Board Game Reviews, Gaming Articles

Lord of the Rings: LCG revisited

Lord of the Rings the Living Card game turned 10 years old not too long ago and as part of that celebration we not only got a new revised edition of the game, but a sort of guarantee that the game will continue to remain in print.

Now so far as Living Card Games go, that makes Lord of the Ring LCG, quite unique, currently one of the oldest of its kind at the moment still in print.

As a super fan of this game with a nearly complete collection barring all the nightmare stuff in which I never found much appeal, this is kind of a big deal. I thought I would throw a few words down for those of you out there considering getting into this one, let’s call it a do’s and don’t list with some pitfalls and suggestions that I can offer.

1st Edition vs. Revised Edition

Just a quick note here because this question comes up all the time. Is there a difference between these two editions? The answer is no, they are exactly, word for word, card for card, the same game. It is just a second printing of the same game and while the core sets have different quantities of card, the Revised Core Set has been revised to have sufficient cards for 4 players, they are for all intense and purposes the same game.

As a rule, you don’t need more than 3 copies of any card as this is all that is legal to put into a deck, but of course, many players support more than their own decks, as such, it’s nice to have more copies of certain key cards. If you already have an original core set, you might still consider getting the new Revised Core Set anyway just for this reason.

Buyers Guide For Newbies

Core Set

If you are fresh and own nothing, the obvious first thing to do is to purchase a core set. Now it’s still possible to get the old core set, but I would advise against it and recommend getting the new revised core set.

The primary reason for this is that the original core set left a lot to be desired when it came to the card list. Many “staple” cards, meaning, cards you will often put into decks don’t come in sets of three in the original core set and this means when you are trying to optimize your deck you often can’t get exactly what you want.

The new revised core set sticks to the minimum 3 cards per card type and it gives you a lot of extras of the more commonly used cards like Gandalf (x8) and Dark Knowledge for example.

The revised core set also comes with the Campaign Mode cards which is the only new thing in the revised edition of the game which really enhances play. It effectively lets you run campaign mode as you do with the Saga sets, but for the core set adventures. It also has sufficient components for 4 players which might not matter to you but with the original core set you barely have enough for two players while the revised set gives you more than enough for 4 players.

In a word, it’s just a better core set. Back in the day most people resolved card shortages in the core set by buying two of them, but with this new revised core set you don’t have to do that.

Initial Expansions

I think most players want to get a good start with their collections and there is a notion that you should start at the begining with the 1st cycle but the reality is that the first 3 full cycles of this game were only so-so and in some cases actually quite bad.

This is evidenced by the fact that when FFG started with re-releases (repackaging) of the original game cycles they started with Angmar Awakened and Dream Chaser cycles. This is because the first three cycles (Shadows of Mirkwood, Dwarrowdelf & Against The Shadows) left a lot to be desired.

Older sets like Heirs of Numenor were extremely difficult to the point of not being fun, but as you become really good at the game, some of these old challenges can actually be fun to go back on. I wouldn’t discourage their collecting, but its good to know what your getting into.

So far as adventures (quests) go, Shadows of Mirkwood is without a doubt the weakest cycle in the game, rather boring to be honest and I would argue can be skipped entirely. Dwarrowdelf is just ok at best and Against The Shadows is horrifically unbalanced, hard to the point of not being fun. Now all these cycles have great player cards and that is reason enough to collect them at some point but the really good (fun) adventure sets start with the Ring Maker cycle and just get better and better with each release afterward and the player cards in the cycles that followed are also a lot more interesting, allowing for far more diverse player deck building possibilities.

I would also avoid buying under the old format (packaging). It has been rather frustrating to try to collect (and complete) each cycle buying the individual packs, in fact even today I have a couple of cycles where I’m missing a pack and can’t it track down. When I say frustrating, I mean it, it annoys me to no end.

The new format allows you to buy the player cards and adventures separately and when you do buy the adventure pack, you get the entire cycle in one go. It’s more expensive than any single pack, but altogether the price is about the same. Player & adventure expansion together is about $115, and buying the separate cycles is about $120, so same stuff, slightly cheaper and with considerably less hassle trying to collect everything.

The fact that they started the repacked cycles with Angmar Awakened and now Dream-chaser is just icing on the cake as these are the first two I would advise you to pick up either way. These adventures (quests) are both fantastic throughout, and the player cards and heroes they come with are far more diverse and interesting than anything you get prior.

Sets like Dream Chaser introduce entirely new sub-mechanics to the game that offer new challenges and call for completely unique ways to build decks. This expansion really shows off the diversity of this game and are really great investments.

I would honestly not try to go back and collect the first three cycles at all unless you can find complete sets in one go and in either case, I would not bother with the first cycle (Shadows of Mirkwood) at all. You can just skip that one, it really was not very good at all and is regarded in the community as the most skippable cycle in the collection.

The Saga Sets

After picking up the two repackaged sets that are available now, you might have your eye on the Saga set. Originally this was broken down into 6 boxes for the Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers and Return of the King story and two sets for the Hobbit.

In the repackage they are being released in 3 sets covering each book. The price and content is the same, but as of this writing Return of the King is not yet available or even announced, though you can count on it being released sometime in the future while the original releases are still quite readily available.

The Saga expansions are I think, an intrical part of the Lord of the Rings LCG experience, but I would not rush to it. It’s sort of like the end game content, which, if attempted too early, can be quite frustrating, but if done when your ready is pure magic.

The saga’s are really great, they use the campaign format which used to be unique to the Saga sets, but is now available with all of the repacked sets including the revised core sets. It allows for a sort of leveling up of characters and deck improvements as you go through and given the difficulty of the Saga sets, this is actually quite crucial to success.

While these are all fantastic sets, the difficulty of the Saga sets is quite high, in particular when trying to complete the entire Saga in campaign mode. I would only caution getting the Saga sets last simply to avoid having it and being frustrated because you don’t have the card pool needed to successfully complete them.

When I say hard, I mean, super hard. You WILL need a pretty wide collection to complete the Saga set with constant deck adjustments and frankly, without some homebrew rules adaptations I don’t think it’s very solo-able, this is definitely at least a two-player (or double-fisting – 1 player playing two hands). I would argue however this is best with 3-4 players for that epic feel.

I would consider these must have’s for your collection, they are quite fantastic and in a sense really are what the game is about. You want to do the lord of the rings core story and while all of the adventure sets have fun narratives, the nostalgic visit to the original story in card form can’t be beat.

Do’s & Don’ts

Over the years of collecting and playing this game, there are quite a few things I have learned that will do wonders for your experience and your wallet.

Do’s

Always and I mean always with the exception of the core sets, look into the 3rd party market when tracking down cycles/sets. You can find used stuff dirt cheap and often buy a complete collection of a cycle in one fell swoop which even if you have to shell out a few nickles is going to be better than fussing about trying to find a single missing pack.

More importantly, you can often find stuff not available through retail for the game as many adventure packs have been released under the “limited release” tag as part of convention events which you are definitely going to want.

Your collection will grow over time and there is quite a bit to collect, but buying this game at full retail is not only expensive but rarely an option as any given cycle is rarely ever available at the same time. In the 3rd party market its quite easy to find complete sets and in my mind this is the best way to collect.
Do’s

Do pimp out your game. There are lots of really amazing accessories for LotR LCG and they are well worth it. Most notably a good playmat and a good storage solution are quite important. I would also recommend sleeving your decks but not doing so for the rest of your collection as there is a lot of shuffling and handling of cards in this (duh) card game.

Don’ts

Don’t ever pay full retail for anything, even recently released sets. You can always find discounted stuff if your patient and it can make a huge difference. For example, the Revised core set retails at 70 bucks, but if you sniff around a bit, you can pick it up for 10-20% discount on that price. In fact, I don’t recall ever paying full price for anything for this game, you can always find discounts.

Don’ts

Don’t buy the limited edition collectors edition or the online version of this game. It’s the worst deal in Lord of the Rings and people have been trying to make it sound special and expensive, when the reality is that all you get is a shitty mat, a poorly produced MP3 soundtrack that is freely available, a crappy plastic ring, some poorly produced art prints and a two-player limited edition of the game that has less stuff in it than the core set.

This was a raw deal and mostly a money grabbed designed to promote the digital version of the game which quite literarly had absolutetly nothing to do with the paper version. These are two entirely different games, in fact the LCG has more in common with Arkham Horror LCG and Marvel Champions than it does with the digital version. Avoid it like the plague.

More to the point though is that the digital version of LotR LCG is a completely different game, than the paper version. These two games have only the name of the game in common and the entire production of the digital game is just a massive cash grab for what really is one of the shittiest CCG’s anyone ever scraped together. It’s a hard pass.

Don’t

Don’t bother with the nightmare decks. Generally speaking, they don’t really add much to the game and even if you find that you have become so good at the game that you need more challenge there are many free game variants for increased difficulty available that are far more interesting than the nightmare decks.

I’m not saying these are bad, just saying they are not worth it.

You don’t get any new content with the nightmare decks, all it is-is the same cards you already have with slightly higher stats on monsters for the most part. They are not worth the 5-7 bucks you will pay for each one.

Don’t

Don’t bother with the Starter Decks. You are eventually going to collect all of the cards anyway and for 22 bucks for 1 starter deck which is half of the cost of a repackaged expansion player box, it’s about the most expensive way to get these cards you can find. What’s worse, there are repeated cards in these and you don’t always get 3 sets of each card so you end up with an incomplete collection even if you get them all. Worst still is that you are going to collect all the sets most likely anyway so you end up with duplicates of stuff you don’t need. There are no unique cards in these sets, all cards are released in other sets.

If you are just dabbling into the LCG, this can be a great way to get some great cards right out of the gate, but if you plan to collect, this is the most expensive and inefficient way to get these cards available.

As a side note, most of these decks are actually not that great, so far as “good deck building goes” they are also pretty mediocre.

Tips & Tricks

Lord of the Rings LCG can be a pretty frustrating game, you are going to lose… a lot and this can’t really be helped, but there are a few things I always recommend to players to keep themselves engaged.

  1. Fail It Forward
    One thing I really recommend is that you try to complete each quest in a cycle 2, max 3 times and if you can’t beat it, move on to the next one. You can always go back to take a crack at it again, but playing the same adventure over and over again endlessly until you beat it will take a lot of steam out of you and you may end up giving up before continuing. There is no shame in realizing there is a quest here and there you can’t beat, these are future challenges and eventually, you will build better decks as your game improves. Don’t let yourself get stuck.

  2. Easy Mode Recommended
    I would strongly advise new players to make extensive use of easy mode when first starting out. I know that it stings but it takes a fairly long time to get good at the game and when you initially get the game (core set) you won’t have the necessary card pool to beat even the core set quests. In fact, the 3rd quest in the core set is universally considered among the hardest to beat even for veteran players with full collections.

    Easy mode turns the impossible into the possible, as you get better, again, you can always go back on any of these and take a crack at them again.

  3. Find a partner or two
    While LotR LCG is infinitely solo-able and it’s a lot of fun, it’s not balanced for solo play and generally speaking, solo play is kind of for experts as you must build very specialized decks to find any measure of success. Some get around this by playing the game two-handed (called double-fisting) but, naturally, the preference would be to have a partner.

    This game is best played with 2, 3 or 4 players. I would not recommend more than that. 4 player games can be a bit slow, I think 2-3 is the sweet spot.

    More than that though, LotR LCG has a tendency to be a very fun experience as there are so many ghastly failures and triumphant successes, it’s something to be shared in my experience.

Final Words

Lord of the Rings LCG is a great cooperative game, but it’s quite expensive to collect and the producers of the game know the pinch players feel when invested in a game and new content comes out. In the end, the instinct is to collect everything but I can assure you this is neither necessary or worth it.

One thing to keep in mind is that a typical quest (one quest) for 2-3 players is basically an entire evening of entertainment. As such if you collect say a single cycle which has 9 quests, that is enough content to fill 7-9 sessions of gaming. Point here is that you don’t need a lot to keep you going for a long time. I have collected everything released and I estimate it will take me the better part of a decade to get through it all.

You can safely skip some of the old stuff and focus on collecting the new stuff. Sure your collection won’t be complete, but the reality is that 1 good quest is worth 10 bad ones and a lot of the older stuff before the Ring Maker cycle can be safely skipped.

Of all the cycles I have played through there are three that I think stand out. The Dream Chaser, Haradrim and Angmar Awakened cycles. Since these are being re-released in the new re-packaged format there honestly is little reason to look back as it seems everything will be re-released in this new format after the Angmar Awakened cycle.

I would argue the Ring Maker cycle and perhaps some of the special release stuff like Murder At The Prancing Pony are exceptions, but I think as new players coming into the game, it’s best to simply look forward not backward.

Now whether you want to track down some of the older releases, pre-re-release is up to you, but if you are going to do it, I highly recommend pretty much everything after and including The Ring Maker cycle but cautioning that you should be ready to wait to finish collections. Very often you can get one or two things from one or another cycle, but rarely is everything available at the same time and as time passes some of this stuff is going to be harder and harder to find. You may end up not being able to finish any given of the older cycles.

There is some debate among the community whether or not Voice of Isengard is a good expansion or not, FFG seems to think its skippable given they started their re-release schedule with the Angmar cycle but personally I think this is a really good one, worth picking up.

Looking at the production schedule of FFG, there is absolutely nothing coming from the old sets, so what is out there today may be all that will ever be available. They seem to be very focused on the new stuff, which makes sense of course. They might still surprise us but I would always approach collecting with the information you have at hand.