DECIPHER.com > The Lord of the Rings > Expansions > Siege of Gondor

Rangers in the Bushes

by Geoffrey Snider
Game Developer, TCG Studio

"Oh my god! That would be sooo cool! You could play companions during other phases than the Fellowship phase. Rangers jump out of the bushes and ambush you!" These were all the obvious things going through my head when I came up with a cool idea way back in June of 2002. We were in the middle of testing The Two Towers expansion and having problems deciding what the rare Faramir's text would be. For a couple days it looked something like this:

•Faramir, Rare
Gondor
Companion • Man
Twilight Cost: 3
Strength: 7
Vitality: 3
Signet: Frodo
Text:
Ring-bound. Ranger.
Maneuver: Exert Faramir to play a Ring-bound [Gondor] Man.

Kinda crazy, right? I just had this image of these guys in cloaks jumping out of the bushes. It kinda reminded me of the time I got all my candy stolen by some older kids on Halloween. Anyhow, it was just a neat image that got me all worked up because we didn't have any cards that did stuff like this. Of course the card is a problem, and that's why it was never made. At the time, we hadn't created the X-list, or even conceived of it. Basically, we had four rangers and Frodo (all with No Stranger to the Shadows or Bill the Pony) walking to site nine, only to be miraculously rescued by three new rangers. Bad stuff. The idea was shelved, but I thought about it every once in a while... and about those Sweet Tarts and Snickers bars that I never got to eat.

Thankfully, the Rohan culture decided to revisit this long-lost theme during Battle of Helm's Deep. Rohan's cultural strength is in its possessions, and since you can only do so much with those possessions (wound minions, exert minions, heal companions, etc.) they eventually got to play those possessions at new and interesting times during the turn. Return of the King kept a little bit of Rohan's previous philosophy, incorporating Merry, Swordthain and Éowyn's Sword, Dernhelm's Blade into the culture. That stuff is such a blast to play with because it has a really great 'surprise element' to it. It does something totally unexpected, and, in my opinion, LotR:TCG needs just a bit more of a surprise factor in its game play.

The first card from Siege of Gondor to deal with out-of-phase possession playing was Charged Headlong. Its obvious strength is its ability to re-use some of Rohan's cooler possession-based abilities... like Rohirrim Helm, Rohirrim Bow, etc. It pretty much lets you do, with an event, what you could only previously do by returning a companion to your hand. Its surprise factor is pretty high because you just never know what kind of junk the Rohan fellowship may pull from the discard pile! My favorite way to use it was to bring back Rohirrim Helm several times over. If Éomer couldn't beat the two minions he was skirmishing (thanks to good 'ol Firefoot), he would simply cancel his skirmish... and then do it again... and again. Very cool, very fun, and very 'control player' oriented.

At the beginning of SoG's development, it was decided that there would be some larger companions for the 'men' cultures (Rohan and Gondor), and the Rohirrim Army was one of them. This card took a long time to cook. When we started work on it, it looked something like this:

•Rohirrim Army, Subtitle
Rohan
Companion • Man
Twilight Cost: 4
Strength: 10
Vitality: 3
Signet: Denethor
Text:
To play, spot 3 [Rohan] companions.
At the start of each skirmish involving Rohirrim Army, exert each minion it is skirmishing once for each uncontrolled plains site you spot.

Craziness. I remember looking at this and thinking "Just give it another horse... why not?" (note the sarcasm). This companion had a maniacal strength of thirteen when fully equipped with all sorts of toys, and it possessed the ability to negate any minion's exertion-based game text. Wow. After brainstorming a few ideas about what might be a good direction in which to take the army, we settled on Rohan's ability to play permanents out-of-phase. Voila:

Its text is a bit of a twist on Dernhelm's Blade; play it out of phase to get a bonus. Very neat. Very fun, and the card immediately has a certain powered-up feel to it that makes you want to play it.

Théoden, on the other hand, was a bit bland. Did we need another companion that had the ability to ditch cards from hand for a strength bonus? Please. Tom hit the second version dead-on with his 'companions dying for bonuses' cards. After a bit of tweaking (Théoden could play any companion from your deck... not just a Rohan companion), he hit his final version in a relatively short amount of time.

March 2, 2004