Decipher's lost it! (OT LOTR's)

Gosh these were some of my favorite cards. Decipher puts out Grima, Chief Counselor, now this.

1R40 Elrond, Lord of Rivendell
1R45 Galadriel, Lady of Light
1R80 Ottar, Man of Laketown
1U108 No Stranger to the Shadows
1R139 Savagery to Match Their Numbers
1U234 Ulaire Nertea
1C248 Forces of Mordor
1R313 Sting
2R32 Flaming Brand
2C101 Filibert Bolger, Wily Rascal
2R108 O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
3R38 Aragorn, Heir to the White City
3R42 Horn of Boromir
3R68 Saruman, Keeper of Isengard
4C192 Uruk Regular

The above are now "banned" from what is called Standard Format which is the competitive level format. Supposedly Open format will continue with these cards permitted. I'm personally disgusted with the whole thing.

DGMA Announcement

R'Bolt

 

There's one ST 1st edition card banned, I think.

 

It's just a new format, nothing more. If you don't like it, nothing is preventing you from playing Open format.

 

True... hopefully the TD's in our area will continue to support Open. Our local group is a buzz with talk about this move on Decipher's part. I still don't like the direction Decipher is taking the game. Banning cards (for serious competitive play) in a bad idea IMO.

R'Bolt

 

With the amount of play those cards see, I'm guessing that TDs will cave in to player demands, and just run open tourneys. I doubt that anyone would want to even play in one of those.

 

They'll have to if they want to play in championship events though.


I jus thought of something: What would Decipher do if everyone who went to Worlds included some of those cards in their decks, say that no one wins?

 

They must have their reasons to do this at the Championship level. If it improves competition at that level, then I guess no one should complain. Still, I am a bit surprised that Decipher has taken the "ban" road. I thought some of these cards were balanced by other cards. Banning Sting is especially strange because Glamdring does the same thing and it's still legal. Ditto on Flaming Brand. It'll be interesting to see what player feedback will be.

Personally, I'm not sorry to see No Stranger go at the top level. Because of that one card, minion decks were pretty much kept to all Moria for months.. not surprisingly, that got very old very fast. It's essentially the same as Force-choking in the SWCCG. We lost about a third of our players around Realms because they were sick of being "choked" and not being able to play the minion cultures they wanted to play.

In comparison, these "Ranger Choke" decks were along the same lines as the old Dagobah Choke & Drain decks (most of which included inserts and constant retrieval).

I have similar feelings concerning O, Elebreth!. That should at least be errata-ed to only work against a fierce Nazgul skirmish IF the Ring-bearer participated in the first skirmish with that Nazgul.

 

Maybe taking the route of not banning cards contributed to what happened with the SW license. I know for me the abusive combos and rulings were overwhelming.

I don't think this overall concept is bad, even though I have to say I don't play LotR so I really don't know about this particular situation.

 

They did a Two Towers set, and the Battle of Helm's Deep expansion came out a couple weeks ago.

 

Banning Sting is especially strange because Glamdring does the same thing and it's still legal.

Yeah, but two things: (1) Glamdring requires you to make a "culture committment" (Gandalf culture); Sting requires no committment because you have to have Frodo. (2) Glamdring has a cost; Sting potentially is free, because of Frodo Reluctant Adventurer.

But personally, I HATE the fact that STING is banned. Come on, it's STING!!! I know the new Sting is still legal, but I like being able to peek at my opponent's hand, which the new one doesn't do. I think they should have made an exception with Sting and just errata it, maybe removing the secondary function of removing twilight pool for each Orc.

 

Yeah,I thought of that.

Ultimately I see a pattern leading to one bottomline: When it comes to the Championships, Decipher wants the Fellowship to have minions to contend with.. and to actually contend against the minions. If this is their justfication, fine. I think players at that level should be prepared to deal with that.

On the subject of banning in general. What's the difference if you have an errata to remember or a banned list? I'd rather have the former lest some player walks in not knowing his card was banned the other day. And most of the time abusive strats were simply dealt with on the cards.. so no new rules to remember. It's just so easy to ban 3 or 4 cards here,a couple more there.. once that Box is open, it's hard to close it again.

Y'know, so many say "Oh, the rules.. oh, the bloody rules" Keep in mind, new rules came out every three to five months and there were rarely that many to remember (Dagobah was the last expansion with a major set of new rules). And at the end of the day, the Star Wars CCG is still the #2 card game in CCG history. Period

 

Well, Standard Format isn't really that bad. Nazgûl are tougher to deal with, which is as it should be, but beyond that, the game is still pretty much the same.

 

Well tell that to my son who saw 20 strength Nasgul at site 2, "four times" in six games at the Delaware Territorial yesterday. It's amazing how "few" Uruk decks were being played among the 40 or so players who made the event. Amazing how 15 banned cards could "completely" change the way the game is played. Personally I think the primary motivation was to push the game into a new direction, although I still have this "underlying" "gut" feeling that is was to make people buy a lot of "new" cards. I think banning is bad and that errata should have been the focus of most of those that hit the banned list. At the very least "Savagery" should never have made the X list.

My observation is that Uruks are not "underpowered" and "Nasgul" are on their way to be the dominant minion culture in the near future.

R'Bolt

 

I meant this to read "now underpowered"

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My observation is that Uruks are not "underpowered" and "Nazgul" are on their way to be the dominant minion culture in the near future.

 

ST:CCG (1st Edition) did have one banned card. It was 'Raise the Stakes' and had gametext sorta like this:

"Play on table. Loser of game must give up one random card from their 60 card deck to the winner. When this effet is played, opponent may cancel this effect by forfeiting the game."

It was pretty sweet, but not appropriate for high level tournament play.

 

Ug, what was Decipher thinking when they made that card?

 

I can understand banning Raise the Stakes. Who wants to play if they may lose the card? The game isn't fun anymore at that point.


Decipher banning cards? I guess Decipher is starting to become more like Wizards of the Coast. I remember when people said the banning of cards was why they preferred Decipher over Wizards.

It doesn't bug me. I stopped getting Decipher stuff a while ago.

 

That is why I stopped playing Lord.

 

The cards are only banned if the players want them to be, because the players decide what format to play in.