fun or is the game now more like Magic and net-decks run (ruin?) the show? I would hope since the game is officially "dead" for years that people would have a little more fun.
Funnily enough, because the game has been dead for a decade and no one (until recently!) was willing to take up the torch to perform errata rulings, people settled into a status quo where the truly broken monstrous combos are all known, but you can't use 'em because people will recognize your username and stop playing with you.
As an aside, this is one of the things that the relatively new Player's Council is aiming to disrupt, by issuing errata and maintaining the X-lists, to bring those formats back into a competitive state again.
6) Knowing that I have zero cards are there certain sets I should focus on buying over another? Better to just by FOTR stuff since it's probably more popular or just buy what I can find? I do want to track down an Expanded Middle-Earth set for Elladan and Elrohir.
I would advise buying the cards you want to have to scratch your collector's itch. If you want to just
play, the way to do it is digitally on Gemp (
http://www.gempukku.com/gemp-lotr/hall.html), a platform that enforces all the rules and lets you play in the browser. As shown in the chart at the top of the page, there were close to 8,000 games played in the last month, so if you truly just want to play I say ditch the cardboard and just play that way.
If you still want to get the cardboard, I can't advise you on what will get used, as that's going to be determined by who's physically close to you; you'll have to find out there.
Thanks for the time guys. I plan to spend plenty of time reading all the rulebooks, CRDs, and rules forums, so hopefully not too many dumb rules questions
We won't mind questions! I would also advise hopping onto the Facebook group if you have a Facebook account; it's quite a bit more active than the forums. The Player's Council Discord is also active and available to answer questions in chat.
Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1465106970387398/PC Discord:
https://discord.gg/mmyYfJ7