But there's one reason why you might want to buy a second core set that no one seems to be talking about: customizing the encounter deck. To me the draw of this game (besides all of the obvious ones) is that you can continually balance it to your liking. You customize your player decks to conquer the encounter deck, and then you customize the encounter deck to conquer the player decks, and on and on for virtually infinite replay value. It doesn't seem like you could do much customizing of the encounter deck with just one core set (granted, my copies are still on their way).

conykchameleon said:

I think this should work marvelously with encounter decks: Use a fixed base (i.e. the standard encounter deck) then add a bunch of random cards from the other APs. Maybe you'd have to tweak some other things to make it work well, e.g. to compensate for a bigger encounter deck, but I'm sure it's doable.

Eh, maybe I won't even want to go three player anyway.  I wonder if the game gets more complex and takes longer if you go beyond 2 player.  It might be simpler just to play 2 player games anyhow. 

I am not usually a fan of FFG marketing strategies, but in this case I think that given this game can be played solo quite well, buying two core sets if you have four friends to play with is not a waste of cards. Just let one of your friends take the extra Encounter/Quest cards back home to train up his deck handling abilities a bit for next gaming session.

And having a fairly succesful single sphere deck definitely needs two sets. Most cards (the best ones usually) of each Sphere don´t come with three copies. You want those for the hard quests for sure.

Acererak said:

So does that mean there is actually a purpose in having three sets?  I'm still confused on that as well.  I thought the new LCG format was going to have 3 copies of every card.  Will the Adventure Packs for LOTR be back to having single copies now? 

nelsonbaggins said:

No, no..  nothing is changing. The Adventure Packs will continue to have 3 copies of each card.

The Core Sets have NEVER contained three of each card. That's why people who are in the competitive games buy multiple sets of the Core Games. But that only applies to the Core Sets  in the other of the LCGs. The rationale for doing in Lord of the Rings is having enough cards to serve the needs of 4 players (though as has been discussed, there will still be some extras).

In fact, in Call of Cthulthu, they are reprinting some of the original CCG "packs" (from before the LCG concept was implemented) to have three of each card, whereas before they only had one.

Watcher said: