Having played a lot of Under the Ash Mountains recently has pushed me to appreciate the cards in this game that allow you to recur some cards from your discard pile. This allows you to last longer against quests like Under the Ash Mountains and Deadmen's Dike, where you will automatically lose if your deck … Continue reading Staples: Recursion →

It has been a while since I have done one of these staple articles, but with Ered Mithrin coming to an end, and with me not wanting to do another Nightmare article just yet, I thought it was time to revive this segment of the blog. For today, I chose the Mustering topic, which deals … Continue reading Staples: Mustering →

Location control is a mechanic in the game that is very close to my heart. I will gladly ditch the Tactics sphere in order to play more cards that interact with locations. But between all of the various cards that swap active locations, discard locations, and place progress, some are stronger than others. In this … Continue reading Staples: Location control →

Usually, players tend to destroy enemies by having more attack strength than the enemy has combined defence and hitpoints. However, there is also another way to do damage, one that bypasses the defence value of the enemy. This Direct Damage strategy is a popular archetype for quests where enemies have only a few points of … Continue reading Staples: Direct Damage →

The game has a couple of aspects that make every game you play unique. One of these is the random order of cards in the encounter deck, making for different staging steps each time. Another one is that of shadow cards. These are dealt to enemies and can either do nothing or end up causing … Continue reading Staples: Shadow card manipulation →

In this game, your characters are expected to get a couple of wounds on them as the scenario progresses. In order to prevent your characters from dying to these wounds, you can heal them. From the early days of the Core Set, there have been many cards that allow players to discard damage tokens on … Continue reading Staples: Healing →

While scrying the encounter deck can be very useful information for players, scrying your own deck is also helpful. Knowing what cards will be drawn in the next resource phase can allow you to stack the deck in your favour. Searching your entire deck for the crucial 1 off card is also very important to … Continue reading Staples: Scrying (Player deck) →

Most characters have to exhaust in order to quest, defend, attack or trigger abilities. On top of this, some encounter cards and some quests also have you exhaust a number of characters to fulfil certain conditions. This leaves the character unusable until the next refresh phase (if you are lucky). In order to get around … Continue reading Staples: Readying →

During their adventures in the lands of Middle Earth the heroes of The Lord of the Rings Living Card Game can get caught in a web, get sacked, have to endure freezing cold, attract local trouble, have to deal with old hatreds, be in need of rest, get possessed, catch terrible fevers or fall into … Continue reading Staples: Condition Removal →