Month in review: November 2020

Hang in there, 2020 is nearly over. I know the year has been rough for many of you, myself included, but brighter days are on the horizon. And that includes the game! Not only did a large wave of reprints hit stores around the world this month, but we also got our first sneak peaks at what the new community project from A long-extended Party will offer the community. This large project will start to share more information of their upcoming expansion for LOTR LCG in the coming weeks, including an article on Vision of the Palantir, so that is something to look out for! With all that said, let’s look at the previous month before looking at what we will be doing in the future.

November

This month has been pretty quiet from FFG concerning the game. A few packs were put on sale in their store, but with no further news expected until Dreadnaught drops, we will probably be looking towards the community for news in the future. We did get a nice run of reprints of some expansions, including several saga expansions that people have been looking for. While this is wonderful for the people who are relatively new to the game, I didn’t really get too excited for it. We have been hearing from several stores that there are no NM reprints coming any time soon, which means that I will have to continue to search for those packs where I can. Luckily, I did find a few missing packs over the past few weeks, including the Khazad-Dum NM pack, with which I am very happy. Hopefully the other NM hunters out there will have the same luck going forward. But with reprint news covered, we can look at what the blog has been doing the past month and what the plans are until the end of the year.

Scenario analyses

The scenario analyses are moving forward, with this month featuring both the renewed version of the Journey Along the Anduin article, and a brand-new article covering the Temple of Doom scenario from the latest cycle. This completed the A Shadow in the East Deluxe box, so we will be moving on to the cycle. We probably won’t be doing them in order, but we do hope to complete the cycle in a few months. The renewed articles will hopefully receive another update towards the end of the year with a new version of Escape from Dol Guldur that contains a more expanded list of details, and is updated to include any combos with the more recent cards. I will be focusing on completing the Vengeance of Mordor cycle afterwards, and we will fill in any gaps in the Saga and POD scenarios in the meantime.

We are also making plans to cover the scenarios from AleP in the future on this blog, but will focus on official content for a while. More info on this to follow.

Nightmare analyses

While I received some more Nightmare packs this month, I didn’t release a new article on a Nightmare quest this month. However, once I feel that I have caught up with the normal version of quests, I will be looking to start covering some more Nightmare quests that I own. In the meantime, I think we will be releasing NM A Storm on Cobas Haven in the coming month, so the series will at least get an update soon. More updates will follow next year, as we approach the end of covering all the regular quests.

Deckbuilding

The deckbuilding series has also received an update this month, as Roka has returned after a brief hiatus. He will be looking to continue his deckbuilding series into the Angmar Awakened cycle, and has published his take on the Weather Hills in a recent article. You will be getting more updates on this in the coming months!

Storage Hub

The hub received a new article this month, covering a binder-focused solution that included a lot of alt art storage as well. With the holidays coming up, I expect some of you will be upgrading your storage solutions soon, so if you have a beautiful solution to storing the game and its components, be sure to let me know!

Additional articles

During November, we released two articles that don’t really fall under any of the other categories. The first was the article covering what quests suit a three-player game best. This mini-series has been pretty popular, and will be completed once RedSpiderr finishes the four-player version. This will probably be completed soon, so keep an eye out for that article. I also published a nice guide to the different challenges that you can include in the game. This should help to keep the more veteran players entertained during the hiatus.

For December, I have a few ideas for some additional articles. I will be releasing an article on the AleP project early in the month, but also have some ideas for an article covering the best artists that made artwork for the game. I do still need some more community input for this, as art is pretty subjective, so any input that I can get on this, is most welcome. You can fill in the poll using this link here: https://forms.gle/LRCj4w17dqFt66S58. I will also be looking to do a year review as always, in which I cover my year in terms of LOTR LCG stats. Look for this article towards the very end of the month.

The Future

I have to say that it feels good that this year is nearly at an end. It has been a rough year for everyone and I hope that 2021 won’t be any worse. For the near future, the blog has more than enough content planned out to keep you all entertained for some time. And with projects popping up in the community that will keep the game alive for some time, we will be having more than enough content to explore in the future!

I personally won’t have too much time for article writing in the future though. My work has decided to move their office and production facility, so I am quite busy with making sure that it all goes smoothly. The good thing is that it does move closer to my house, but it will take a few months before everything is ready. This means that I have less time to work on the blog, but I should at least have enough time to make sure that all articles from my co-authors get released in time. And with the holidays coming up, I should have some more time off to work on the final articles of this year. The blog isn’t going to disappear and will continue to push out content, just not at the pace that I have been keeping before the pandemic started. I trust you all understand and that the support keeps going strong into the new year!

Another thing before I end the article, I have been asked by Dave from CardTalk to promote a project of his. CardTalk usually does something special in the month of February, and this year they want to talk about superlatives (best, worst, etc). For this, they need community input as well, so please check out this link to fill in the poll: https://bit.ly/CardTalkFebruary. There will be several prizes that can be won, so if you are looking to win some items related to the game, be sure to fill it in!

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~