Council of Elrond

I have been readings Joe's material, and being one of the persons Joe was discussing with in Belgium I have been thinking myself about the current tournament frustration. I agree on his points that the highly competitive decks are usually the same and very little top material is shown at this point.

Which made me come to an interesting idea. I will post here some ideas that I have about changing the meta slightly be a few small errata/possible bannings. I urge people to join the discussion, but do so with based posts. I wanna hear argumenttation on how the current freeze of environment can be changed.

Make a note! This isnt official yet, just finding a way to spice up the tournament by trying to pilfer out some high negatives.


1th: Balrog 2-minder.
IMHO this rule should have been inserted from the beginning. People who know me and know what I play know that I use 3-minders frequently, but thats because I play within the rules. The Balrog already has a huge arsenal of advantages, and the 3 mind rule makes him play extra character points for free. This is very strong and has lead to a constant present of Balrog decks among tournament decks.

2nd: Ban Carambor.
This is the sole card that I refuse to play myself. It leads to a certain decktype that is such a huge negative play experience that its existence should not be tolerated. I know that the deck isnt foolproof but Mikko took it to worlds to show its strength and obliterated several top players with it. This card needs either an errata but more likely a ban.

3rd: Allow change of ICE rules.
I know that since ICE went down the Council said that the rules made by ICE were set in stone. BUt some of those rules and cards lead to lots of confusion and are in general unneccesary. Take into example the rule about what is playable during an automatic attack. It creates confusion and in general isnt a rule people deem neccesary.

4th Allow errata.
Some cards made have too big an impact on the scene and/or lead to negative playdecks. One popping up inmediately is Great Shadow. Its a Bade to Rule for Balrog, but without the direct influence penalty, with an extra +1 general influence AND with an ability to get needed cards from the discard back into the deck.
There are other cards as well that have such an impact that they are deemed too powerful and need tweaking. Small errata or better wording saves a lot of trouble.

These are my points that I can think of quickly to make the meta less stale and less cheezy. I know there will always be powerful decks and there will always be cheeze, but the meta needs an overhaul on some points.

MFG

Bert Claessen
Ringbearer
Council of The Isles of the Dead that Live.

Re 1th:
I think balrog 3-minder rule is strong but not that much to modify it, it is proven that hero, FW or minion can be as strong as any hog deck, and they dont have this rule, also, since hog doesnt have a long list of possibilities for deckbuilding, it is very predictable and in consequence can be easily stopable if you know how to...

Re 2nd:
I would say that Carambor shouldnt be banned, just add him to the list of exceptions for a FW player, because Carambor being played by minions can result in something rather interesting...

Re 3rd and 4th:
This 2 points makes some sense, but we have to be careful, i agree that auto attacks rule is stupid, but we dont want to overpower decks such as akorahill, wich are very powerful at this moment

You've taken the tack of nerfing as opposed to boosting. However, I do agree with the Balrog 2-minder and Great Shadow. I can't comment on Carambor since I haven't seen the deck in question. Trust miguel to find it, lol.

But that's just the tip of a rather large iceberg I'm afraid and I'm not altogether convinced that these alone would dramatically alter the meta-game...

My suggestions would definitely include tinkering with the rules for active RWs. In truth, only 2 of the 9 RWs (Akky and Hoarmy) are really worth playing in a tournament environment, with the Balrog and LE/Sauron making up the other popular choices for minion. That's a lot of underused parts of the game!

I think we have a general MeCCG problem however, and that is that speed of a deck is always paramount. Any card that clogs the hand is a bad card. In terms of hazards, that immediately rules out ~80% of the available cards.

I don't really know if the 'problem' is able to be solved, or even if it's worth the effort. Don't expect to get too much support sadly. The past has already shown that MeCCG players (even if they're not particularly active) are generally against wholesale change to ICE's legacy. You'd need to the leaders and movers and shakers to be on your side and more prominent and vocal than they are now, and many of these people now have a fairly low profile online.

It is always up to the players. I prefer thematic, interesting decks to tournament winning decks exploiting holes in the game or to much cheese. Therefore I love efforts like the virtual sets and the UEPs.

I can think of a number of cards and tricks that are hugely annoying me, including the minion Arkenstone, the White Tree for fallen wizards, etc. My own approach is to avoid these unless it fits with the theme of a deck. Also, I love creature based hazards instead of grab-bag.

Specifically, if Carambor is limited to once per turn he is sufficiently weakened, no need to ban him.

If drastic rule changes ever get through I would suggest giving the Balrog exactly the same rules about playing characters (1 per turn, from hand) as any other allignment and perhaps lowering the influence of the Balrog and his main leaders a point.

This is a more delicated issue than it seems. If cards/rules are to be changed, who will decide it? As we can see, there are several different opinions about what should be changed and how.

This same discussion has been brought in the spanish Council of Rivendell forum; it seems like the metagame is stalled, and some changes need to be done if we want to keep this game alive. The problem, though, is exactly what Jambo said:

I don't really know if the 'problem' is able to be solved, or even if it's worth the effort. Don't expect to get too much support sadly. The past has already shown that MeCCG players (even if they're not particularly active) are generally against wholesale change to ICE's legacy. You'd need to the leaders and movers and shakers to be on your side and more prominent and vocal than they are now, and many of these people now have a fairly low profile online.

I especially suscribe the last sentence. Even the NetRep team is inoperaive now because the most important members haven't showed up in a long time, and the other members aren't voting members, and don't have enough knowledge of the rules to answer all of the questions.

If something is to be done, the only idea I can think of is something like a team, formed by members designed by the players, who have great knowledge of the game mechanics, the meta-game, and a lot of time to invest on the project.

At this point, however, I feel like we are taking contradictory steps: Mark started the "Universal Rulesbook" some time ago, and for a short while it was going ok, but time has passed, and all of us have a life, a lot of other things to do, and can't really continue the project. Anyway, there's still hope on that, since a lot of work has been done, and someone could take over it and continue, or maybe Mark/Mikko/me start working on it again when we have the time. But the main idea of the Universal Rulesbook was "set in stone" what ICE had done in a way everyone could easily understand and use.

Now, if we are talking about changing stuff related to rules, that's some major trouble: it would mean that all of the previous Ruling Digests wouldn't be valid (since they are directed towards the "set in stone" way) and also all the other work related to rules, as the new Rules Inserts that Mark did with some of my help, the Universal Rulesbook, the Play and Examples File, etc.

I'm not saying I'm against doing changes to cards/rules, I just want to let everyone know that it's a big big big task to accomplish, and that even if it's done, players still should be convinced and/or agree to follow those changes. In other words, it would have to be so cool and well made that people prefered it over what ICE did.

And all that, considering that many of the players of MECCG all over the world never check this forums...

I agree with all of Ringbearer’s suggestions. I really don’t see why we are not issuing more erratta. Some caveats: I haven’t studied the 2-minder Balrog problem enough to know if there are other solutions. Also, the issue of Carambor must be tweaked finer, so as to allow, for example, minion play of him, as was suggested. I was thinking that simply changing the global marshalling point win rules so that they now read “…but each player must always get at least one turn” would suffice. Don’t we think? Because this is really the fundamental strength of him, his ability to force a one-turn win.

>It is always up to the players. I prefer thematic, interesting decks to tournament winning decks exploiting holes in the game or to much cheese. Therefore I love efforts like the virtual sets and the UEPs.

I agree. Unfortunately, people like me have brains that are obsessed with trying to figure out every little combo that is possible with a certain deck. This is a fun, intellectual, and necessary process.

Over time, however, this will result in cheesy-plays. The problem is not so much the small cheesy plays. For example, consider in sealed deck or ARDA the very minute (yet powerful in sealed) combos your brain will figure out. These make the game more enjoyable, and are basically a process of deck efficiency-making, central to the card game process.

The problem is the game-changing, almost rules-defying cheesy play that result in overpowered decks and a piss-poor game environment. It should be the job of the Council to stop such plays by ruling against them, issuing errattaed, or elsewise transforming them. It should be the job of the council to stop players like me.

What makes the stubborn players’ reluctance to change quite ironic is that I have never seen a card game company that doesn’t do exactly this: strive to manage the game so that the best game environment is always created. Of course, let’s cut our Council a little slack, because they don’t have one the most powerful tools for change available to them, which is the invention of new cards. Yet they CAN issue errata. They will never do this, however, without the support of most players AND the National Councils, because that would tear the community apart. (It would be like the American Federal Government trying to pass an important law without believing that most of the states would support it.)

>But the main idea of the Universal Rulesbook was "set in stone" what ICE had done in a way everyone could easily understand and use. Now, if we are talking about changing stuff related to rules, that's some major trouble: it would mean that all of the previous Ruling Digests wouldn't be valid

Hmm. That could be true. But I still see the Universal Rulesbook as valid for this reason: I don’t think most of us (myself included) even KNOW what the current rules are supposed to look like. Therefore, the UR will finally give all players (I hope) an easy-to-understand, accessible version of the rules. Two things are possible at this point. One, players will comprehend them better, and the game will become less complicated. Two, players will NOT comprehend them any better, but they will at least perceive what the rules are trying but failing to accomplish, and this knowledge will help us to REWRITE the rules into something different. In other words, the UR is probably necessary for a 2nd Edition Rules Rewrite because without the UR, no one will understand what the rules are to begin with!

I think that the Council and players might be more susceptible to change than we think. Remember that the Rules Judges like to cling to certain rules interpretations not because they are conservative at heart, but because they are logical at heart… they worry that to change the interpretation would affect many other different cards and rules. However, if we actually change the rules themselves…. that is another story.

There are many bottlenecks. For example, would we have mass errata on the level of whole card rewrites, in order to incorporate important keywords like the ones used in the never-published MECCG 2nd edition game “Lore”? They came up with a great keyword “Engagement,” which tremendously simplified what kinds of cards could be played or activated during battle: if it said “Engagement” on it, you could use it. And all types of battles, auto-attacks, creatures, company combat, were treated the same. But if we did whole card rewrites, are we then supposed to reprint all the cards? How can we possibly ask players to remember 1700 new texts?

Could we being to implement a Second Edition? I’ll tell you one thing: I believe we can start having the conversation, at least. One “baby step” would be freeing up the Council and giving them the power to issue errata, etc. But what do we do about nay-sayers? We want to be democratic, after all. Well, I have a funny solution. Listen to this: over the next year, we write down the name of every player who shows up for a national, worlds, or otherwise major MECCG tournament, or who plays at least 5 games of GCCG. Then, we have the Council ask everybody the really hard questions: should we issue errata? Should certain cards change? And guess what? ONLY THE PLAYERS ON THE LIST WILL BE ALLOWED TO VOTE ON THESE QUESTIONS. This would give us our most accurate feedback on what the real “players” of the game feel.

--Frodo

I agree with Frodo that the Universal Rulebook is necessary to begin with before drastic changes are made.

If we have a good collection of what the rules, erratas, etc are now and if a group of people have a huge amount of time, rule changes can be suggested and play tested to increase the playability of the whole game. I do not think this will limit possibilities of the game, but the rules should become clearer and the amount of rules could be reduced.

Hi. I find this thread very interesting and I'll try to revive it with my contribution.

First of all, we must recognize that what Ringbearer said is true: there is a really low number of top performing decks, which are able to score a lot of points in a few turns and are hard to hamper with any hazard strategy whatsoever. Any player who wants to be competitive in a tournament must choose among a few decks. Basically it is about bringing your own “variation” of a “theme” picked from a narrow range of well-known decks, with minor variations at best. The scope for innovation and originality is thus limited, and the situation is indeed frustrating.

On the other hand, I strongly agree with Manuel's words:

Manuel wrote:If cards/rules are to be changed, who will decide it? As we can see, there are several different opinions about what should be changed and how.

We must always keep in mind that the MECCG community is a community of peers, and since ICE's demise there isn't anymore an authority entitled to produce new cards and/or rules and claim them to be “official”, and probably there won't be one anymore. If the CoE would become active in this sense, any intervention (be it rewriting rules, changing card texts, creating new cards...) would satisfy someone, but at the same time it would produce dissatisfaction among others, and thus trigger pushes for further compensative intervention in another direction. Any sucha further intervention would inevitably displease someone else. The chain-reaction scenario is easy to imagine, and I strongly fear its potential break-up effect on the MECCG community.

We need to do something if we want to make the game more attractive. In order to prevent detrimental disputes over what has to be changed and how, we should think in terms of “expanding” the range of game-types at the players' disposal. To get an idea of what I mean, think to a sport like swimming: there are different strokes (butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, front crawl), and every single swimmer competes in the stroke which best suits his/her own characteristics. Some swimmers specialize on a single stroke type, others (e.g. Phelps) are top-competitive in all stroke types. Those who are more familiar with winter sports could think about skiing, which is divided into four different disciplines (slalom, giant slalom, super giant slalom, downhill).

Some work has already been done in this sense: virtual cards, dream cards, scenarios are valid examples of ways of broadening the range of game-types, with a positive renewing effect on MECCG. But at the same time they are strongly “invasive” on ICE's legacy (in terms of rules and/or cards). I'm not saying that this is a flaw, I'm simply saying that those innovations cannot fit the needs of those players who just want to play a funny high-level MECCG game without facing (nor playing) the same old trite Red Hills or Cheezagast deck.

In my view there's a non-invasive intervention which would allow for tournaments with a broad range of potentially competitive, original and funny decks, and at the same time it would minimize deviations from the ordinary pool of cards and rules:
the CoE should officially codify casual playing.
Casual gaming would be simply MECCG playing, but with just a number of restrictions in the deck's composition and of minor (but as limited as possible) intervention in terms of special rules aimed at eliminating cheezy play.

To give a clearer idea, I'll make a list of some examples of sucha interventions. This list is of course neither exhaustive nor complete: some opportune interventions could be missing, as well as some of the following interventions could be inopportune. The definitive codification would of course require a long process of discussion, evaluation, testing.

1) Limitation of unique hazards allowed in a deck. In order to prevent cards from clogging the hand, most competitive decks have the same grab-bag kind of hazards (mostly half creatures) which are easily playable no matter your opponent's strategy. With minor variations from deck to deck, they are usually:
the strongest nazguls (Adunaphel, Uvatha, Ren...)
a couple of dragon manifestations (Daelomin at home, Smaug/Itangast ahunt)
some agents (My Precious, Lobelia, Baduila, Golodhros)
some very powerful events (Revealed to all watchers, Rolled down to the sea)
other half-creatures (Mouth of Sauron, Gandalf/Pallando/Lady vs minions)
What do they all have in common? Their uniqueness. A maximum of unique hazards allowed in a deck (a proper number could range between 3 and 6, but it is just a rough estimate of mine) would force players to develop more thematic and original hazard strategies.

2) Banning roadblock hazards. Roadblock is maybe the main alibi for squatting decks. It is a sort of prisoner's dilemma: “I could refrain from playing a cheezy squatting resource strategy, but since I may face a cheezy roadblock hazard, I play cheezy in the first place, in order to avoid giving an edge to my opponent”. Banning any hazard which potentially sends back the company to its site of origin or taps its site broadens the range of feasible resource strategies, and leads us to the next point.

3) Squatting companies can't play resources. This would be actually a more invasive intervention as it would introduce a new rule: “a company which was at its current site at the end of the previous turn cannot play any resource if in the previous turn the company didn't face any attack or if it didn't lose its site phase due to the effect of any hazard”. On the other hand, this would simply bring back the game to its original essence: exploring the Middle Earth gathering useful resources for the struggle against the enemy, and I think that many players would welcome this. The second part of the rule simply prevents from being treated as intentionally “squatting” a company which moved in the previous turn but couldn't play resources due to a river, lost in free domains, or simply because all characters got tapped/wounded by hazard creatures and/or automatic-attacks. Sucha company would be allowed not moving in order to attempt playing the resources it couldn't play in the previous turn. Notice that a broad interpretation of this rule would even prevent a squatting Halbarad/Ioreth from marveling away perm-events. Actually I don't know if a broad or a narrow interpretation would be better in this regard.

4) Every player must be entitled to play at least a whole turn as resource player. This is basically Frodo's idea to prevent the cheezy FW use of Carambor. IMO this would be the best solution: the intervention would be less invasive than totally banning the character (or banning him for FW players only) and at the same time would prevent exploitation of other not-yet-invented dirty tricks based on other cards, which could potentially prevent the opponent from playing at all.

5) Allowing german promos. They would (slightly) expand the card pool and introduce new possibilities regarding both resource and hazard strategies. Especially Das Pack vor der Tür would make wolves/spider/animals a viable option for a decently effective hazard strategy, instead of a forced choice for newbies with a limited access to cards, who are forced to play with a bunch of commons. As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to see german promos allowed in the official play too, as they're IMO perfectly balanced cards (they were all developed by ICE as well, after all), but since I'm coherent with what I said before about the lack of an authority in MECCG, I only expect them to be allowed in unofficial play at best.

6) Anything else which didn't come through my mind but would work fine.

What I have in mind is a concept of MECCG as a multi-faceted game with several game-types, each one being part of a bigger picture. The breakdown of MECCG's game-types would be something like this:

1. the official game (i.e. ICE's untouched legacy)
2. the casual game (ICE's card pool with further sub-rules)
3. the virtual cards game (partial rewriting of ICE's card pool, ICE's rules untouched)
4. the dream cards game (cards pool expanded by the players, some intervention in the rules)
5. the scenario game (e.g. the Dragonhunt: ICE's card pool, scenario-specific rules made by the players, with the scope of the game usually differing from scoring more MP's than the opponent or dunking the One Ring)

The first one would be the only “official” game-type as it would be based on ICE's cards and rules, with the CoE's role limited to providing guidance and guidelines for the purpose of interpreting ICE's legacy and shedding light on its darkest points. The others would be all “semi-official” game-types, sanctioned codified and approved by the CoE, with scope for intervention by the CoE when necessary, albeit as limited as possible once the game-type finds a stable balance. Each player would be free to choose the game-types (s)he likes best and play them. If the process goes further we may consider including each game-type (or at least some of them) at Worlds. We would have different world champions: the World champion in a strict sense, the casual game champion, the virtual cards champion and so on.

If this casual play proposal is welcomed by the CoE and the community, the next Lure could be a great occasion of putting to a test the provisional version of this game-type with a tournament. The upside is that if the CoE tries to launch this idea and the community doesn't like it, the casual game-type would just naturally die away out of lack of interest without leaving traces, without any intervention in the official gaming being even attempted, and therefore without any rift created among the community.

I hope this contribution of mine will help providing new momentum to this thread. Any comment is welcomed. I wish everyone to express his/her feedback about my proposal.

Sorry if the post is too long!

i dont agree with your points 1, 2 and 3 because:

Re at 1: There are some hazard startegies that also uses a big ammount of unique hazards wich are not grab bag (agents, dragons, khamul machine, darkness made by malice, etc)

Re at 2: Roadblock strategy is just 1 more hazard-type you can face, and as such, there are ways to deal with it (promptings/ piercing all shadows, twilights, GoM, etc...)

Re at 3: Do you really want everyone to play with mordor shuffle/ akorakill or eriador rests/ hobbits? Because this is going to happen if such a rule is used... those decks are cheeze enough and they dont squat...

Re at 4 and 5: i agree

About different game-types, those already exists, it is just that people doesnt want to learn tons of new cards/ rules or they just dont care about new cards/ rules at all because they are very used to ICE's legacy, me -as a member of the VC dev team and as a designer of DC cards- know this scenario very well, most of the players don't have a virtual or DC deck.
Another issue about different game styles is that "designers" themselves doesnt have that much time anymore for doing that job, you know, all of us have a life besides MECCG

just a few thoughts...

Best regards!
Marcos

Maybe tapping a character if you squat and more characters for every next turn may be a reasonable solution to prevent the reel squat decks.

Hello all!

I'm just getting back into the game after a 10 year hiatus and am eager to jump into the "conversation" so to speak. I've never pleayed competitively (its hard enough to find even one player to play casually!) but do enjoy the cards, the world and building decks while I imagine the story they might tell etc.

This is probably not the place for this, but I read through the thread with interest and ran across some things I didn't understand. So, I was hoping someone could answer a breif question:

Can someone explain the difference between virtual cards and dream cards?

Thanks, and thanks for everyone's work here for keeping the game alive and thriving!!!

Easily put

dream cards are new cards using new artwork and effects

virtuals are old (unused or under used) cards, so same artwork, but other effect, most of the time these cards keep their type (so a resource perm stay a resource perm ASF)
theese effects can be slightly different (e.g. Reforging) or totally different, but mostly the theme remains the same.

so far there is 1 Virtual set with 50 cards

"offically" there is 1 set of dream cards released on GCCG have 184 cards

under testing there are 5 more sets totalling 500+ dream cards (hopefully the will be 17 new set when I am done)

mfg Nicolai

Thanks! (and sorry about the thread hijack)

I downloaded the Virtual Card pdf. Now I just print them, cut them out and affix them to the same card to effect the text change, correct? Doesn't doing this make the cards "stand-out" in a deck i.e. - you can tell where those cards are becasue they are slightly thicker?

Is the only place to get the dream cards on GCCG? Is there any way to print them out etc?

Moderator: please move my posts to a better spot if they are too disruptive to this thread.

harneloot wrote:Thanks! (and sorry about the thread hijack)

I downloaded the Virtual Card pdf. Now I just print them, cut them out and affix them to the same card to effect the text change, correct? Doesn't doing this make the cards "stand-out" in a deck i.e. - you can tell where those cards are becasue they are slightly thicker?

Is the only place to get the dream cards on GCCG? Is there any way to print them out etc?

Moderator: please move my posts to a better spot if they are too disruptive to this thread.

Most of us use sleeves so we wouldn't notice. Also note Virtual and Dream Cards are not offical for a standard tournament. They are only used for Virtual and Dream Card tournaments.