Distraction: Middle-earth CCG

My little animal brain is easily distracted by shiny things. And when something gets my attention, I often disappear into it and lose all sense of time. So, for me, this has been, "I'll get back to my LotR LCG games in just a bit here after I'm done enjoying this other thing for a little." When it's really been months. I figured, while still focused on other things, I would write about a few of the more relevant distractions.

Recently, I've been feeling a bit nostalgic for the Middle-earth collectible card game put out by Iron Crown Enterprises back in the mid-nineties. This would have been right after or right during my reading of The Lord of the Rings for the first time. While the game had a very short lifetime ('95-'98), it turns out the game still has a worldwide following with regular events. 

Middle-earth: The Wizards was the first release of the game. In it, you play as one of the five wizards with a goal of gathering enough influence to convince the free council that you have the best plan for defeating Sauron. Alternately, you can bring The One Ring to the Cracks of Doom and destroy if (if you're lucky enough to pull the cards needed for that). 

"Play me," it whispers

I lurked around the international Facebook group until I saw a collection of around a thousand Limited (1st edition) cards and jumped on it. A few days later, someone in my state was selling a well-priced Unlimited sealed starter deck and I snagged that up. That just showed up in the mail and I figured I would catalogue the opening.

Two packs for the price of one (box)

Upon opening a MECCG starter box, you receive two wrapped packs. The first, smaller one is one of five seeded packs that gives you some essentials. We'll talk about that in a bit. The second pack has your uncommons, rares, rules booklet, and commons. A feature of this game is that you can play a full game with just a starter deck using the basic set of rules (Starter vs Standard). The booklet also comes with instructions for a solo mode as well as official optional rules you and your opponent can decide to include. I'm pretty sure I didn't realize that at all as a kid and, instead of playing a ton of solo games, I had an ever-growing collection that was looked at often but only actually played with once or twice.

To make an "out of the box" game possible,  there are five seeded pack options you can open in a starter deck. These contain two wizards, the right amount of heroes to play, essential locations and a bit of synergy to give your deck some direction. The seeded cards in these packs are not available in booster packs or the rest of the starter deck, so you had to "collect them all" for a full card pool back in the day and there was no way to tell which pack was in a given starter. This was fixed for the next (and only other) large release, where an open window in the back of the box showed you which of the seeded packs you were getting. 

The Saruman / Alatar seeded pack

The box of limited cards I received had the cards necessary to re-assemble two of the seeded packs. I was hoping that the unlimited starter would have one of the other three options and it did! I used some opening videos to help me assemble two starter-like pools out of the limited cards (building them as 1:1 as I could off the video, then making appropriate swaps for cards I did not have). This gives me three starter decks to experiment and learn with. My hope is to not go as crazy with this game as I have with others. In fact, I may end up proxying the complete set and just making irregular purchases over the years to swap out for my proxies. The game has retained a lot of value on the secondary market and it's not cheap to collect.

Bears and Dwarves and Bards, oh my!

Above is a sample of the synergy and potential that can be found in a seeded pack. Beorn can help recruit Beorings, who need to be recruited at Beorn's House. All three are paired together here. The same goes for Gimli recruiting Dwarves of the Iron Hills at the Iron Hill Dwarf-hold. This deck now has two objectives it can aim for right off the bat. Then there's Bard the Bowman. He can help recruit the Men of Northern Rhovanion, who are recruited at Lake-Town. But neither the men or the town are included here. Bard can still be used as a hero and now you have some specific cards to keep an eye out for.

When you open the randomized pack, you get nine uncommons and three rares. The mixture of resource (bronze), hazard (grey), site (white), and hero cards (blue) are not set in this section. But after the rulebooklet, you have the common section that alternates between bronze and grey cards (with a couple of sites). Decks should have an equal mixture of resource and hazard cards and a sealed deck provides you with a roughly correct mix (you'll have a few more resources, but you also set two aside out of the deck). 

This pack happened to be a good example of the secondary market value still present. My final rare was Assassin, which still commands around $45ish on the 'bay. It not only features beautiful Angus McBride art, but it's a powerful card to play against your opponent and can be played in areas that are often relatively "safe" for them. I'll explain a bit more of how that works in another post.

So don't throw away the box of MECCG sitting in the back of your closet. 

Alright, next post will be me going through re-learning the ropes of a solo game. This game is notoriously difficult and full of decision points. While the starter rules help with this, the difficulty of those is equal to the complexity of most regular game rules. 

See ya on the journey!