Month in Review: February 2023

Another month has passed, and it really feels like 2023 is going by at record speed. Maybe that is because this is a relatively short month. Also, not a ton happened, making the month fly by quickly. The biggest development this month was the Lure of Middle Earth convention in Germany, which has been the highlight of my month personally. It was great to interact physically with the community and play some games with my actual cards. But a bunch more happened this month on the blog that is worth discussing.

February

As I said, no real news here out of FFG or AleP. We are due for an announcement soon, since it has been several months now without new content releasing. This has pushed a lot of new players to search out the older packs. But as these are no longer being reprinted, the market is quickly inflating prices for old APs and Deluxes. We did get a reprint from Gamezenter for NM and POD packs, so at least those won’t go for scalper’s prices any time soon. Let’s hope for some teaser articles in March for hopefully a Q2 release of the next repackaged cycle or Saga expansion.

Scenario analysis

Nothing new to state here, I will be deleting this segment from the reviews until a new article is released. This can be either from the Oaths of the Rohirrim cycle, PODs, or a Saga review.

Nightmare analyses

We did get some major updates in this segment though. I wrote two articles on the Nightmare Blood of Gondor and Morgul Vale scenarios. Those certainly aren’t the easiest quests out there in Nightmare mode, but I managed to get through them eventually. I really hope that the guides help players to beat those quests, though it might take you a lot of attempts. I will personally go to the Angmar Awakened cycle to put in some effort to fill in the gaps of the NM quests. The Ringmaker cycle will be done in its entirety by another author, who was up for a challenge. So you might see some articles that are no longer in progression order, but I hope to make some big steps towards full NM coverage on the blog this year!

Traits/Staples

I am putting contracts under this segment as well, since the setup of these articles are roughly the same. I went ahead and made an article on the latest AleP contract: At the End of All Things. There is still one AleP contract to cover, but I haven’t played around with it yet. I have also looked at my Staples segment again, and I feel that there are things there that could be added in future articles. So look forward to those!

Additional articles

At the time of writing this article, I am not sure if the Lure article has already been published, but if not, I will share my thoughts and experiences with the convention in a separate article. This will help people get a better understanding of how it feels to go to that convention and what you can expect. This was my first time there as well, so hopefully this article inspires you to attend next year. As for other additional articles, I am working on my loot article as well. But since that project has not yet concluded, I am not going to be releasing the article yet. I hope to be able to share it with everyone in March.

The Future

This past month has been rather busy for me, but luckily the trends are going upwards when it comes to my situation. I am feeling more confident in being able to do things I could do before, and blood results have indicated that no tumors are regrowing. So let’s keep this positivity going in the coming months! That will be made easier now that the worst of the winter is behind us, and that the days grow longer. This month’s highlight was for sure the Lure of Middle Earth convention, where I got to hang out with several members of the community in person again.

It was a shame I didn’t have the loot ready for Lure of Middle Earth, as it would have been the perfect place to hand it out, but we are nearly done with it all. I just need the pages to be uploaded into the book-writing software and figure out the order of things. Once that is done, I am confident that the book can be printed this month and be shipped to everyone before April. A good thing too, since I am starting to work more and more. So that leaves less time each day to work on blog related projects like this.

March will likely be a bit more quiet for the blog, as I put some more time into the loot and working on myself. So don’t expect too many articles, though some storage solutions or guest articles can always pop up out of nowhere. I hope you are all doing ok, and are looking forward to Spring like me!

~Aa’menealla nauva calen ar-malta~