by Thanee
John_VW wrote:
so, 2 base sets to start with 4 players...
See above. It is not absolutely necessary.
does the base set come with 2 "starter decks", or 4 (do you know)?
It comes with 4 decks (one of each sphere; leadership, tactics, spirit, and lore). Each of the decks have 29 cards (plus one Gandalf card making it 30; there are 4 of those in the Core Set).
if it comes with 4, and i have 2 base sets is that to give each of the 4 players more to choose from in constructing their decks?
Yes, you will have more options, because in the 4 pre-constructed decks there are cards in multiples of 1, 2, and 3. When building your own decks, you can use any card as often as 3 times. So, having 2 Core Sets allows you to play the cards that are only once or twice in a single set more often (2 or 3, respectively). Or you could use the same cards in multiple decks (if you build decks with overlapping spheres).
The expansion sets, giving you all-new cards (and three copies of each of those), give you more options for deckbuilding, though.
and...should i go with 2 base sets, do i then need more than 1 when adding and expansion, or am i now locked-in to having to get 2 of each expansion (to account for the 2 base games i'm starting with)?
Absolutely not. There are some expansions (The Watcher in the Water comes to mind -> Resourceful), which have very useful "neutral" cards (which can be used with any sphere). Those might be interesting to have more than 3 times when building 4 decks. But other than that having each expansion once should be perfectly fine.
As said above, having a single Core Set and a bunch of the expansion packs should work well with four players (just need something to use for the two additional threat counters and some extra tokens). You could then build single-sphere decks when playing with four and try out some mixed-sphere strategies when playing with two.
Bye
Thanee