TLHH DC Project: The Great Eye - Concepts & Discussion

[Sam, Great Elf Warrior]

Search/Stealth
Foresee X - (to foresee X, look at the top X cards of your draw deck; place any number of those cards on top of your draw deck in any order and the rest beneath your draw deck in any order)
Again I've used this before, but it might very well express the theme of searching for the Ring. It also allows a better telepathy side theme. Take a look at Light & Shadow to see some examples.

Hmm...it seems a bit powerful.

Cards in hand - revealing, discarding your own, stripping your opponents', putting cards on top of draw deck, reconciling
This might lead to initiative, but I'm not excited about using it explicitly - it's not a very interesting mechanic. Just having hand manipulation will allow it to work well with initiative.
I did have an idea of a theme of having no cards in your hand representing putting forth all your strength. Something like "Desperation - While you have no cards in hand, this minion is strength +2 and damage +1."

eg.
Orkish Inquisition
Event • Shadow
Search.
Spot an minion to reveal the Free Peoples player's hand. Choose and discard a revealed Free Peoples card.
"'Nobody expects the Orkish Inquisition!"'


Top card of draw deck - telepathy (Forearmed), mill (Desperate Measures, Dwarven Axe)

Sounds good in general, although I'm not sure we need the new keyword (we already have initiative, and one number-of-cards-in-hand keyword is probably enough).

Alliances (Fighting the Eye, gathering all his strength)
Multiculture strategies - Song of the Shire, or the sort of dual-cultures we were talking about above

I really like this one, especially for Shadow. I've often thought there was a shortage of multicultural shadow decks and that we needed more cards like Hate and Anger. Especially ones that take advantage of the ways two shadow cultures might complement each other, for example:

Fires of Vengeance
Condition • Support Area
Each time a possession is discarded from play, you may exert an Orc to stack that possession here.
Shadow or Regroup: Choose one: play a possession stacked here; or exert an Orc and discard this condition to play a possession from your draw deck.
The forges of Isengard armed the wild men of Dunland.
Note: This card takes advantage of the fact that the high vitality Orcs can protect the 1-vitality Dunlendings, and helps them both by recovering Hides to protect them from archery (maybe in a joint site control deck). This is just an example, of course, but you get the idea.

Signet shenanigans - making signets matter between putting them around, counting them, spotting them, for both FP and Shadow (minion signets?)

Yeah I think they're good, although I don't think minion signets would add a lot (minions are already factionalized enough, and this set already has too many new concepts for minion signets to be in the running).

[chompers]

The set name implies that this set should perhaps feature Mordor and Hobbit (Sam and Frodo) and perhaps Smeagol more than other cultures. Perhaps there is not the need to include so many cultures in this set.

Perhaps more with Palantirs?

Definately burdens, resistance and stealth should feature in this set. Stealth doing something more interesting than canceling skirmishes, does it make sense for stealth to manipulate the assignment phase? Revealing cards from opponents hand, top of decks etc also seems to make sense.

Is there a reason or logic to putting both and in the same set. Perhaps only one needs to feature - perhaps some could be cross-culture minions as previously discussed.

Further exploration of putting on the ring for some gain but at a high risk seems to match this set as well and it might lead into further use of the Twilight keyword. On that note - does it make sense for Frodo to gain the Twlight keyword when wearing the One Ring? If so perhaps this could be explored with Fellowship cards triggering off the Twilight keyword - this might encourage Frodo (or the Ring-Bearer) to wear the One Ring.

So - how about this for a different ring:

* The One Ring, Ring of Twilight
Strength +1
Vitality +1
While wearing the One Ring bearer gains Twilight, and each time he is about to take a wound add 2 burdens instead.
Fellowship or Assignment: Add a burden to wear the One Ring until the regroup phase.

Not really sure of the point of it. Other cards would bring it to life i guess. Balance is probably all over the place. But the goal of this ring with support cards would be to wear it all the way to Mount Doom and try and not get corrupted (you would need some good burden removal). Probably supports a solo deck? Fellowship cards that trigger of Twilight would be useless without the keyword so it is probably a bad idea unless the cards are designed to work without the Twilight keyword, but get better when the keyword is in play. Sorry for my incoherent ramblings - hope some of it makes sense.

[Anvar]

Not sure I would want to put your keywords in this set, just because I think it would be more fun to explore something new. Some of my thoughts below.

BURDENS/RESISTANCE
-One ring stuff
Agree with this, I have always liked this theme.

-Resistance-Enduring
What about getting a resistance boost for each wound a la enduring? Or the reverse, losing resistance as you get more weary.

-Creature of Twilight
I love this. Think its clever, flavourful and really entertaining.

SEARCH/STEALTH
Not sure I'm a fan of foresee here, but the basic idea is good. Perhaps more in the way of telepathy for all cultures?

[Thranduil]

I know what you're saying about initiative, but I'm really not a fan of it. Firstly, it is not very interactive as it only applies to one player, and secondly it rewards you for not playing cards, which is much less fun than playing cards. I'm not saying we should use my idea (I didn't think it was that good!), but it beats initiative on both of those counts: it applies to all players, and it rewards you for having fun. Also we don't need to reference initiative in order for some cards we make to be good with it.

I've always loved that idea of the twilight Ring. A card something like:

Call of the Ring
Condition • Support Area
Spell. Twilight.
While the Ring-bearer is wearing The One Ring, the Ring-bearer and each Nazgûl gains twilight.
"Their cold eyes glittered, and they called to him with fell voices."

If we use creature of twilight (which needs a better name by the way!), we could also run something like companions skirmishing this minion use their resistance instead of their strength (except for twilight companions) or some other advantage for being twilight.



Resistance enduring is a cool idea, and could be a great FP resistance keyword (given that creature of twilight is the Shadow one).



I think the key for search and stealth is the manipulation of information. We can utilise a lot of design space with cards in hand that so far doesn't have much of a look in (eg. revealing hands, bouncing cards to hand, forcing discard, discarding for effect, mini-games á la Hosts Still Unfought, revealing cards á la Meant to Be Alone).


Side issue: do we want only search Shadow cards and only stealth Free Peoples cards? Or should they be spread out in both?

[legolas3333]

only that card sounds almost exactly like pull of the ring...

[Thranduil]

only that card sounds almost exactly like pull of the ring...

Again I'm not posing possible card titles or card details, just overall concepts.

[Jerba]

I would be wary of creating more than 1 loaded keyword. The Creature of Twilight concept would be better handled by an event I think.

[Sam, Great Elf Warrior]

I would be wary of creating more than 1 loaded keyword. The Creature of Twilight concept would be better handled by an event I think.

Or just put it in the text, for example:
Reaching Wight
Minion • Wight
Resistance: 11
Vitality: 3
Site: 2
Twilight. Damage +1.
Each character skirmishing this minion is resistance +5. Skirmishes involving this minion are resolved using resistance instead of strength.

The "resistance +5" is so that overwhelming isn't as big of an issue (mathematically, giving companions a resistance bonus is better than just making the minion weaker, because it creates a bigger gap between the win-loss point and the overwhelm point); instead of being resistance 0-8, companions will be resistance 5-13.

One problem is "cannot be overwhelmed unless his strength is tripled" cards, which would keep a companion from ever being overwhelmed by such minions (since it makes overwhelming require a strength difference, even when winning the skirmish itself is based on resistance).

[Jerba]

Sam is right about it being better in the text. I think he solved it very well in his idea.

Personally, the more I think about it, I think it might be better to just keep strength vs. strength and not go into resistance vs. resistance. Strength and vitality represent both the will and the physical strength of those characters. Look at the twilight minions in Two Towers block. I don't think giving minions resistance would be a great idea to further the game. But thats just me.

[chompers]

Sam is right about it being better in the text. I think he solved it very well in his idea.

Personally, the more I think about it, I think it might be better to just keep strength vs. strength and not go into resistance vs. resistance. Strength and vitality represent both the will and the physical strength of those characters. Look at the twilight minions in Two Towers block. I don't think giving minions resistance would be a great idea to further the game. But thats just me.

Agree.

[Thranduil]

So what we have for a set of mechanics is this:

• Search/stealth, Palantíri (manipulation of information)

• Twilight, The One Ring

• Burdens, resistance

• Alliances (big armies, multiculture)



I think that's enough.

Most of them are fairly straightforward - it looks like we're dealing with resistance and burdens in a fairly standard way and not trying anything particularly crazy.

The one that needs sorting is the Alliances theme. I posted some of the main ways I've seen this dealt with in the past, which briefly summarised are:

1) Altered template dual culture

2) Culture-shifting (eg. Defender of Rohan)

3) Cross-culture cards (eg. Hate and Anger, Alliance keyword)

4) Culture keywords (non-altered template multi-culture)


Obviously we can do more than one of these approaches, but particularly between 1 and 4 (and any other ideas people have) we should make our focus clear.



What we also need to clarify is a couple of new keywords (loaded/unloaded) / game verbs - something essentially new.





Thoughts?

[Sam, Great Elf Warrior]

2 in moderate amounts (one or two companions).
3, especially for shadow cultures (I'd prefer 4 and " or [men] minion"-type language over a new keyword, though).
4 for Shadow cultures (a Dunland keyword for [men] and maybe Sauron, moria, and isengard keywords for and [men]).

[chompers]

I like your idea Sam. Perhaps you could add keywords such as Moria, Mordor, Southron, Easterling, Dunlending, Saruman, etc to some of the , and minions.

Then produce conditions or other cards for , , etc that trigger off these keywords. This might be a way to promote cross culture without changing templates. or producing cards for so many different cultures.

This way you would only need minions for , , , and in this set and splash cards for the , [?], , minions to link the cultures together for whatever formats it is we are supporting (at least it will be relevant for open play).

For example: (Not sure about formatting and wording)
* Call to Arms
Condition
When you have three Moria minions in play all your minions are damage +1

Something like that (it could probably be a card so that no cards need to be put in this set) - hope you get the concept. Just my 2 cents.

As for options 1-4 ...

Option 1 - not a fan.
Option 2 - I like the idea of fighting to change you companions culture. Take Rohirrim Aragorn for example - he could have been but changed to under the right conditions. If those conditions are no longer met, he revets back to . This makes it harder to use him in a Rohirrim deck and probably useless for a Gondor deck. If Rohan wants an Aragorn, they should have to fight for him. The same should be true for an Elven Aragorn and so on.
Option 3 - Above may be another option for how to do this.
Option 4 - I guess this is also what i have mentioned above.

[Thranduil]

Okay that's some great thoughts. I can definitely see a few splash culture-shifting and mainly Shadow cards with culture keywords - that looks great. And we definitely ought to be using Southron et al. So the question becomes, if that is the main avenue, should we bother with any cards of the old culture templates at all? Or all new cultures and keyworded?

I think m64's alliance has potential though. Let me find some sample alliance cards for you guys...

All Powers Assembled
Condition • Support Area
Alliance: or (You may replace with or anywhere in this card's gametext). To play, spot 3 Orcs.
Shadow: Play a minion to reveal the top card of your draw deck. If that card is a minion, you may play it; it is twilight cost -1.
"…but Gothmog the lieutenant of Morgul had flung them into the fray; Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet…"
M1C72

The Hour of Men
Condition • Support Area
Alliance: . To play, spot 2 Man companions, each of a different culture.
At the start of the regroup phase, you may exert a Man to heal a Man of another culture.
Skirmish: Exert a Man companion to make another Man companion strength +1 (limit +2) and damage +1 (limit +2).
"…and there fair and desperate was raised the banner of the White Tree and Stars. Upon the other hill hard by stood the banners of Rohan and Dol Amroth, White Horse and Silver Swan. And about each hill a ring was made facing all ways, bristling with spear and sword."
M1R26

[Sam, Great Elf Warrior]

I think m64's alliance has potential though. Let me find some sample alliance cards for you guys...

All Powers Assembled
Condition • Support Area
Alliance: or (You may replace with or anywhere in this card's gametext). To play, spot 3 Orcs.
Shadow: Play a minion to reveal the top card of your draw deck. If that card is a minion, you may play it; it is twilight cost -1.
"…but Gothmog the lieutenant of Morgul had flung them into the fray; Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet…"
M1C72

The Hour of Men
Condition • Support Area
Alliance: . To play, spot 2 Man companions, each of a different culture.
At the start of the regroup phase, you may exert a Man to heal a Man of another culture.
Skirmish: Exert a Man companion to make another Man companion strength +1 (limit +2) and damage +1 (limit +2).
"…and there fair and desperate was raised the banner of the White Tree and Stars. Upon the other hill hard by stood the banners of Rohan and Dol Amroth, White Horse and Silver Swan. And about each hill a ring was made facing all ways, bristling with spear and sword."
M1R26

Can you play alliance cards as cards of a different culture (for example, can you recover All Powers Assembled with Ships of Great Draught)?
If so, what about cards like It Burns Us: How many times would you wound a minion if you only had All Powers Assembled and cards in hand?
If not, why not just use "or" phrases instead of a new keyword ("Play a , [gollum], or minion to...")? It's a little longer, but a lot simpler than adding a new keyword (especially considering all of the other new concepts we want to do).