seeing as how we have been told repeatedly it is not going to happen for any other of the 4 previous LCG's including the biggest, AGoT, I would not hold my breath.

ImmortalJedi said:

When Call of Cthulhu went from CCG to LCG, I thought I would have a part of me that missed trying to track those cards down.  However, as it turns out, I don't.  I did a thorough check and NO PART of me is missing tracking down and overpaying for singles, let alone chase foils and promos.  When I think of the colossal amounts of cash I put into Decipher (which apparently did neither of us any good), I want to cry.  And once Decipher went down, most of my card friends got out of the biz entirely...so...useless piles of cards.

Which makes me want to get involved with this game even more: collecting and deck-building without the fear of it becoming extinct as long as I want to play it.

jgt7771 said:

Absolutely.  I used to love opening boxes of randomized packs.  Sure, I'd spend a fortune on boxes and only get four of the ten cards I was actually looking for, but when I found those four it was exciting.  The problem with that is it's only exciting to find those cards because it's so frustrating to open pack after pack of cards you don't want or need.

PWBrian said:

As a former Magic player and a current boardgamer, I can say the satisfaction, dollar for dollar, of opening a board game far exceedes the satisfaction of opening packs of Magic cards.

There was a card in the Star Wars Trading Card Game (Wizards' game, which you could only play if you had at least average luck with dice-rolling), the Executor, of which there was only one version made prior to the game's cancellation; they may have made more later as virtual cards, IDK. This is the card that you basically had to have if you were going to play a competent Imperial deck, because the game generally crucified you if you restricted yourself by continuity, and this was a good enough card to get around that problem. And I always prefer decks that make sense. They don't have to be "theme decks," per se, but I would rarely put Jango Fett and adult Boba Fett together, for example.

Now unlike SWCCG, SWTCG had only standard rarities throughout its lifespan, so this card shouldn't have been so difficult to grab. But the card was an absolute female dog for me to pull out of packs, and nobody was willing to trade even a single copy of it, ever. I could only acquire one copy online, and I can't even remember where I got it from. But the one copy, as most people know, is generally not enough to build a 60-card deck around.0 cards. So eventually I gave up. Now that I don't care anymore, they're pretty easy to find on eBay and such.

I can't say I will ever miss not having cards I need to have in order to play the game properly.

It seems pretty clear that FFg won't ever make a 3x Core set. What we need to hope for is something like the AGoT Core Set Model where you get (roughly) 1x of every card, so if you do want to buy a 2nd or 3rd core set, you don't have much redundancy. Whatever they say about it, the LoTR core set card distribution was either stupid or greedy. For a second Core set, you already had massive numbers of redundant cards, and anyone wanting a full playset of the 1x Cards was going to end up buying an entire box for about 12 useable cards.

1x each so we can get variety, fine, just not 1x 2x and 3x randomly spread between cards.

Mighty Jim said:

Agreed. It's an "either or" situation.

Either gives us 3x all the way across so that we can easily get a full playset with reduced variety out of the box or just gives us 1x as came in the Call of Cthulhu LCG with increased variety where redundancy was only to be had in extra domain statues, 10 story cards and extra boards when attempting a full playset..

The crap in between is sad.

I understand why more variety was to be had in the AGoT and CoC coresets since those games far predate the LCG marketing, but in the case of newer LCGs it smacks of money grab with such a seemingly haphazard mix.

As much as I lamented buying multiple core sets of CoC LCG, I much prefer that over the price of redundancy being passed on to the consumer on top of owning extras that nobody wants so basically get thrown away. A shameful waste of paper resources.

 So I had a thought about the core set, and I'm pretty sure it won't happen, but please hear me out. When I first heard about this game in August, I read that the core set was for two players and, as mentioned above, you could make two tournament decks with it.

Then I found out that the two decks at GenCon were Military and Rogue strategies. That made me assume that the core set would come with one complete Military and one complete Rogue deck. I thought we'd have to wait for Force packs to start building Operations or Tech strategy decks.

Then I read about LotR and how it comes with 4 decks, one for each sphere of influence, but none of them are big enough for a standard tournament deck -- you have to combine two spheres of influence which makes the deck harder to use (so the Amazon.com reviews say).

So then I thought, wouldn't that be great if they released two core sets! (not two corsets, mind you) They could do one that was Military and Operations, and another that was Rogue and Tech or some other combination of two deck strategies. This way you could actually have a functional standard tournament deck out of the box. I think it would be awesome. There's something about buying two separate starters that appeals to me much more than buying two of the same starter. I don't know if this distribution method would help alleviate some of the frustration at card ratios, though. It would just make it more palatable to buy two starters.

Yeah, but wasn't the problem with the LOTR-coreset that you had all these (more or less) useless encounter deck and quest cards? So if you want to have two different starters, you would also have to include two different sets of encounter cards to make this distribution work.

At first I didn't buy a second one, but the longer I had waited for the adventure packs the bigger my desire for proper 50 card decks got... and FFG won in the end...

I'm hoping for a more player-friendly distribution, but my hopes aren't very high. Which is sad, because you'd think FFG know their crowd and listen to their suggestions. What I don't want is this kind of situation: You bought your second LOTR-coreset and you still only got two Unexpected Courage, but six Rain of Arrows... That was annoying!

Well... In LOTR lcg I use those extra cards as on backround of home made scenario cards, so they are not completey useles, but yeah.. More evenly distributed cards would be nice or then there sould be some deck building rules where some cards can only be ones, in the deck and some other more times. So one icon would mean one in deck, and two icons two in deck, three incons three in deck and so on... If only starter distribution would be the same. But that would be too good to be true... would it?

For example, if Gandalf would have had "only one is allowed per deck" mark, it would have been just fine, to have only one starter set... and so on... Or maybe "two allowed" would have been better, because one core set was mean to be two player set. But when the rules says that there is 3 card limit in each deck, It makes game balancing harder, because now some player groups have one Gandalf in deck and other have three. It is like putting Range Rower, and Nissan micra in the same ofroad race... other has no change of surviving the race trough!

I second this.  I love Lord of the Rings and after buying 2 base sets I am still short a some cards.  If they had done that with the expansion packs I would have quit playing the game.  I doubt I start another LCG from FF if they do that again.  Too much money, and the cost to them to print enough the first time is small.  I would rather pay $45 for the first set and get everything, than $40 each and have a ton of stuff I don't want.

If not 3x for each of the cards in the base set, at least make sure there are no 1x ones, so the 2nd copy would complete it, or come out with a completer pack of just the cards you are missing for the same cost as one of the expansion sets.  It wouldn't cost them much to make available and would make fans very happy.

I wouldn't mind it so mcuh if it was limited to 2-3 of each card per set because then I can split a set with a friend.  Having just one of a card in the core set(excluding heroes and scenario cards) is just bologna.

Ya, I'm guessing the core set will not contain 3 of. I think FFGs idea is to put a faux rarity in the core set to give deckbuilding a bigger variety. I've accepted that multiple core sets will be required to have 3per.

Hellfury said:

Dude, what are you talking about here?

Having every card x3 would be awesome for people who plan on buying into this game heavily and deck building and buying the expansions and supplemental packs. It would royally suck for the casual players who just want a game they can grab out of the box and have some star wars themed fun immediately. There is a reason why starter decks are sold for pretty much every CCG and CCG style game ever produced.

The idea is to give players an out of the box experience that carries across the flavor of the game, has good replay value for the hobby enthusiast. HArd core gamers are much more likely to buy the same product x2 or x3 to get a play set so they can build every deck under the sun than someone who has never played a CCG before is to figure out how to build a playable deck out of three identical stacks of cards.

Given the numbers that I've heard dropped about the success of the LCG design and the expansions and deluxe expansions that have x3 versus core sets, it certainly indicates that the Core Set out performs every other product in all the lines. A highly playable Core Set is much more likely to turn a casual player into a dedicated player.

@ SystemIsDown: Sorry I don't get the point

If you want more challenge do not ues cards as Gandalf or so

The point here is just to avoid to buy multiple core set, as lot of players (and that's a shame I'm in) also like to have a "complete game" (*3 cards of each)

When you see the drawback of LotR, most players are complaining about the need to buy multiple coreset and would be ready to spend more money if the game was complete.