Month in Review: February 2021

With exactly 4 weeks since the previous monthly update, the month of February has finished again. It has been a month of community members searching high and low for the Fellowship kits, and I have been one of them. Luckily, I have managed to get my hands on some parts of the Fellowship kit that should arrive next month. I will also do my best to source any other cheap sets that I can find to distribute to local players here, as it sounds like Europe will not be getting a lot of Fellowship kits at all. It has also been a busy month for me collecting more Nightmare packs and working on improving the storage system. I hope to share some updates on this in the near future. But let us take a look at what the blog has been doing in this shortest month of the year, and what we have in store for you all in March and beyond!

[In the thumbnail are the packs of sleeves I made this past month. See my post about them in the LOTR LCG Players facebook group for more details.]

February

FFG and OP have actively been avoiding community efforts to get more Fellowship kits distributed, so it sounds like there are some real anti-consumer things going on there. On top of that, L5R has been completed this month, and no new content is planned for that series either. This just leaves Arkham and Marvel in active development by the studio, and does not bode well for LOTR LCG to ever get out of the hiatus. Despite that, the community is still growing, with more and more new players joining the game. It is getting a little difficult for them to collect certain expansions, so I hope we are getting a wave of reprints again at some point.
In more positive news, the AleP project has been inching closer to completion from what I’ve heard, so we are due for some more articles and perhaps even the release of their first expansion really soon. That will give players more content to play and build decks with. The team has been working very hard on this, and based from my experience with the second quest, the box looks like a really fun challenge. Hopefully I will have more to share at the end of March.

Scenario analysis

I released only one regular scenario analysis this month, which was on the Under the Ash Mountains quest. It’s good to know that I don’t have to worry about that quest anymore now that the article is finished. However, I fear that the blog will slow down its scenario analyses for a while since some of the authors are stepping down (for a while). One just got a second child, one is quitting the game, and another needs some time for themselves. So articles on these topics will slow down a little with them out of the running. We should hopefully finish the cycle before the end of the year though, and I will try and do some more articles myself to make the effort. But I also have a lot of other topics to discuss and work has been getting busy as well.

Nightmare analysis

The Nightmare project has been doing just fine though, as I have released the Treachery of Rhudaur this month and am planning to finish NM Seventh Level in March. More NM articles are also being worked on, so I hope that one day we can finish them all on the blog. My collection of the packs is also coming along nicely, as I am currently in possession of 38/50 with 3 more on the way. I am trying to complete the entire collection, but it has been difficult with reprints now (semi-officially) halted. Dwarrowdelf and Saga packs have been the most difficult to collect, but hopefully I can get lucky some day and avoid having to pay $40 on Ebay for them.

Storage Hub

I mentioned it already, but I have been working a lot on my storage solution. This started when I made my own sleeves using art from the digital card game as cardbacks, and they turned out great! I also bought some new dividers from Tesseract Games and found them to be too tall for my current solution, which stores the encounter cards in Ultimate Guard Flip ‘n Tray 200+ boxes. But after testing with my Arkhive, I found that they fit perfectly in those, so I did what any sane person would do: ~~I cut the bottom part of the dividers and put them in my old boxes.~~ I bought 8 new Arkhives and stored all my cards in the new boxes! Between this, more NM decks, new playmats, new loot items from content creators, and a Fellowship kit on its way, I feel that I will need to update the Storage Solution article into its 4th edition. It will take some time to complete, but hopefully I can manage before the end of next month. I will be able to adopt a few chapters from the previous article, but will need to rewrite a lot as well, so please be patient.
In the meantime, if you want, you can still submit your article to the hub by contacting me. That way we can arrange for your storage solution to be featured on the blog.

Deckbuilding

Roka skipped ahead a few cycles to bring you all the deckbuilding analysis for the Fortress of Nurn. This particularly tricky quest really requires some good deckbuilding before you attempt it. I have still not won against the quest, but hopefully with the help of this article, I can manage in the future. Roka will continue with his analysis of the Angmar Awakened cycle next, starting with another quest that will require deckbuilding skills: The Wastes of Eriador. We will continue to release these articles to you in the coming months.

Middle Earth Tour

A new series by an old author, dragoncymru brings his Middle-Earth Tour project to the blog with a few articles at regular intervals. These articles will cover each cycle and present the players with some potentially beneficial locations that they can include to the encounter deck to make the game a little easier. The first 2 cycles have already been completed, and from what I have heard, progress is coming along nicely for the next few articles. I will continue to publish these articles throughout spring, hopefully you will enjoy!

Additional articles

There were no additional articles this month, but I do have another one planned for early March. This one will look at the different community outlets and the loot that they supply to the community. While it won’t be a complete list of all the things that they have released for you all, it will be an extensive list of all the different community members you can support, and get a little extra something with. I am currently working on this article and hope to release it soon, so you can see what platforms you would like to support in this new year! If you have other topics that you would like me to discuss, please let me know and I will consider it for an upcoming article.

The Future

As I mentioned before, the blog will be short on authors for a while, so expect articles in smaller varieties and quantaties in the near future. Hopefully things will kick back off once new series start, or when people return. I myself am also quite busy these days, as the company I work for has offered me an indefinte contract and is starting to build up my laboratory. Hopefully by the end of next month, we will be producing again, which leads to me being quite busy during the day. But in the evenings and in the weekends I should still have time for some blogging. There is still plenty to write about, and I am still enjoying the collection process of this game as well! We are also still in the third wave of the pandemic here, so there isn’t much I’m doing during the time off from work. So the blog is still a great project for me to work on in my spare time.

2021 Loot

A quick note now about the progress on the loot I have planned for this year. It is coming along nicely, but I will have to start setting up a deadline in order to fully fund the items in time and know what my budget is. In previous years, the deadline was towards the start of the summer, but since the loot this year will be slightly more expensive and I cannot deliver it to people who just subscribed for $3, I am putting the deadline on April 30th. Pledge your support for the blog before that time and until the loot is released (planning is currently towards September/October) in order to ensure that you get your hands on the book. After that deadline, it will not be possible to purchase the book through the blog, as it should be a limited release. I will have some extra copies, but intend to use those to trade for NM packs and to give to others that have helped the blog over the years. I will be repeating the announcement a few times before the deadline, but save the stress and subscribe to at least the Guardian tier ($3) today though this link!

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~