The Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game

[VladVoivode]

Hi all,

I was kind of surprised that there hasn't been some discussion on this game and as this is the off-topic forum it should be a safe subject.

I am interested in your thoughts about the game. I discovered it last year and for me it is simply brilliant. It's difficult to pull off a single player/co-op game as it is but incorporating the lore based on one of the greatest authors of all time and IMHO THE greatest fantasy author is no small feat. In a sense this takes me back to the early days of Magic the Gathering when people were still discovering amazing new combos and feverishly creating decks to end friendships. But it's also a bit of a paradigm shift for me because I have gotten so used to PvP games like MTG and Warhammer Invasion that I was at first doubtful that FFG could actually pull this off. The Tolkien estate is very protective of the property and I would imagine that it cost FFG quite a few shekels to secure the rights to produce this.

Needless to say I got hooked so badly that I have every expansion and AP except the most current, Celebrimbor's Secret, which isn't available yet in The Netherlands. While the card pool is nowhere near the size of MTG and never will be, it seems that the possibilities of this game and its current pool of "only" 1200 or so cards are almost limitless.

And like the early days of MTG, there are superb strategy sites everywhere. The game itself seems to solve the debate between playing for theme and playing to win. The theme is inescapable and like MTG, there is no perfect deck.

I want to return to the notion of playing against the game rather than another person. While the encounter decks for each adventure are shuffled, the encounters themselves are well designed and some are quite wicked. It's almost as if the encounter deck IS a human player. Certainly the game owes much to MTG especially in the way of evolution. Traits and keywords have spiced up the game considerably and it seems that there is so much yet to explore.

What attracts me most about LOTR is that it is not a CCG. None of these cards will ever considered illegal for play. I look at my rather large MTG collection and I have unopened/still shrink wrapped boxes of Onslaught, Judgement, Urza's Legacy, and Torment. At least here in The Netherlands it's pointless to open these as Modern is "the thing" here. But LCGs like LOTR and Warhammer don't suffer from a losing investment nor a collection of cards that simply are no longer legal for play at the ol' gaming hole.

Anyhow, I am curious if anyone here plays LOTR LCG and what you think of it.

Keep tapping!
Vlad