Player's Council Errata Release

[TelTura]

How long do you intend to leave these cards on the cartoon templates? Is that the mark of a PC card? It's not bad and it's helpful to have a clear differentiator between Decipher and PC cards, just curious.

The 5 that have been released have had their templates changed to the official ones already.  If they're still showing as the #$&*@! templates, you might need to do a hard-refresh (shift + F5 in many browsers) to clear the cache.

For the most part the errata seem about on level. Some hit harder than others, but honestly I expected to have more issues than I do. Still got opinions though!

High praise!

Sting -- I think it's pretty neat to make Sting half of Glamdring since Sting is only half a sword. I wonder if the twilight cap needed to be reduced though, since all pre-Shadows Orc shadow cultures have a way to play around it except Orcs who would probably prefer any added exertions, though I can't speak to the impact in Shadows+. With it only revealing 4 cards I'm not sure I'd mind my opponent trying to remove all 4 tokens no matter what my strategy is.

I agree, for what it's worth.  Every time I bring it up someone goes "I thought you were against choke", and I am, but at least in this case it's trading vitality for twilight, which some Shadows can capitalize on.

Gimli, Dwarf of the Mountain-race -- It occurs to me that he's not good in Choke decks and not good in Dwarf decks and as you note, not a good choice in Shadows+ either. I question whether Decipher found that the twilight reduction was too strong or thought that the potential for twilight reduction could be too strong. I think he'll get another pass before long. My recommendation would be original text but I'll settle for +2 strength to get him in line with the other situational Gimlis (who trigger off better situations than "going second").

Yeah, Gimli is one where we shrugged and took Decipher at their word.  He will probably need further iteration to be competitive.

Relics of Moria -- I'd dispute the claim that this card doesn't start the machine. It's cheaper than Goblin Scavengers and doesn't cost any cards from hand. At any rate, the decision to wait until after Moria lost Cavern Entrance* to ban this card perplexes me so doing near-nothing sounds about right.

I don't doubt that it can start the engine, just that even when I see it played it doesn't seem to often be the first move, since the Scavenger start seems to beat it to the punch so often.  Maybe I just haven't been lucky enough to see it need to be the kickstart.

The Shire Countryside -- I disagree with the notion that this card makes it trivial to wipe all wounds, though I haven't found the official word on the matter either. According to the CRDs we have it was added sometime between September 2004 and January 2005. Shadows came out in November or so and with it came Erland, Dale Counselor. Exert Erland, take an event, play it, lose initiative, trigger A Light in His Mind, heal a companion with The Shire Countryside... Well shoot. So which card do they axe, one of the two new cards or the old one? I'd bet this ban was a quick fix for not adequately considering the possibilities, and was probably a big push in the direction of set rotation. The card put them in a bind to have to work around it, true, but they should've seen it coming and either banned it up front or worked around it. While the errata here makes loops impossible, it's difficult to use the card any other way as well. So: if the phase limit is what counts, revert the rest of the text. You'll kill loops and still deal your heavy hit to cards removing more than one burden without depriving it of all value.

It might have gotten double-nerfed. 

On the one hand I've got some decks killed by these changes that I definitely don't want to leave behind, especially for ATfNBS and TSC which aren't banned in any format I play. On the other, using Sting outside of Fellowship block could be fun. Since everything is a nerf at this point it's hard to see myself being pulled into the PC formats unless I want to take a deck of mine that's unaffected and put it up against weaker decks. It'll be interesting to see what develops in the future.

Yeah, nerfs are only exciting if they hit cards that one personally finds offensive--for that reason, I expect to see people up in arms about HttWC and who dislike choke in general to be attracted to this, just as others will be attracted when GLR and Grond are addressed.  But yeah, the formats won't truly start to come unto its own until Phase 3--when we finally get to start buffing the real stinkers and offering essentially new cards that could really start to mix things up.  Not to mention the actual new cards themselves, too.