First wave of adventure Packs preview...

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp

With every adventure pack coming with new scenarios (on cards?), and locations (especially with the article describing one pack as "location heavy,") I'm very curious to see how many cards will be useful in truly customizing your decks.  The article mentions half of each deck is devoted to new player cards, but when divided between all four spheres of influence (and presumably, some general cards any sphere may use?), I'm really curious to see how much my decks will change between releases.  Also very curious to see how many new enemy cards get released each month, as I think that's going to be a lot of the fun of this game.

In any case, so many locations, etc should make a lot of opportunities to design or play great (or awful) user-created scenarios.

Lightdarker said:

I agree with you.  It is looking like a very restrictive game that does not really promote deck-building.

Why?

The co-op quests and gameplay likely means that many of the co-op specific cards are not useful in solo.

The quests themselves seem to take up half the expansion packs.  (See Hunt for Gollum Preview).  So in reality half those cards are only useful when you play that one quest....not usefull in other decks.

Lastly, with only a single hero(1x copy) it means you would have to buy multiples of the little expansions as well.  I thought it was 3x everything in all expansions but the core but apparently not.  The core also has a distribution that has 1x, 2x, 3x.  For example I have lots of MECCG decks and some of them have Elrond or Bilbo, but the decks have different purposes.  I don't have to rip the decks apart each time to fish out that one character.

Then there is the Threat mechanic which powers the whole thing.  It seems like nearly all the gameplay is based off it.

My guess is that this is in reality a co-op boardgame with infinite scenario expansions.

I mean sure, you could tweak the pre-built decks in the core and the Chapter Packs...but it is not looking like it will be anything as flexible as LCG/CCG players are used to.

But on the bright side, I don't see any reason to buy multiple core sets now.

I hope you are wrong about this, but what you say seems a fair comment from what we know. A shame if it isnt as flexible as classics like Star Wars CCG (Decipher) & the solo play with MECCG (Iron Crown).

The characters might be outside of your playdeck anyway so only having one might not matter.  (you would  not have to keep fishing them out of your decks).

On the other hand, I was thinking that maybe the other half of the pack with all those Quest/Scenario related cards might just allow us to create custom-scenarios.  That could be a whole new sort of interesting deck-building that has never been available before. 

 I would much prefer the rules over expansion pack news right now...

Frog said:

From what we've been shown so far this pretty much seems the case; you choose your 3 Heroes before play begins and once the game has started, you can only bring Allies into play, not additional Heroes. So no need for several copies of Bilbo, Aragorn, Legolas, etc.

From the pics, looks like the Adventure Packs are going to be named:

Adventure Pack #1: The Hunt for Gollum
Adventure Pack #2: [Grimbeorn?] at the Carrock
Adventure Pack #3: A Journey to Rhosgobel
Adventure Pack #4: The Hills of Emyn Muil
Adventure Pack #5: The Dead Marshes
Adventure Pack #6: Return to Mirkwood

Can't wait for these! And for the rules PDF, of course...
 

I posted this in one of the articles but I find it very strange that half the cards are for the encounter deck/enemy. I had been under the assumption that this was going to be more or less a fixed deck with only quests and perhaps objectives swapping out. I think it is strange that there is a deck building component to this as you will be fighting against this deck. I suppose the rules might clarify this but if it is this way it will be strange to tune and enhance a deck that you will be fighting against.

I really wish there was a way for one person to play as the enemy/encounter deck. Kind of like in a Dungeon Master type role where 1 person plays against the rest of the fellowship.

Frog said:

I think the characters will be a pregame decision. Or we'll get three copies of each hero in the AP.   And it's too early to tell, but 9 new player cards per pack might be fine for sphere synergy (spheregy :P)   Mono-sphere decks might be boring to play right out of the gate. Or they might be too strong. I guess we can tell in a four player game in which everyone plays one sphere. Could be interesting.  

 @Darksbane. I replied to you in that article.  Encounter deck customization could add a level of competition :D

qwertyuiop said:

To me it makes prefect sense to get roughly half player cards and half encounter cards. Replayability for this games comes (mainly) from two sources: tuning the player decks and varying the composition of the encounter deck. If the encounter deck was fixed you could stop tuning your player deck at some point. But if your 'target' keeps changing, you'll have to continuously adapt to succeed.

I could imagine that at some point the ratio will change, e.g. because encounter cards could be reused in later scenarios to be combined in different ways, making it less important to boost their number compared to new player cards. But for now 50/50 seems ideal to me.

And in conclusion I can only say, I'm looking forward to lots of custom-created scenarios and content for the game. There's so much potential there!

 It's interesting how there's no mention of how many cards there are in each pack. I'm hoping this game focuses on diversity. The APs could very well be 40 cards each, with one of each hero and location, 1-3 of each enemy and attachment.

evilidler said:

it says: 60 cards, 3 heroes, 27 new cards and the rest new encounters and quests card

And I quote !

These fixed 60 card decks include a new Hero, three copies of nine unique player cards, and the Encounter and Quest cards devoted to the included scenario.

I guess the scenarios show how to build the encounter decks by showing which enemy 'spheres' to include in the encounter deck for each scenario.

jhaelen said:

This is what I was thinking, that once you had however many copies of something like "Generic Scary Monster," from adventure pack X, you could use them in the scenario provided further down the road with adventure pack Y, so there would be less of a need for a large number of new encounter cards with each monthly release (< 50%).  This is also assuming that each adventure pack will come with "for this scenario, assemble your encounter deck like this" instructions.  However, this makes me wonder if FFG is looking to make each individual adventure pack a "self contained unit," of sorts, a scenario playable by itself with the addition of the core game.  In that case, it seems unlikely that we would see cards carry over to be used in future adventure packs, and that ratio of about 50% player cards and 50% encounter deck cards may stay about the same.

I think what is maybe most likely (purely a guess on my part, of course), is that we will see adventure pack cards carry over and be usable with future adventure packs within the same cycle, for example, players using the "Hunter from Mordor" cards from Shadows of Mirkwood adventure pack #1 later on in the eventual release of Shadows of Mirkwood adventure pack #6.  Who knows, though.