Month in Review: November 2019

Another month is over, and what a month it has been for the community. Not only did we get a lot of new cards spoiled to us, but most of the community finally got their hands on Wrath and Ruin. This in turn meant that the community was thriving with discussions on the new cards and fun new deckbuilding ideas. So as we approach the end of this year, let’s review the past month for the blog and look forward to what is to come in December.

November

FFG finally released some more news, and while we won’t have our hands on Saruman for a long time, we know that he made it as a hero at least! Just half a cycle to go before the break, so not that many cards left to play around with. What is noticable though, is that the quality of these packs are amazing, with very weird and wonderful cards thrown into the packs in order to give us something to do during the break. The contracts are great too, and I am looking forward to the final three. As for the blog, November has been a productive month behind the scenes, with a ton of drafts being finished this month. But let’s go over the different catagories and discuss them in more detail.

Scenario Analyses

The Haradrim cycle is the current cycle being discussed on the blog, but since the quests are pretty heavy on the new mechanics, it takes some time to cover the scenarios individually. However, the end of the Haradrim cycle got analyzed, with both the Dungeons of Cirith Gurat and the Crossings of Poros scenarios analyzed. We will try to get the other scenarios of this cycle out as soon as we can, but it takes a while to cover every aspect of those scenarios. With all scenarios of the Haradrim cycle now claimed by authors, I will be taking on volunteers for the start of the Ered Mithrin cycle. If you are interested in writing a scenario analysis, please let me know and I can get you sorted.

Traits and Staples

Nothing new happened for this catagory, but I will look into doing another staple analysis for December. The traits are no fleshed out enough to instruct everyone about the mechanics of that archetype, but some might need updating once all cards have been released. The developments around the Valour and Doomed archetypes will call for new and updated articles once all cards of the Vengeance of Mordor cycle have been revealed.

Deckbuilding

The Deckbuilding series released two articles this month, with both Celebrimbor’s Secret and the Antlered Crown now covered. The Ringmaker cycle has now been completed, but will be summarized in an upcoming article. After that, the series will continue with the Angmar Awakened cycle, trying to create a deck that can beat each of those scenarios consistantly.

Player card Review

This month marked the start of the player card reviews of the Dwarrowdelf cycle with the first review of a Deluxe box. From here, the series will continue the cycle with the APs in the series, which will likely last another half year. Next up in December will be the Redhorn Gate, after which the rest of the cycle will be published over the course of the next half year if all goes to plan. Stay tuned for more on this series!

Monthly Poll

I include the poll in this article just to remind everyone that the poll for next month will be slightly different than normal. Instead of a simple poll in the side-bar of the blog, I will instead be doing another tournament style poll on what hero is the community’s favourite. Unlike last year, I will this time do 7 rounds of Swiss matchups, after which the top 16 heroes will move on to the final bracket. These will be randomly seeded and will result in a winner at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. With 100 heroes in the tournament, it is going to be an exciting poll to take part in, so vote here for the first rounds of Swiss matchups. You can also follow me on Twitter or take a look at the FFG forums or the Facebook group for updates on the poll.

Additional articles

This month I had one additional article lined up, which was made with the help of several community members. This article described the best expansions to get for beginning players, and why they should pick these packs up. I have received great feedback on this article and I hope that it will be useful to those just joining the game. As for next month, I got a Patreon requested article on the scoring system of the game that I intend to release during December. Besides that, I will have several end-of-the-year articles ready to go at the end of December, allowing me to share some statistics of the blog in 2019 and what my year with LOTR LCG looked like. Should I have time for more articles, I will try and release them as well, though more topics for articles would be appreciated.

The Future

From now until the end of the year, I have several things still planned. Not only will the new poll take up some time every few days, but I also want to complete some articles I started a long time ago. On top of that, the Haradrim cycle is nearing the halfway mark of being finished, so work will have to be put into the Ered Mithrin cycle once this cycle has finished. Lucky for me, I have now graduated my bachelor studies and can put more time into blogging. This means that articles will come out slightly faster during December, which gives everybody some more reading material during the holidays.

At the start of the new year, I will be looking into getting an actual job, meaning that the blog might start to take a backseat to work related stuff. I really hope that I will have time inbetween things to continue working on articles here and there, but I cannot promise anything at this point. The only promise that I will make is that from December onward, you can start to expect 10 articles per month. This is because the Patreon goal of $75 has been reached, at which I made that promise. These articles may be smaller staple articles here and there, but if my co-authors have spare time, they can put in some work towards that 10 article goal each month. I will at least try and create a backlog of articles during my time off in order to have enough articles to put out at the start of the year.

Thank you for all the support the blog has received in this month, and I hope that we will continue to entertain and inform everyone about this game during the holidays. Have a good one and I will see you all again at the end of December.

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~