Looking Back: Heirs of Numenor

Heirs of Numenor is where I decided to take a pause in my The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game purchases.

As the game saw less and less playtime at our house (we have quite a few other games we play as well!), the quests started piling up. My wife and I also realized the game was great for us with the middle-level quests, but not really that fun with the extremely tough ones. When Heirs of Numenor came out, the word was that the difficulty level had amped up to an extreme level. And the word also was that the player cards really were nothing to write home about. Signal pause.

Since getting back in the game earlier this year, I've left the Heirs of Numenor quests pretty much in the box. While I was working on a set of decks for my wife and I to beat The Steward's Fear with, I did try a two-handed attempt at Peril in Pelargir. I got destroyed and the set went back into the box. As for the player cards? They saw play in most of my decks from the time I got the expansion, so they've proved a useful edition to me (highlight on Defender of Rammas, who sees play in almost every non-thematic deck I do with "Tactics" having a part of it).

But now that I'm working with a larger card pool and more experience, going against the expansion recently was not as tough as I once feared. Yes, it might take a good number of attempts to beat (see Into Ithilien), but the possible strategies become clear fairly quickly. Then it is just a matter of getting the right draw from the player deck and the encounter deck. While there are some nasty effects (Blocking Wargs, The Power of Mordor), the quests are not characterized by them.

It seems to me the designers were reacting to two things: The relative ease of the game after dwarves had come into their prime and the background role mono-Tactics had taken in most players view. The solution? Really tough quests that had elements appealing to the Tactics sphere (Battle and Siege).

And just as the Mirkwood Cycle fell prey to an army of dwarves, Heirs of Numenor is not as intimidating surrounded by a much richer cardpool than available during its release. This expansion still has bite to it, and will prove quite a challenge to players just starting out, but should be a source of fun for players who have kept up with most releases and enjoy more well-rounded strategies.