Ok, it’s not actual loot like I did in previous years, where everyone who helped out with the blog in the past 12 months received a gift from me, but I had to put this article in the same series, so the title stuck.
I have been working hard since the summer of 2024 to prepare a new book for you all. This followed after my fourth Poll-antir results earlier that year, in which I asked what sort of book people would like to see. The results were overwhelming: More than half of you wanted something on traits and deckbuilding.
That book has been in the works ever since, and as of the release of this article, it has been published and is available for purchase. This article walks you through the process behind the book, and the decisions I made along the way. There will also be links to the publisher’s site, where you will get the best value for the book, and a form to fill out in case you want a PDF version of the book.
My thanks go out to everyone who helped with creating this book, even if it took a fair bit longer than I would have liked. I’m still incredibly happy with the end result and hope that everyone gets to enjoy this new book ahead of their game nights and conventions.
The Concept
So I had a demand from the community for something Traits/Deckbuilding based. Luckily, I did have a series on the blog back in the day covering each trait in the game with their strengths, weaknesses, and interactions with other traits. So I used that as a baseline for the book. It would be separate articles on each trait, giving a summary of some of the best aspects of the trait, and then ending on a couple of decklists that people can use as examples. From there, players can put their own deckbuilding skills at work to figure out a deck of their own that might be inspired by some of these decks.
The problem was that not every trait was as well developed, and that some of the articles were pretty outdated. On top of that, covering just the traits wouldn’t be enough to fill a book with, so I had to look at the different mechanics the developers introduced to expand the book a bit more. This ended up being the middle section of the book, with mechanics like Doomed, Secrecy, Side-quests, and mono-sphere decks. Again, I had some of these articles written already, but they had gotten serious buffs with the Vengeance of Mordor cycle that was released after initial publication. So updates for those articles were also in order.
I now had a fair chunk of text to process into a book, but still felt that it was missing something. At the time, the end of the game had just been announced, and we were in the middle of AlePs development of their second cycle. I decided that this fan-made expansion to the game did improve certain traits and mechanics significantly, so their input would also be included in a separate section of the book. I would keep it separate from the “official” content to have a split between what certain traits were before and after the attention by AleP. Traits like Beorning and Eagle were expanded upon a lot.
As AleP had just completed releasing their second Deluxe expansion, I included the entire card pool up to that point in the book. This means that the new Minstrel trait got added. However, as the process of the book took a lot longer than anticipated, AleP also released new Adventure Packs for their second cycle. The traits expanded upon in these packs (Istari, Easterling, Wose, Isengard, etc) have not been included in the book. This was mostly because I did not have enough experience with these traits to write about them, and there weren’t a lot of decklists available when writing. I had to cut it off at some point, so I decided upon including the Deluxe, and leaving the rest of the APs for another time. Perhaps as an appendix for a future version with more fan-made content included.
As this book covers deckbuilding, newer players might not be too familiar with the rules for deckbuilding and can use a hand with general tips to improve their decks. To help with this, I made an article on the blog that would later be used in the book to help improve the cohesion of different deck ideas that people may have. This would be the final chapter of the book and hopefully leave readers motivated to work on their own decks!
The Process
Now that all the content had been decided upon, it was time to get things turned into a book! The first step was to get everything into a single document and make sure that each trait had the same sub-chapters for consistency. Luckily, I could copy a lot for the major traits from the blog. But I still had to rewrite a bunch of text from it to update it for releases since the last publication. This also impacted the “Best packs to buy” section, as for some traits, you will be better off getting the pre-made Starter decks now that it is becoming more difficult to get the original products from stores or even second-hand.
Between all this text editing, I also reached out to the artist who did the commissioned piece for the Field Guide cover. I have detailed the full process behind that in a separate article here. This includes drafts and the eventual road to final products and prototypes of the book.
The editing of the text was meanwhile in full swing and I even took to writing some brand-new sections on the AleP traits and whatever official traits and mechanics I had never written on. This took a few months to do, but by April 2025 I was ready with the first draft of the text. That was 169 pages long and well over 68.000 words. And with English not being my native language, you can bet good money on it that there were some mistakes in there. Rather than having AI go through the text and becoming smart enough to build their own decks, I enlisted the help of a handful of community members who review various sections of the blog to fix grammar, correct mistakes, and improve the flow of some sentences. This review took another 2 months while I was also finishing up the artwork for the blog.
With the text eventually done, I was left with a big document of text, which would read horribly if I were to just paste it into a book format. Dozens of pages of just bare text without and lay-out would not be a good look. So I enlisted Thaurdir (the community member, not the wraith) to work on the layout again. He had done the layout for the Field Guide as well which was received very positively back when that released. THis part of the process took the longest by far. I was not able to help much, except for creating a lot of QR-codes to the final decklists of each chapter. Almost a year later, we were finally ready to bring the edited text to the book format, now that icons for each sphere and attribute (willpower/attack/defence) had been added, and some final tweaks were made to the text itself. After pasting in the pages into the book-making software, I ordered a prototype in the middle of August 2026 to see if pages would line up properly. They did, so that allowed me to make some final adjustments and release the final product to the world!
One final hurdle was that some of the text was turning out to be a bit vague in the prototype. Thanks to Thaurdir, we were able to find an alternative method of getting the PDF file converted to book-form. This did take another week to get right, and required an additional round of prototypes, but that was better than having text that’s making you wonder if you should start getting glasses. This second round of prototyping also allowed me to test the paperback version of the book. While it won’t be as sturdy as the hardcover, it is a bit cheaper, allowing more players to get a copy of the book for themselves.
The Final Product
The final books turned out to be 216 pages long, with only 2 pages needing to be filled with something other than the text of the new book. This is because each book needs to have a page count divisible by 12. So I added the Round Sequence chart from the very first book to fill the pages.
You can also get a 15-page sneak peak at the book’s contents via the ordering link below.
How do I get one?
There are several ways to get a copy for yourself. As mentioned, there is a hardcover and a paperback version available. The paperback is slightly cheaper and easier to bring with you on the go. The hardcover is a little sturdier and lies flat when closed. The best place to get the books is via the site of the publisher, which should save you on third-party costs. The previous book has been picked up by bots and published on sites like Ebay and Amazon at higher prices, so I strongly suggest getting it via the links below
- Hardcover version (€ 30) : https://www.blurb.com/b/12981586-tools-of-the-trait-hardcover
- Paperback version (€ 22.50) : https://www.blurb.com/b/12981599-tools-of-the-trait-paperback
Do note that you should set your location to the right country/region for the site to save on shipping. It’s not the cheapest shipping, but I have not had a complaint so far with the 1000+ copies of the Field Guide that were shipped the same way. The site also periodically has promo-codes that might apply to the books, so you can save some money that way.
Other books you can get at the same time to save on shipping include:
- The previous book: A Field Guide to LOTR LCG, focusing on each scenario in the game: https://www.blurb.com/b/11570234-a-field-guide-to-lotr-lcg
- A hard-cover version of the Playthrough Notebook: https://www.blurb.com/b/11279551-votp-hardcover-playthrough-notebook
- A noteblock with this book’s cover art on it: https://www.blurb.com/b/12490935-vision-of-the-palantir-noteblock
- A paperback version of the Playthrough Notebook: https://www.blurb.com/b/11039694-vision-of-the-palantir-loot-2021
If you have been a Patreon supporter since the start of this journey (cut-off date on September 2024 when initial design began), then you can message me via Patreon to get your shipping refunded by me. I can’t afford to give everyone a free book after I scaled down the Patreon a while back, but I want to lower the bar to entry to the book as much as possible. As a supporter of the blog, you also get access to the full-resolution version of the cover art, and access to the PDF version of both this book and the Field Guide.
For those of you who want the PDF version of this book to have digitally or print for yourself, there is a form below that you can fill out. I do ask that you consider donating to the blog to support efforts like this, as it has taken a lot of effort to get this completed. Commissioning artwork and publishing a book isn’t cheap, so if you want to ensure we can continue to do this, feel free to donate what you want. I understand that not everyone has the funds for additional game items like this, so I will be sharing the PDF regardless of donations, so don’t feel left out. Keep an eye on your spam filter as well after having filled out the form. I do reply to each form, but it might get lost in your inbox.
That about covers it. I hope you are all eager to get your hands on this book. Thank you to everyone who helped out with feedback, proofreading, or inspiring me to write this in the first place. It’s amazing what a little poll 2.5 years ago can do!
Will I do more books in the future? Well, that depends. I want to wait a while and focus on doing more of the articles on the blog. I know that there is some demand for a Nightmare Field Guide, but I am far off from completing all the NM analyses. Only once those are done, can I look into making such a book. I just don’t know if it will be worth the effort, as the audience for something like that might not be worth the time investment. We’ll figure something out. Otherwise, if you have suggestions for more books, let me know!
Vision Of The Palantir 