by Rookiebatman
I saw a post in another thread that I thought really typified a serious problem I'm starting to see in this game:jkayati wrote:
Sadly, for me, I lost interest and sold my copy. In the end, I've found this to be a puzzle type game. Figure out the deck that works, and the scenarios are fairly easy to overcome. Until you do, bang your head in frustration as you lose again and again.
It seems like, for the harder scenarios, people win by one of two methods:
A) They build a deck specifically fine-tuned to the threats and challenges of that individual scenario.
B) They build one deck that's powerful but balanced, so that this one deck can take on pretty much any scenario.
This is all well and good as far as "skill gaming" and overcoming a challenge, but that's not what I'm looking for. Maybe it's just that I haven't read enough strategy articles, but I never seem to hear people say "I really liked the grouping of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in the movies, so I put the three of them together and figured out a way to make a deck where they could have a decent chance of winning most scenarios." It seems like there are some groupings of heroes (or just an upper limit of starting threat level) that just never has a chance in higher-difficulty scenarios. And even with really good, fine-tuned decks, scenarios that have significant starting enemies (like JdtA) require a lot of luck in getting just the right cards at the beginning if your threat level isn't very low. So it doesn't really seem like any amount of playing skill (that is, being able to pick up any deck and use it significantly better than a less experienced player would) will make up for the liability of a poorly constructed deck or even moderate amounts of bad luck.
That doesn't work for me. I play games with a role-playing sensibility; my main reason for playing any given game is to immerse myself in the theme and enjoy the experience of spending a little time in that world. I DON'T play games for the thrill of defeating overly difficult challenges and figuring out clever ways to beat the system. Now, I'm not saying I want it to be easy, or I just want everything handed to me. I'm more than willing to put in the hours gaining play experience so that I can increase my skill and understanding of the game, giving me the ability to overcome obstacles of a higher difficulty, but only for the end goal of having a more enriching thematic experience. Like, basically what I was envisioning as an eventual status quo was that at some point I could say, "Okay, now I know the ropes. I really like Aragorn, so I'm gonna take him and two other heroes that he might possibly have been questing with at that point in Middle Earth history, and just follow the three of them as they engage in imaginative adventures (in which they don't get beaten 95% of the time)." I don't mind playing some more min/maxed decks along the way, if that helps me to understand how the game works so that I can eventually reach that end goal. But as I read more strategy threads, I'm starting to feel like that ideal is just not within the parameters of the game's framework.
Granted, I haven't been playing (and reading threads) for very long, so maybe I'm just rushing to judgment. But I don't think I will be playing the game for very much longer if all it's about is just putting together combinations of cards that have purely arbitrary references to LotR characters and concepts, and no real sense of theme. That's really something that I hate about CCG's in general; most of them, when you get right down to it, are really just gameplay mechanics and card combos with a theme tacked on. I had hoped this game was different, because the scenario mechanic seemed a lot more thematic than the usual "my deck versus your deck, and whoever gets five VP's first wins" type of CCG. But now, I'm really starting to get the sense that theme is just as irrelevant here as any of the others.
Please tell me I'm wrong; I really want to be wrong about this, because I really like LotR, and I do still like the scenario style (and how many scenarios there already are available), but if most of the scenarios are impossible to beat without a min-maxed deck, then the value of the narrative is nullified.
