In defence of Hunter

[Dictionary]

I have noticed that nobody that I know of actually likes the Hunter keyword. I remember sending a PM a while back defending the idea, and as somebody who thought it was an interesting concept, I've written some analysis for any who are interested:


First, I don't think that Hunter inherently makes characters stronger, as you can see from Mablung, RoI; Damrod, DoG or Silent Traveler. Compared to what you would normally expect from the costs of these cards, they have reduced strength to compensate for being a hunter. Quite a few Gondor characters and minions have this. The issue is more to do IMO with unique characters having their normal statistics and being Hunters, as well as having strong abilities (Thorongil, Captain of Ithilien etc.). Generally though, I would say this is limited to specific cards, as this issue is not even applicable to every unique character. For example, Eomer, Horsemaster already has many various previous versions with strength bonuses (TMoR; Eomer, HtM), so his Hunter version isn't that spectacular. Eager Hunter + Of the Woodland Realm are also not too bad, with the former being in a similar situation to Eomer (Gimli, FC; LotGC) and the latter generally preferring archery over skirmishing (Greenleaf; Legolas, WE), depending on the deck strategy. As a matter of fact, I think that these two are generally only put into Hunter decks so that they can use Hunter mechanics (Forth the Three Hunters!, Whatever End) and not because they are stronger than previous versions of the character. Also note that Curunir is supposed to counter enemy Hunters, but is actually too weak in contrast to the earlier released AotDL!


I think that as a mechanic, Hunter creates interesting situations with minions such as White Hand Butcher or White Hand Warrior, where the Free Peoples player is limited in their assignment decisions to using one of their Hunters or giving bonuses to the opponent. This is somewhat demonstrated in the set 17 starters. A big part of how Hunter works is that it depends on the fact that the Free Peoples player chooses where to put minions, which means Hunter needs to be a bigger bonus for minions. In other words, Hunter for the Free Peoples player is something that affects their assignments in order to best counter it, but for the Shadow Player it's simply a bonus that they can build their deck around. This makes Hunter much more complicated than simply "A strength bonus for a companion or minion". Like resistance, if the mechanic had been in the game since the beginning, it probably would have fared much better i.e "do I put a hunter or two in my deck so that I have an easier time if my opponent is playing an all Hunter deck, or do I think that I will be ok and that I can risk it"; this logic is similar to deciding whether to use anti-nazgul versions of companions in FOTR, or whether their deck already deals with Nazgul, and of course, sometimes their presence is simply coincidental. With only 3 sets using the Hunter keyword though, as well as systematic power creep after Towers, the keyword becomes pretty polarised.

[menace64]

First, I don't think that Hunter inherently makes characters stronger,

That is precisely what Hunter does.

...as you can see from Mablung, RoI; Damrod, DoG or Silent Traveler. Compared to what you would normally expect from the costs of these cards, they have reduced strength to compensate for being a hunter. Quite a few Gondor characters and minions have this. The issue is more to do IMO with unique characters having their normal statistics and being Hunters, as well as having strong abilities (Thorongil, Captain of Ithilien etc.).

Some cards seem to have been designed around a balanced implementation of Hunter in mind. Most Hunter cards feel like the keyword was tacked-on for free, and this problem only got worse as the block moved forward. Thorongil would be pushed even if he wasn't base-10 strength against 90% of the minions in the game.

Generally though, I would say this is limited to specific cards, as this issue is not even applicable to every unique character. For example, Eomer, Horsemaster already has many various previous versions with strength bonuses (TMoR; Eomer, HtM), so his Hunter version isn't that spectacular. Eager Hunter + Of the Woodland Realm are also not too bad, with the former being in a similar situation to Eomer (Gimli, FC; LotGC) and the latter generally preferring archery over skirmishing (Greenleaf; Legolas, WE), depending on the deck strategy. As a matter of fact, I think that these two are generally only put into Hunter decks so that they can use Hunter mechanics (Forth the Three Hunters!, Whatever End) and not because they are stronger than previous versions of the character. Also note that Curunir is supposed to counter enemy Hunters, but is actually too weak in contrast to the earlier released AotDL!

Hunter is the embodiment of power creep. Hunter benefits from skirmishing older characters, who automatically become weaker against Hunter characters. Right here is where the trouble starts, and the trouble is absolutely independent of cherry-picked "lesser" examples. It's a bad* keyword, with a negative effect on just about any format outside of Hunters Block.

(*this is not an emotional critique, but a design critique. Implementing a binary keyword that only keys off of not-itself is an effective strategy only at driving up sales of related product, and then of polarizing the meta so that only the newer cards can thrive.)

I think that as a mechanic, Hunter creates interesting situations with minions such as White Hand Butcher or White Hand Warrior, where the Free Peoples player is limited in their assignment decisions to using one of their Hunters or giving bonuses to the opponent. This is somewhat demonstrated in the set 17 starters. A big part of how Hunter works is that it depends on the fact that the Free Peoples player chooses where to put minions, which means Hunter needs to be a bigger bonus for minions. In other words, Hunter for the Free Peoples player is something that affects their assignments in order to best counter it, but for the Shadow Player it's simply a bonus that they can build their deck around. This makes Hunter much more complicated than simply "A strength bonus for a companion or minion". Like resistance, if the mechanic had been in the game since the beginning, it probably would have fared much better i.e "do I put a hunter or two in my deck so that I have an easier time if my opponent is playing an all Hunter deck, or do I think that I will be ok and that I can risk it"; this logic is similar to deciding whether to use anti-nazgul versions of companions in FOTR, or whether their deck already deals with Nazgul, and of course, sometimes their presence is simply coincidental. With only 3 sets using the Hunter keyword though, as well as systematic power creep after Towers, the keyword becomes pretty polarised.

More Hunter cards would've only made the problem worse, I think.
But I do agree that Hunter should - eventually - receive a healthy dose of innovation/errata.

[Dictionary]

Well, that's a pretty condemning first response.

That is precisely what Hunter does.

This first statement is completely unqualified, and simply exists to be contrary to what I'm trying to analyse. I've shown some examples of characters who have hunter built-in to their cost, so exactly how are these characters stronger than if they didn't have the keyword?

Some cards seem to have been designed around a balanced implementation of Hunter in mind. Most Hunter cards feel like the keyword was tacked-on for free, and this problem only got worse as the block moved forward.

I count 41 cards with the Hunter keyword in the deckbuilder. Almost half of them are rarely played, so again, I question this premise. Minions especially have gone through a lot of strength boosts after TTT, so "tacked on for free" is difficult to identify here. How many companions have hunter boosts added for free? I count less than 10. So again, saying this applies to "most" cards seems like a huge exaggeration.

And again, bear in mind that a card like Fleet-footed Hunter is not getting his hunter keyword for free. It's replacing Archer and any kind of good game text ability.

Thorongil would be pushed even if he wasn't base-10 strength against 90% of the minions in the game.

Yes, Thorongil is incredibly op, but this hardly speaks for an entire concept. Castamir of Umbar is op, but that doesn't mean we should scrap Enduring. If every ROTK minion had Enduring, would that make Enduring a bad keyword, or would it simply be an inappropriate use of it?

Hunter is the embodiment of power creep. Hunter benefits from skirmishing older characters, who automatically become weaker against Hunter characters

No, it's really not that simple. Here are some examples in more detail: High hunter characters suffer against low hunter characters (Faramir, CoI vs Seeking Uruk; RiW would be preferable). Non-hunter characters suffer against high hunter characters (PaNM vs White Hand Butcher; Damrod, DoG would be preferable.). Then we have the context of overwhelms: Low hunter companions suffer against low-hunter minions (Silent Traveler vs Chasing Uruk; Derufin would be preferable), and high hunter companions suffer against high hunter minions (Eager Hunter vs Gorbag, FR; again, RiW would be preferable). In these situations (Which are common, because minions have higher base strengths than companions), non-hunters are favoured. Then of course, we have the many neutral situations where whether one character is a hunter or not makes no difference. And defender +1 situations, where exclusive use of hunters or non-hunters is fine, but mixing hunters and non-hunters is punished. So already we have 5 or 6 different scenarios that could arise here, each favouring different sides, and that's not an exhaustive list.

Implementing a binary keyword that only keys off of not-itself is an effective strategy only at driving up sales of related product, and then of polarizing the meta so that only the newer cards can thrive.)

This statement seems to confuse intent with results. Decipher presumably never intended early cards to be op, yet some were. So even if they intended to produce op cards, that doesn't automatically mean that those cards are op (Elladan, Elrohir, Sauron), or that they're op in the intended way (Aiglos, any loop card) and it's pretty clear that many cards (Sorrow Shared, Miruvore, Ranger of the South) were not intended to be super op anyway. What's more, arguing whether a specific card or concept was "intended to be op" is a bit of a subjective rabbit hole.

However, the binary keyword point is the main thing that makes me wonder if the concept could've been done better, which is precisely why I'm trying to explore the full ramifications of the keyword. The trouble is, Decipher liked to keep their keywords bound to certain blocks, which is why Menace has no Enduring, and suffers a lot because of it. However, this would seem to imply that hunter would've been dropped after Hunters block, and barely appears in Ages End. So, if they'd wanted to do power creeping in the future, they didn't need Hunter to do it. In other words, it was an idea for the cycle of cards in Hunters block, not a tool to make every character better than previous blocks. If they wanted to enforce power creep, they could do that anyway as they did with cards like Siege Troop.

Right here is where the trouble starts, and the trouble is absolutely independent of cherry-picked "lesser" examples.

Except that it's the op cards that get cherry-picked, not the bulk of the cards. It's highly probable that they would've made those cards op anyway. Aragorn already has a strength 9 version, so nothing was stopping them bumping it up another point, as they did with Wise Guide. You could argue they feared that this would be too obvious, but that assumes they thought their player base wasn't very smart, and cards like Durin III, Grimbeorn or the online only Treebeard, Enemy of the Hand (W), seem to imply that they just didn't care.

[menace64]

I apologize for my tone and the severity of the stand I may appear to be taking. I'm aware that my tone and language have been uniformly combative basically everywhere - I haven't yet figured out how to fix it and you certainly aren't the first to experience it recently.

[Phallen Cassidy]

An interesting challenge, to look past the general power creep of the set and evaluate Hunter on its own merit. I don't like it for many of the reasons menace64 describes, but if it were truly the embodiment of power creep I would expect to see far more Hunter decks in expanded. The strength bonus part of the equation alone really doesn't seem too bad. Sure, Gorbag, Filthy Rebel is 16 strength for 6 twilight, but Black Land Shrieker is 20 for 8 (often less). As Dictionary said, Hunter on its own has a lot of interesting ways for the strength bonus to play out.

Looking through the cards, I think the biggest issue with Hunter is the cards that are concerned with "non-hunters". Gorbag, Filthy Rebel; Great Axe; and Legolas, Of the Woodland Realm are good, I would say: they punish your opponent for overextending into Hunter. Ugluk, Ugly Fellow; With All Possible Speed; and Aragorn, Thorongil are bad: they punish your opponent for not extending enough (in addition to the bonus you get). This is sort of similar to why Glimpse of Fate and Madril, Defender of Osgiliath are bad, where players are already interested in doing something (cycling, adding threats to do stuff) and then they get a bonus for it. Or how Faramir's Ringbound Rangers in Towers block are immune to some devastating effects (Grima, Wormtongue; Men Will Fall; Hornburg Causeway) -- it's not that being Ringbound is necessarily great (in this case it doesn't "do" anything), it's that players are punished at times for not being Ringbound.

To Dictionary's overall point, Hunter probably gets more flak than it deserves. Site control / liberation is unavailable to Fellowship Block cards; threats are unavailable to Towers Standard cards; initiative was exclusive to King Block (and I would argue that it was a maybe-decent idea very poorly executed). And yet, none of those have the same sort of general opposition. Some of them are even called progress. Could Hunter be a "good" keyword? Sure. Even if it was only available for the last few sets' worth of cards. Does the current implementation make it "good"? No, I think not. But I'd say it's moreso because of cards around Hunter than that Hunter itself is "bad."

[Dictionary]

I apologize for my tone and the severity of the stand I may appear to be taking. I'm aware that my tone and language have been uniformly combative basically everywhere - I haven't yet figured out how to fix it and you certainly aren't the first to experience it recently.

It's cool, I heard you mention this before and I know you've been with this game pretty much forever, so Decipher's more questionable decisions are more apparent to you.

An interesting challenge, to look past the general power creep of the set and evaluate Hunter on its own merit. I don't like it for many of the reasons menace64 describes, but if it were truly the embodiment of power creep I would expect to see far more Hunter decks in expanded. The strength bonus part of the equation alone really doesn't seem too bad. Sure, Gorbag, Filthy Rebel is 16 strength for 6 twilight, but Black Land Shrieker is 20 for 8 (often less). As Dictionary said, Hunter on its own has a lot of interesting ways for the strength bonus to play out.

Looking through the cards, I think the biggest issue with Hunter is the cards that are concerned with "non-hunters". Gorbag, Filthy Rebel; Great Axe; and Legolas, Of the Woodland Realm are good, I would say: they punish your opponent for overextending into Hunter. Ugluk, Ugly Fellow; With All Possible Speed; and Aragorn, Thorongil are bad: they punish your opponent for not extending enough (in addition to the bonus you get). This is sort of similar to why Glimpse of Fate and Madril, Defender of Osgiliath are bad, where players are already interested in doing something (cycling, adding threats to do stuff) and then they get a bonus for it. Or how Faramir's Ringbound Rangers in Towers block are immune to some devastating effects (Grima, Wormtongue; Men Will Fall; Hornburg Causeway) -- it's not that being Ringbound is necessarily great (in this case it doesn't "do" anything), it's that players are punished at times for not being Ringbound.

To Dictionary's overall point, Hunter probably gets more flak than it deserves. Site control / liberation is unavailable to Fellowship Block cards; threats are unavailable to Towers Standard cards; initiative was exclusive to King Block (and I would argue that it was a maybe-decent idea very poorly executed). And yet, none of those have the same sort of general opposition. Some of them are even called progress. Could Hunter be a "good" keyword? Sure. Even if it was only available for the last few sets' worth of cards. Does the current implementation make it "good"? No, I think not. But I'd say it's moreso because of cards around Hunter than that Hunter itself is "bad."

I like this analysis. I hadn't considered the whole "punishing one strategy" = fine, "punishing all but one strategy = bad in this instance, but it's some really good logic. If you want to encourage as many strategies as possible, punishing a concept that didn't exist for the previous 3000 odd cards probably wasn't the best idea, and as you say, this is actually more to do with game text than usage of the keyword itself. In fact, I've always been on the fence with Ugly Fellow, since he's basically a nod to the previous Ugluk but much more consistent, and uruks needed a bit more beef (Lurtz, interestingly, never got any significant power creep). But Ugly Fellow really does punish non-hunters a bit too hard. I'm also reminded of Sprinter, since he was going to wound hunters once and non-hunters twice, but they swapped it around, fitting much more neatly into your paradigm.

[Phallen Cassidy]

You make good points about Ugly Fellow; Ugluk, Servant of Saruman and Weary accomplished basically the same thing. He just seems so useless against hunters, haha. I'd still prefer if his text worked against hunters instead -- make your opponent choose between a strength 12 minion or a guaranteed exertion. I think it would feel more thematic that way too, since the Uruk-hai hunters were acutely aware of the Three Hunters and vice versa. Why on earth is Thorongil different from Sprinter and Of the Woodland Realm? Gimli and Legolas make sense, they're hunting down the hunters. What is Aragorn off doing?

[Dictionary]

You make good points about Ugly Fellow; Ugluk, Servant of Saruman and Weary accomplished basically the same thing. He just seems so useless against hunters, haha. I'd still prefer if his text worked against hunters instead -- make your opponent choose between a strength 12 minion or a guaranteed exertion. I think it would feel more thematic that way too, since the Uruk-hai hunters were acutely aware of the Three Hunters and vice versa.

Yeah I think I'd prefer this too, makes for more interesting decisions. Also if Thorongil targeted hunters he could (with some boosting) be used to stop minions like Mauhur, RH, who is another card that should probably also target hunters.

Why on earth is Thorongil different from Sprinter and Of the Woodland Realm? Gimli and Legolas make sense, they're hunting down the hunters. What is Aragorn off doing?

Hunting everything else I guess, that's how badass he is .