Ellareth said:

the game is not easy with number of players. Yes in SOM cycle it was like this but now with HON is going more difficutl with the number of players.

I've been thinking about this situation over night and, despite my two proposed solutions above (1. limit Born Aloft to once per phase or 2. institute a rule saying each card may only be played or enter play once per phase), I've reached the following conclusion …

What does it matter?

Computer games include cheat codes and nobody complains if you use those cheat codes in single player or even multiplayer co-op.  So given this is a co-operative game, what does it matter if this combo exists?  If people want to use it, let them.  You don't have to if you don't want to.  What's the problem?

The only problem I see is any potential competitive tournaments with players competing to get the best score against a given scenario.  And if/when that happens, just ban the combo.  Have a rule saying that in competitive play, you can't play Born Aloft on Erebor Hammersmith more than once per turn.

Simple.

"God mode" exists in single player computer games, but not in online play.  I don't see why we can't have the equivalent for this game, too.

Glaurung said:

Glaurung said:

Sorry but I really don't see that as a valid argument at all.  I've played twenty CCGs/LCGs in my time and I don't think you can compare the cards from any of them to those of another - different games require different cards and different standards.

Hell, one really obvious example - the Babylon 5 CCG allows players to choose their starting hand.  No, really, it does.  Too powerful for LotR, right?  But it's perfect for Babylon 5 and the game would be terrible without it.

Saying Will Of The West would shock an MTG player is completely irrelevant.  :-)

What matters is whether or not it works for this game.  And I think it does.  Other than the prospect of uber-card drawing, which I think it's fair to say was never FFG's intention with any combo, why exactly would Will Of The West be too powerful?  It wouldn't …

Yeah, kind of agree on Will of the West as well. It has been a lynchpin in both this and the Zigil deck. Making it go out of play after you use it would stop the infiniteness of these types of combos. Though, you could still draw your whole deck in like a turn, which probably still isn't great for the game.

I'm sorry, "very easy" was not the word I should've used.

What I was trying to say was that 2~3 player games allow players to 'specialize', which allows players to do reasonably well against most scenarios without the need for extreme specialization (such as spirit/lore draw + wotw deck given in this post, or infamous Hama pure tactics lock down deck); if you are able to with with these extreme measures, you are probably skilled enough to win without them too….. but I said them in very poor manner.

And like what others said above, every broken combo arises from Will of the West. Fix that card, and always set limit per phase or round to repeatable card draw and that should be good.

Stenun said:

Yes you right on certain points but….. any card game is need draw. When draw is unlimited is always bring to unbalance. If in 1 action i can shuffle all my dsicard pile back is really powerful. When i saw this card first time i was shock. And all the time on this forum i say will of the west, Beravur and Protection lf Lorien should to be ban or get errata. Now Beravur and Protector get already waht they deserve now is time for Will of the west. And also i still beliive we need to limit draw per round and sure we need to limit hand size.

Rather than have a draw limit, which requires keeping track of the number of cards drawn, I think a "hand cap" is better.  A limit to the number of cards you can have in your hand keeps you from drawing too many cards all at once.  It won't fix everything, but it is a good start, since it makes these combos slower and less reliable.

In one game I play, a hard hand cap was recently set at 16.  The end-of-turn hand cap has always been 8 for that game.  But the end-of-turn hand cap was not effective on its own, as 17 years of draw abilities made it possible for players to draw obscene amounts of cards in one turn.  Once they instituted a 16-card hand cap, it GREATLY reduced the number of people attempting broken combos.

FFG could easily do something like this in LoTR LCG.  Have an end-of-turn hand cap of 6 cards, and a hard hand cap of 12 cards otherwise.  Or some other numbers that they thought was fair.

Bryon said:

same story was with previous Lotr card game from Decipher. From the begin Decipher game also have unlimited draw but very quickly come crazy powerful combos and they issue the rule of 4 ( cannot draw more then 4 cards every turn in felowship phase). Felowship phase is the same like a planing phase for FFG game.

Yes, I remember when Decipher announced that rule.  It made sense.  So did giving eratta to Far-Seeing Eyes to make it unique, which I think was announced at about the same time.  The "Rule of 4" just felt a little clunky, since you had to keep track of how many cards you had drawn that phase.  Thankfully, 4 is a rather small number, so it wasn't that big of a deal.

I still prefer a hand cap, since you don't have to keep track of anything in the past.  You only have to count the cards in your hand at the exact moment you activate a draw ability and see if you are allowed to draw.

Bryon said:

Yes the good old times of Decipher……….I remember first Lotr world cup in Essen 2002. I was there with my country team……Good time!

Anyway hand cap is the good decision i agree with you. Sometimes is also geting weird when i play with my friend who love to play lore and Beravur and in the middle of the game he had more cards in his hand then in his player deck. And then he say : i can cancel this treachery let me check i should to have a Test of will somewhere here and it take a 10 second to just look to his hand. And after he play dwarfen tomb to get Test if will back to his hand. And from this moment i start to feel crazy boring cose i understand game is won 100% and is only matter of time and from this moment a game is just burden. NON change it! Now is not same every thing much more hard and i love it! Really waiting and like the idea of the new nightmare sets for the old quests to make them replayable with strong current decks.

Will see what Caleb will do now with all this issues.

I have to say that this mechanic has a certain kind of elegance. The Beravor and Ziggy decks have been pretty straightforward, but this Hammy tactic is kind of cool, especially as it does not affect solo play as much as multiplayer.

What I would like to see are treacheries that will be shuffled into the player deck. And they should  include mean stuff like "discard all your cards" or "raise your threat / reveal one encounter card for each card that you have drawn this round" etc.

leptokurt said:

also very good idea! Also when staging can reveal more encounter cards for each 2 cards i players hand more then 6 or 8.

leptokurt said:

That's a pretty cool idea. The only problem is that you could still abuse stuff in every quest without those treacheries. But still, maybe like an errata to Will of the West or something and then the inclusion of treacheries like that in some quests could be a way to make drawing decks look less enticing.

Bryon said:

Yeah, that's a concern of mine as well. Keeping track of how many card draws, or even watching to make sure you don't go over a hand cap size, is just kind of clunky and not very fun. It's another monotonous task to keep track of, just like when we had to start keeping track of game rounds. Too many things like this and the game upkeep becomes more of a chore than it's worth.

We might be okay for a while again if they just stop the Hammersmith trick, don't make many more drawing cards, and then start making some of leptokurt's treachery cards.

The power of some of the cards in this game has been a constant surprise to me, I think. Stuff like the Zigil Miner, Will of the West etc, they're cards I didn't expect to see so early in a game's development. I mean, Will of the West is a core set card! Good lord, it makes you wonder sometimes whether the designers know what they're doing. I do remember the discussions about the Zigil deck where people were including loads of high-cost cards in their decks to get the resources they wanted, then they brought out scenarios that discard allies from play (Long Dark) and that use your high-cost cards against you (Foundations of Stone), which I've always thought were elegant ways of countering these ludicrous decks. It makes me think the designers do know what they're doing, and were just waiting for people to get comfortable with these crazy decks when they then make scenarios you don't want to play with them. So now there's a stupid idea of drawing your deck into your hand during setup or whatever, so what's the betting we'll be getting scenarios that say "during the planning phase, reveal x cards from the encounter deck. x is the number of cards in your hand" or "each enemy (or location) in the staging area has threat equal to the cards in total in each player's hand" and the like? Having the encounter deck copy the players could be interesting, too, so every time you bring an ally back from your discard pile, you have to put an enemy into the staging area or whatever. Basically, what fresh hell have they got in store for us now?

This doesn't really have any effect on the already-released scenarios, of course, but then up until they announced these new nightmare cards, I was firmly of the opinion that the designers thought we all only played the current adventure pack, and the other quests would gather dust once they were "beaten" etc. I dislike errata, either to cards or the rules themselves, so I hope they find some other way. The idea of mixing treacheries into the player deck sounds absolutely inspired, I'd like to see something like that happen. I don't want to give the impression that I think the game was badly designed from the start, but the fact that there are no upper limits has always really bugged me. Even the fact the rulebook suggests using alternatives when you run out of tokens etc - to me, if I've pulled all of the resources that were in the pool when I started, that's it, I don't go digging around for change to use! So I suppose if it came down to a rulebook erratum to introduce a hand cap or draw cap, I'd be happy enough with it. I'd prefer, though, if they found a way to use hand size against us in-game.