The Way Into Mordor - Gandalf (8/28: "You still speak in riddles.")

[DáinIronfoot]

Well, once again, in my latest poll, the people have clearly spoken. No votes for Hobbits, only one vote (mine doesn't count ) for Elves, and four for the culture.

And I think it's pretty plain what people want to see first: Ents, right? So, let's start with the best-known of their kind, shall we?

As you'll see, some of my Ents are unhasty, just like back in the old days of Tower block. But don't despair...they aren't ALL unhasty, and there are plenty of ways for them to get quite hasty when you need them to, and not just by their own gametext.

Also like the old days, there will be close ties between Ents and Hobbits...as well as a tie-in that could use a little more help: Ents and Gandalf.

•Treebeard, Eldest Ent
Companion • Ent
Strength: 12
Vitality: 4
Signet: Gandalf
Unhasty. Damage +1.
Maneuver: Exert an unbound Hobbit or Wizard companion to allow Treebeard to skirmish and participate in archery fire until the regroup phase.
Maneuver: Spot a Wizard and exert Treebeard to play an unbound Hobbit from your discard pile.
"‘I told Gandalf I would keep you safe, and safe is where I'll keep you.'"
23U?

Yep: discarding Hobbits are big again in this set. This does what Gandalf, Greyhame tried (and in my opinion, failed) to do: give that strategy some really solid support. Yes, it requires two rather expensive companions be around, but once they are, a simple exertion can pull a Hobbit back from discard during arguably the most useful phase for such an action to take place.

Oh, and Treebeard can make a nice beatstick, too. As an unhasty companion, he requires a little motivation to do so, but I think exerting a Hobbit or Wizard is a small price to pay for a 12-strength damage +1 monster, don't you? :hey:

•Treebeard, Earthborn (reprint)
Ally • Home 2 [TTT] & 8 [TTT] • Ent
Strength: 12
Vitality: 4
Unhasty.
Response: If an unbound Hobbit is about to be discarded, stack that Hobbit here instead.
Fellowship: Exert Treebeard and add to play an unbound Hobbit stacked here as if played from hand.
"‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see. I am honoured by your confidence; but you should not be too free all at once.'"
23R?

Once again in full support of the discarding Hobbit strategy. This is an example of a card I tried desperately to remake into a unique and better alternative, failed, and opted to just reprint. For the purposes of supporting discarding Hobbits, it really is hard to beat, especially since that response action has no limit. You could stack every unbound Hobbit in your fellowship here, no questions asked!

•Beechbone
Companion • Ent
Strength: 9
Vitality: 3
Resistance: 7
To play, spot 2 characters.
Each time an Ent is killed (including Beechbone), each Ent is strength +2 and loses unhasty until the end of the turn.
"‘...a very tall handsome Ent....'"
23C?

This poor fellow was eventually burned to a crisp by Saruman's Orcs during the attack on Isengard. His death made all the other Ents rather furious, so I tried to represent that here. Since Ent fellowships tend to flood the twilight pool leave a player open to losing some of those Ents along the line, I figured this guy could be a BIG help in inspiring the other Ents to a fever pitch...just as they were in the story. Until then, you get a pretty strong companion to help beat up minions.

And by the way, if you have a subtitle suggestion for Beechbone, I'm all ears.

[lem0nhead]

•Treebeard, Eldest Ent
Companion • Ent
Strength: 12
Vitality: 4
Signet: Gandalf
Unhasty. Damage +1.
Maneuver: Spot a Wizard and exert Treebeard to play an unbound Hobbit from your discard pile.
Maneuver: Exert an unbound Hobbit or Wizard companion to allow Treebeard to skirmish and participate in archery fire until the regroup phase.
"‘I told Gandalf I would keep you safe, and safe is where I'll keep you.'"

Seems ok to me.

[FM]

•Treebeard, Eldest Ent
Companion • Ent
Strength: 12
Vitality: 4
Signet: Gandalf
Unhasty. Damage +1.
Maneuver: Spot a Wizard and exert Treebeard to play an unbound Hobbit from your discard pile.
Maneuver: Exert an unbound Hobbit or Wizard companion to allow Treebeard to skirmish and participate in archery fire until the regroup phase.
"‘I told Gandalf I would keep you safe, and safe is where I'll keep you.'"

Seems nice enough, I think. Depends on what you get to do with it, though.

[DáinIronfoot]

Cool, cool. Glad he's well-recieved so far.

I DID make one change: I switched the order of his abilities. Looking back, it appears all other unhasty Ents have their hasty-ing text listed first, regardless of phase, so I decided to stick with that pattern here.

Oh, and with the two quick reviews, I decided to add one more Ent to the original post. So much for unhasty, eh? :hey:

[sickofpalantirs]

Well, once again, in my latest poll, the people have clearly spoken. No votes for Hobbits, only one vote (mine doesn't count ) for Elves, and four for the culture.
why doesn't yours count? meh. ni. it.

•Treebeard, Eldest Ent
Companion • Ent
Strength: 12
Vitality: 4
Signet: Gandalf
Unhasty. Damage +1.
Maneuver: Exert an unbound Hobbit or Wizard companion to allow Treebeard to skirmish and participate in archery fire until the regroup phase.
Maneuver: Spot a Wizard and exert Treebeard to play an unbound Hobbit from your discard pile.
"‘I told Gandalf I would keep you safe, and safe is where I'll keep you.'"
fine
:


•Beechbone
Companion • Ent
Strength: 9
Vitality: 3
Resistance: 7
To play, spot 2 characters.
Each time an Ent is killed (including Beechbone), each Ent is strength +2 and loses unhasty until the regroup phase.
"‘...a very tall handsome Ent....'"

beecbone, burned 
should he be unhasty?

[FM]

I like Beechbone. Cool ability.

[lem0nhead]

I like beechbone but i would just question how useful he is, if youre in a skirmish when an ent dies which is 75% of the time surely, then youve paid the unhasty cost so it renders that bit useless, so youre paying 4 for a companion that only works a little bit if you lose a companion? Dont get me wrong DI i love him but think he needs a slight thoughtful tweak...... 

[DáinIronfoot]

I like beechbone but i would just question how useful he is, if youre in a skirmish when an ent dies which is 75% of the time surely, then youve paid the unhasty cost so it renders that bit useless, so youre paying 4 for a companion that only works a little bit if you lose a companion? Dont get me wrong DI i love him but think he needs a slight thoughtful tweak...... 

True enough. If I made it until the end of the turn, would that be better? It would then work if you double-moved, would it not?

[lem0nhead]

It would be ok if no other inspiration hit you o bearded one 

[DáinIronfoot]

Done, then!

Okay, two more Ents to play with, and ones we have somewhat surprisingly not seen since Tower block. Can you believe the only Ents Decipher used multiple times were Treebeard and Quickbeam? Like I've said a million times...underdeveloped strategy (and race!) on their part.

Anyway, Big D may have made up these guys' names, but their new subtitles are straight from the language of the Elves: Sindarin. Took a little research, but considering Tolkien himself did the same thing with Leaflock and Quickbeam ("Finglas" and "Bregalad", respectively) and Decipher DID copy that, I figrued Sindarin names made sense for these guys too, and was more than worth the time it took to delve into Sindarin. Hope you agree...and enjoy!

•Birchseed, Brethil
Companion • Ent
Strength: 8
Vitality: 4
Resistance: 7
Unhasty. When Birchseed is in your starting fellowship, his twilight cost is -1.
Assignment: Exert an unbound Hobbit or another Ent to allow Birchseed to skirmish.
Each time Birchseed wins a skirmish, you may heal another character (or an unbound Hobbit if that skirmish involved an Orc or Uruk-hai).
"...there were tall strong Ents, clean-limbed and smooth-skinned like forest-trees in their prime...."
23U?

"Brethil" is Sindarin for "birch tree". I considered working the Sindarin translation of "seed" ("eredh") in there too, but any combination of that and brethil just looked too complex and, frankly, stupid. So I kept it simple.

•Lindenroot, Nimlothond
Companion • Ent
Strength: 10
Vitality: 4
Resistance: 6
Unhasty. To play, spot 2 characters (or a unique Ent).
Assignment: Exert an unbound Hobbit or discard a card from hand to allow Lindenroot to skirmish.
Each time Lindenroot wins a skirmish, you may exert a minion (or wound that minion if it is an Orc or Uruk-hai).
"There were a few older Ents, bearded and gnarled like hale but ancient trees...."
23R?

Not QUITE so simple here, as I combined two Sindarin words. I couldn't find the exact translation of "linden" (or any of the other names it goes by in English, like "lime", "tilia", or "basswood"), but I got the next best thing: "nimloth", which is Sindarin for "white-tree", something many species of linden are known as. The next part fit PERFECTLY: the Sindarin word for "root" is "thond"...a pleasant surprise, since "th" appeared at the end of the first Sindarin word and the beginning of the next, making the natural portmanteau "nimlothond". Woo-hoo!

Yeah, it's the small things in life.

Oh, as for the cards' actual text, they're obviously best when used against their worst enemies: Orcs and Uruks. Many old-school Ent cards targeted , so I figured the Orc/Uruk thing made a lot of sense from a gameplay perspective...as well as from a storyline persepctive, of course. I'm a little worried about how cheap you can get Lindenroot, but I wanted to stick with the original costs and stats for the Ents as much as possible, so hopefully the spotting requirements help offset that. You tell me, though!


EDIT: In light of peoples' uneasiness with the return of unhasty, here's another card to show one way I plan on allowing the FP player to more easily circumvent the restrictive keyword. Notice it also works without any Hobbits in sight...unlike previous conditions like Ent Moot.

Infuriated
Condition
Strength +2
Toil 1. Bearer must be an Ent. Limit 1 per bearer.
While wounded, bearer loses unhasty.
"‘When Treebeard had got a few arrows in him, he began to warm up, to get positively ‘hasty', as he would say.'"
23U?

[Olorin]

Get away from "Unhasty"l

Is Aragorn, Gil-Galad or Eomer unhasty?
Ents are no beatdown companions - and are unable to kill minions; Do you know Sheperd of the Trees?

  costs... but strength of 7 - imagine you start with

Frodo Merry and Quickbeam - a possible starting fellow for an Ent-deck. You have only got this companion in hand (Sheperd of the trees)... and you move to a site with 1 twilight: there are now 10 twilight tokens.
Your opponent plays a siege troop or something like that... and now - each of your ents would be overwhelmed (especially due to the fact, that Gandalf pusher cannot push enough: strength +2 or in rare cases +3) even if you play a pusher, your ent will be overwhelmed)
... and if an ent ever should win a skirmish, than he makes just one wound... so ents never can run

so get away from unhasty - for ents it's hard enough to survive!
They give so much pool - and it's hard for them to win or to kill minions - and they didn't get any strong artifacts or special abilites - only poor conditions - but for the   there aren't any cards like Scouring of the shire... - so they loose each support
...and in addition to that, there have to be always those tiny wimpy hobbits sucking up the fellowship count - and you shouldn't have more than 5 comps in play - with ents impossible

The best fellows are:

Elves
Knights
Ranger and Rohan and Hobbits
...
...
Gandalf and Ents...

that's my opinion.

[MR. Lurtzy]

Get away from "Unhasty"l

Is Aragorn, Gil-Galad or Eomer unhasty?
Ents are no beatdown companions - and are unable to kill minions; Do you know Sheperd of the Trees?

  costs... but strength of 7 - imagine you start with

Frodo Merry and Quickbeam - a possible starting fellow for an Ent-deck. You have only got this companion in hand (Sheperd of the trees)... and you move to a site with 1 twilight: there are now 10 twilight tokens.
Your opponent plays a siege troop or something like that... and now - each of your ents would be overwhelmed (especially due to the fact, that Gandalf pusher cannot push enough: strength +2 or in rare cases +3) even if you play a pusher, your ent will be overwhelmed)
... and if an ent ever should win a skirmish, than he makes just one wound... so ents never can run

so get away from unhasty - for ents it's hard enough to survive!
They give so much pool - and it's hard for them to win or to kill minions - and they didn't get any strong artifacts or special abilites - only poor conditions - but for the   there aren't any cards like Scouring of the shire... - so they loose each support
...and in addition to that, there have to be always those tiny wimpy hobbits sucking up the fellowship count - and you shouldn't have more than 5 comps in play - with ents impossible

The best fellows are:

Elves
Knights
Ranger and Rohan and Hobbits
...
...
Gandalf and Ents...

that's my opinion.

Agreed. The ents need to be stronger with less of a penalty.

[DáinIronfoot]

Get away from "Unhasty"l

Is Aragorn, Gil-Galad or Eomer unhasty?
Ents are no beatdown companions - and are unable to kill minions; Do you know Sheperd of the Trees?

  costs... but strength of 7 - imagine you start with

Frodo Merry and Quickbeam - a possible starting fellow for an Ent-deck. You have only got this companion in hand (Sheperd of the trees)... and you move to a site with 1 twilight: there are now 10 twilight tokens.
Your opponent plays a siege troop or something like that... and now - each of your ents would be overwhelmed (especially due to the fact, that Gandalf pusher cannot push enough: strength +2 or in rare cases +3) even if you play a pusher, your ent will be overwhelmed)
... and if an ent ever should win a skirmish, than he makes just one wound... so ents never can run

so get away from unhasty - for ents it's hard enough to survive!
They give so much pool - and it's hard for them to win or to kill minions - and they didn't get any strong artifacts or special abilites - only poor conditions - but for the   there aren't any cards like Scouring of the shire... - so they loose each support
...and in addition to that, there have to be always those tiny wimpy hobbits sucking up the fellowship count - and you shouldn't have more than 5 comps in play - with ents impossible

The best fellows are:

Elves
Knights
Ranger and Rohan and Hobbits
...
...
Gandalf and Ents...

that's my opinion.

Agreed. The ents need to be stronger with less of a penalty.

Ahhhhhh...so THAT'S what all the fuss is about.

I admit I'm not a big fan of unhasty either. It makes Ents difficult to skirmish with, especially against a Shadow player that features at least decent wounding potential. Like you said, Olorin, they flood the twilight pool as it is, giving the Shadow player(S) plenty of twilight to send several minions after you, and then you need to worry about "unlocking" your best fighters to counter them.

But like many of my DCs, while I want to bring newer gameplay terms and tactics into older strategies, I want to stay true to those older cards as well. With The Way Into Mordor essentially being a Standard-legal Tower block set, that means it has plenty of Standard legal stuff...but also a taste of good old Tower block, which was the beginning of LOTR TCG's golden age. For better or for worse, unhasty was part of that, and like many long-gone concepts and terms I'm trying to bring back in my sets (trackers, search cards, allies, etc.), I think it would be a shame to just abandon it.

What I am trying to do--perhaps unsuccessfully so far--is to make unhasty Ents more viable for gameplay. This means that while several (but not all) Ents will have the old and mostly despised keyword, their text, for the most part, makes it easier to "hastify" them then their older, Tower block counterparts. And more importantly, there are other cards--Beechbone being a small example--that get rid of unhasty entirely, at least short-term. Yes, you have to work at it a little bit, but once you do, you end up with some mighty powerful companions bashing their way through the skirmish phase. That's why you can get away with a -cost 10-strength 4-vitality companion like Nimlothond.

I promise, I am aware of the serious drawbacks of unhasty, and am determined to make it less restrictive than it was in the old days. I just haven't gotten far enough to really demonstrate some of my plans for doing so...but I'm going to go back to the last post after I'm finished typing this and add a condition that will hopefully show a better glimpse of how even unhasty Ents can get "positively hasty" more easily than they could in the past.

I am also aware of how they have difficultly finishing off minions, which I promise I ALSO plan to address. If there is ANY group of companions in the game that should leave little standing in their wake, it's Ents! The damage bonus on Treebeard is a small taste of my plans to tackle that issue.

Just trust me for now. If, once I get further into the culture, you feel like unhasty is STILL too much of a drawback, I will reconsider. But give me that chance first, eh?

All the same, I'm dishing out some gold for your constructive critisism. I appreciate ya'll expressing your concerns, I really do. That's what I post these for, after all! Just give me a little more time, and then take a second look and let me know how I'm doing at that point.

In the meantime, check the condition I'm about to go back and add, and I'll accelerate my "hastifying" cards a bit and spoil more of them over the next few days. Deal?

[Olorin]

Ent-thing

Artifact  support area

To play spot an ent. Each companion is resistance +1.
While you can spot 2 ents, each companion is strength + 2 and damage +1.
While at a forest or battleground site, each ent is defender +1 and strength +3.

[lem0nhead]

•Birchseed, Brethil
Companion • Ent
Strength: 8
Vitality: 4
Resistance: 7
Unhasty. When Birchseed is in your starting fellowship, his twilight cost is -1.
Assignment: Exert an unbound Hobbit or another Ent to allow Birchseed to skirmish.
Each time Birchseed wins a skirmish, you may heal another character (or an unbound Hobbit if that skirmish involved an Orc or Uruk-hai).
"...there were tall strong Ents, clean-limbed and smooth-skinned like forest-trees in their prime...."

I see everyone's point on the unhasty thing, a few ents similar to this guy and youre already taking like 4 wounds from exertions before you even get into the fight, just to get INTO the fight lol. Hes just ok though Dain, considering Infuriated.

•Lindenroot, Nimlothond
Companion • Ent
Strength: 10
Vitality: 4
Resistance: 6
Unhasty. To play, spot 2 characters (or a unique Ent).
Assignment: Exert an unbound Hobbit or discard a card from hand to allow Lindenroot to skirmish.
Each time Lindenroot wins a skirmish, you may exert a minion (or wound that minion if it is an Orc or Uruk-hai).
"There were a few older Ents, bearded and gnarled like hale but ancient trees...."

Again just ok.

Infuriated
Condition
Strength +2
Toil 1. Bearer must be an Ent. Limit 1 per bearer.
While wounded, bearer loses unhasty.
"‘When Treebeard had got a few arrows in him, he began to warm up, to get positively ‘hasty', as he would say.'"

Cool, excellent flavour, but id make more than 1 card similar to this to overcome the unhasty blight. And make the next one either 0 cost or a 2 cost with toil 2.