I love it, especially the images, how did you make them?
Scraping pixels in Photoshop. I took the original card images for each culture and literally scraped at pixels with the eraser and the clone stamp tool. That's a simplified explanation, but that's essentially what it amounts to. It's incredibly painstaking work, but once a template is done, all I have to do is put my own text in. I still haven't blanked out all the cultures yet. I still have to do Shire, Rohan, Raider, and a few others. It takes a good 5-9 hours to properly blank a card, depending on how detailed the template is. The Moria one took me forever because I had to be careful erasing around all those little spiky glass pieces in the image frame.
Amazing! Great choice of images. I'm not an expert but Shadow cards seem a little overpowered to me. The cave troll is enduring and can be exerted 3 times at will, and it can play its chain (very easily once one copy is in the discard pile) to make free peoples archery almost useless.
Anyway, your work is impressive. I'm excited about it.
Obviously these need to be playtested before they're considered finalized-- that's actually something I'm going to need help with here soon, so if anyone wants to volunteer to playtest these I'd be very appreciative-- but I thought about the Cave Troll's text very carefully.
First, you have to actually be able to play the Chain from your discard pile to exert him, you can't just exert him three times for no reason. If you do have the Chain in your discard pile, you can still only exert him once because the Chain is unique and can only be played once. Granted, you now have a strength 19 Fierce minion in play who is basically immune to archery fire, but he's NOT immune to direct wounding like
Terrible and Evil, since that occurs in the Maneuver phase. If you exert him to play the chain, all Gandalf has to do is exert 3 times to kill him.
The only problem with this is that he's still a little too cheap, given his game text. I might raise his twilight cost to 14 or 15 to make it less likely that the Shadow player will be able to play other minions in addition to the Cave Troll. That's sort of the point of this card-- you can play a single massive minion, and you can even play him cheap if you discard a ton of orcs from hand, but that's all you'll be likely to play. The risk is that if the Free Peoples player kills him, that's the only minion you have out.
As I said, these will all continue to be adjusted as things go along, but I am trying to keep things balanced while also adding new risks to the game. For the record, Company of Rangers is most definitely going to receive some modifications both visually and with its text in the near future. I might reduce its strength to 9 and make it an
Archer instead of
Defender +1-- sort of the Ranger version of
Garrison of Gondor.
Now for a bit of an explanation on the set's Themes.
The title "Power and Temptation" sort of gives it away, as does the game text of the One Ring. It's really about high risk/high reward for a lot of these cards, especially the Shire cards. You can use the One Ring, Unbearable Temptation on
Frodo, Resolute Hobbit and still have a resistance 11 Ring-bearer (or 12 or more if you have The Scrolls of Isildur and some
![[Gondor]](https://lotrtcgdb.com/forums/Smileys/classic/gondor.png "Gondor")
artifacts out). With a
Hobbit Sword or
Sting, and wearing the One Ring, Frodo can be strength 9 plus whatever other pumps you can manage for a skirmish-- this gives him good odds of not only surviving skirmishes, but winning them (which is unusual unless you've got an alternate Ring-bearer).
That combined with
Sam, SoH to peel burdens every other turn makes for a very potent fighting Frodo. The major risk--aside from easier corruption-- is that lots of Shadow cards punish the Ring-bearer for using the Ring (
Return To Its Master, for example). There will be similar such cards in this set. So yes, even Frodo can kick #$&*@! in a skirmish with this Ring, but he's also exposing himself to greater danger and more burdens. Ultimately if you're using that strategy, the success of your Fellowship will really depend on what Shadow side you're facing.
Each culture is going to have a kind of sub-theme, as well. I've always felt that cultures like Moria ran themselves into a corner because they were so homogenized for one gameplay tactic: swarm. Yes, they are the possibly best swarm culture, but they don't get used for much else. I want to give Moria a bit of a revival in the opposite direction; instead of lots of little minions that end up stacked on
Goblin Swarms, this set will focus on giving Moria large, powerful minions that come out by themselves to do harm, like the Balrog. In fact, much of this set's Moria cards will focus on the Balrog. With large minions, the strategy changes, because they're frequently unique. Instead of pounding the Fellowship every turn with lots of little guys, you send out one big guy every other turn to act as a road-block to moving, or trap the Fellowship at an inconvenient site.
The Wraith culture will be very focused on the recursion of Twilight minions as a competitive shadow side that no longer clogs and isn't so much focused on corruption as on weakening the Fellowship. The Sauron culture will be a more "uniting" Shadow culture designed to glue other cultures together for unusual combinations, such as
![[Raider]](https://lotrtcgdb.com/forums/Smileys/classic/raider.png "Raider")
and
![[Wraith]](https://lotrtcgdb.com/forums/Smileys/classic/wraith.png "Wraith")
.
![[Dunland]](https://lotrtcgdb.com/forums/Smileys/classic/dunland.png "Dunland")
and
cultures will have new cards that offer cooperative cultural opportunities very similar to the Evil Men culture, without lumping them together (giving strength bonuses for spotting other minion men, etc.). The Shire culture will have an emphasis on slightly stronger Hobbits and a fighting Frodo, with the offset of increased vulnerability to burdens. And so on.
Topic: Power and Temptation-- New Set [CARD IMAGES] (Read 27291 times)
