Neat idea! Is each booster 11 cards, same as the Decipher ones?
Yes, I've been the same type of boosters as Decipher (11 cards: 7 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare); it felt appropriate and actually makes the math relatively simple. With the size of set I used, each common appears twice as often as a particular uncommon and five times as often as a particular rare.
Are you intending rarity to correlate to a card's accessibility (how powerful it is) or a card's worthiness (how usable it is)?
Rarity (especially in a reprint-only set) has to incorporate a large number of factors:
- How powerful is the card?
- How reliable/niche is the card? (is it a card like Host of Thousands that every Moria deck wants to use, or a card like Moria Archer Troop, which is only good if you open other archers?)
- How splashable is the card? (from a set design standpoint, splashability can be a positive or a negative, depending on the card)
- Does the card require multiple copies to be effective?
- How powerful is the rest of the culture? (more on this below)
As you've noted, many of these purposes pull in opposite directions: niche cards are often less powerful, and so want to be at a high rarity (so players don't open lots of copies of a card they don't want) but also at a low rarity (so players aren't disappointed opening a weak rare). In a perfect world, the answer would be to only include niche cards if they're powerful, but with a reprint-only set, there are going to be compromises.
The way I generated sealed pools opened all packs at once, and so I was always evaluating the rares as a group instead of pack-by-pack. I think that led to me under-appreciating the feel-bad moment of "the rare in this pack isn't very good," because I just lumped the rares that weren't strong in with the rares that were off-culture from the bulk of my pool. Tightening up the power band of the rares is something that may be worth prioritizing more than I have.
Moria can swarm very efficiently with 0 Goblin Armory, for example, and that card is so warping that having 4 of it matters a lot more than, well, really much of anything else.
I think
Goblin Armory is a good example of how I tried to think about rarity. Here are the probabilities for opening 0, 1 or 2+ of a particular card in a sealed pool if it's not in the same culture as the culture-specific pack:
| C | U | R |
| 0 | 50% | 71% | 87% |
| 1 | 35% | 25% | 12% |
| 2 or more | 15% | 5% | 1% |
and if it is in the same culture as the culture-specific pack:
| C | U | R |
| 0 | 30% | 54% | 78% |
| 1 | 37% | 34% | 20% |
| 2 or more | 34% | 12% | 2% |
Goblin Armory is a card that most Moria players will want multiple copies of, but it would warp the environment if they got it too consistently. Uncommon felt like the right spot because players who open a Moria pack will get at least one copy 46% of the time, and will get multiple copies about 12% of the time. That means that you have the chance to build around it, but it's far from a guarantee.
Beyond the individual card consideration, there's the overall culture consideration. In my playtesting, I found Moria to be one of the weaker shadow cultures; swarming requires more synergy than beatdown, and so is less consistent in limited. Having a powerful card like
Goblin Armory at uncommon was an attempt to balance Moria with the other shadow cultures. (While I stand by this general comment, the specifics may be wrong. It's very possible that I was just making poor deckbuilding decisions with my Moria decks, and the culture is actually more powerful than I think.)
Shadow sides are naturally much more flexible in accepting different splashes so that probably doesn't need much attention. However, not many cards in FP packs -- especially commons where it matters most -- are really that splashable, so I think most cards in the 9 boosters are basically unusable.
The FP cards being less splashable than the Shadow cards is a deliberate choice on my part, although it's certainly possible it's an incorrect choice. While splashing minions is easy, because they don't stick around, shadow support cards in a multi-culture deck have a high chance of getting stuck in your hand (what if you draw your Moria minions and Dunland support, for example).
On the FP side, companions do stick around from turn to turn, and so cultural enforcement is easier to meet. A two-culture deck that can start one companion of each culture won't have any problem with spotting the necessary characters, provided they can keep them out of the dead pile. I tried to include multiple two-twilight companions in each culture at common to make this possible (this was hardest in
![[Gandalf]](https://lotrtcgdb.com/forums/Smileys/classic/gandalf.png "Gandalf")
, and
Leader of Men has switched between common and uncommon multiple times).
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the best solution would be. The randomness is the fun of it. I notice you didn't give multi-culture hate to Shadow packs (a good thing), maybe instead of a culture-specific booster pack you could design some sort of "here's the bones of your deck" base pack?
Having a "bones of your deck" base pack is an idea that I've wrestled with the whole time I've been working on this set. It would help with reliability immensely, but at the cost of making the format feel a lot closer to the already-existing draft and sealed formats on GEMP. I decided to challenge myself to make it work without any sort of base pack, but I absolutely acknowledge that it might be necessary.
Hard to figure out how to remain random enough without either sabotaging players (here's some random stuff, figure something out) or pigeonholing them (here's Elven cards, go play Elves). Selecting a FP pack at the end does solve most of the issue, though inelegantly.
I agree completely! Opening one culture-specific pack felt like the best option to me, and it's the only one I've tested. Some other solutions I considered:
- Have a fixed list of cards that everyone opens, including 2-3 low-power companions of each culture and some ring-bearer support (like Hobbit Sword), as discussed above.
- Include a "Companion pack" in everyone's pool that only contains companions to ensure everyone gets enough without having a fixed list. In the end I felt that by adjusting rarity distributions, I could ensure everyone opened enough companions without a dedicated pack.
- Just open more packs. I think 26 packs (13 per side) would give enough cards in each culture to reliably build a deck without having culture-specific packs, but I was worried about the pool getting too large.
- Open multiple culture-specific packs, chosen at random. Again, I haven't tested this, but imagine opening 3 culture-specific packs per side instead of 1. You would probably play 2 of those 3 cultures, and the cards in the regular packs would be a major factor in deciding which 2. This might also allow you to open fewer regular packs.
I think what I would try is splitting up rarity by splashability and power. So commons are the "any deck can use this if they want" sort of cards: namely companions but also some gear or generally-helpful conditions. Usable, but perhaps not very good.
The big issue I found with making splashability a primary consideration is that there are a large number of important cards that are unsplashable: most possessions can only be borne by a single culture, and most skirmish events only affect a single culture. When there was an option between a splashable and non-splashable version of an effect, I tried to go with the splashable option, but often that option wasn't there (ex:
Rider's Spear) or I felt both needed to be at common (ex:
Rider's Mount and
Horse of Rohan). Again, without creating new cards, there are compromises to be made.
The last thing I'll note is that no matter what, everyone needs RB support. If you don't get Hobbit Sword you are in trouble from the start. That's the sort of thing that could go in a "base pack" I mentioned earlier. Of course, most Shire cards you pull are going to go towards this so you'd have to be very unlucky to wind up totally unarmed.
Ring-bearer support is another tricky one. As you say, Shire cards automatically fill this role to some degree, and I've tried to make sure common in that culture fills that role, with cards like
Bounder,
Hobbit Sword, and multiple strength-boosting events. Like I mentioned above, I tried to make a set that wouldn't need a base pack, but giving everyone a couple of Hobbit Swords might be necessary.
In response to your specific cards comments:
- I also really like Dagger Strike and Servant of the Secret Fire! I wish Decipher had made more cards like these.
- I tried to avoided cards that call out specific cultures and races in your opponent's deck, but Disquiet of Our People and Here Lies Balin, Son of Fundin are worth considering (like Frying Pan).
- I completely avoided cards that call out signets (like Forth Eorlingas) so that I didn't have to worry about whether the set contained an appropriate balance of signets.
- Rohirrim Bow should be in the set at common for exactly this reason! Looking back over my posts, it seems I used an old version of the Dwarven and Rohan lists (the other cultures are all correct). I'll fix that now!
Thank you so much for your detailed feedback! It's amazing to finally talk about this set and get some different perspectives on it.
Topic: Movie Masters - Sealed using only Boosters (Read 5990 times)