Cards From the Cutting Room Floor: Part 1
The Free Peoples of Middle-earth

By Joe Alread
Decipher Game Designer

Everybody has a card idea. Everyone thinks to themselves, "Wow, I really wish I could make a card that could do X..." But after that one cool idea you have, what comes next? What do you do for the other 100+ cards that you would have to make for a set?

That is the dilemma we faced with Realms of the Elf-lords. We all had a couple of cool ideas, but that wasn't going to be enough to fill a set. We needed more. Fast forward to today, where the set looks just perfect, as if we knew right from the start what we wanted to do with it.

How did we get from day one in development to today? A lot of things came and went during our time with Realms, and that's what I'll be talking about here.

          "Elves are going to be a challenge" -Game Designer Mike Reynolds

He wasn't kidding. We needed to come up with a new theme for the Elves since the themes that it currently has have kind of been "capped". We couldn't make more cards like the Mirror of Galadriel or Far-seeing Eyes, and we certainly couldn't go ahead and open up more archery to them. Our first efforts didn't amount to much, a couple of characters downloaded weapons, a few more Elven archers, one who was even able to wound Nazgûl.

The concept I had in my head was of a defensive nature, but how could we take that concept and create a whole new theme out of it? Chuck Kallenbach, who was in charge of the Elven design on this set, thought out the defensive theory and began to experiment with regroup actions. Once you moved, the idea was that the Elves would be able to protect you and help you get through that second move in a turn. From removing pool to bouncing minions back to an owner's hand – while these mechanics can be extremely powerful during other phases, the regroup phase seemed to be a good time for these kinds of events to take place. It has given birth to a whole new theme for the Elves, something they will probably be a master of for a long time to come.

The (Complex and Confusing) Kingdom of Gondor

Once again, much like the Elves the Gondor culture has "capped" many of its old mechanics. How many more cards could we make that exhausted minions, or manipulated rangers? We had to come up with something new and fresh, but it still had to be simple enough for our casual players to understand it.

Since I was the designer in charge of the Gondor culture, I decided to start off rather large. I had this idea of Gondor trying to "redeem" itself. In other words, everything they did put some kind of burden on them. Their main goal was to be able to take powerful actions, but be able to handle that burden (or responsibility) that was involved with taking those actions. In many ways, they were trying to redeem their race.

One of the very early drafts of this concept came in the form of topdeck manipulation. We had a condition that said every time your Gondor companion won a skirmish, you could place a Gondor card from your discard pile on top of your draw deck. Then with this condition as a lynchpin, there was a variety of cards that discarded the top two or three cards from your draw deck, and based on how many Gondor cards you discarded you'd receive some kind of benefit.

Confused yet? Obviously the concept had a variety of problems. Why would you ever want to put Gondor cards on top of your deck at the end of a turn? Playtesters would draw Gondor cards into their hand when they needed Shadow cards for their next turn. After this we moved onto other concepts such as discarding cards to even counting tokens on cards. None of it worked all that well. What we eventually had to come down to was exerting and healing. While it's something we've done before I think the feeling of Gondor exerting and then trying to heal has a bit of a cool story flavor to it.

The Main Players

It can be difficult to create new main characters that balance well with their older versions. Imagine: Legolas being able to discard minions with lesser strength than him during the maneuver phase, Aragorn being Defender +1 right on his card, or Arwen getting strength +1 for each Elven ally you could spot! It was all here, and obviously, it all went straight into the trash. One of the early versions of Saruman actually had the same game text that he has right now: he could exert to assign an Isengard minion to a companion. Except that early on in the process that companion couldn't exert to prevent that assignment like you can today. Play a few games without the prevent text and you'll see why we needed to include that on his card.

To finish off, I'd like to list off the top ten cut concepts that used to be in Realms of the Elf-lords. These concepts weren't good ideas for one reason or another and you probably won't have to think too hard to figure out why. You might ask yourself, "Why did you even test this? I read it and I can already tell it wasn't worth testing!" But once again, if you have this one idea in front of you along with hundreds of others in the back of your head, things can get confusing...

10. You Have My Bow - Plays on Frodo. He is strength +3 while you can spot Legolas bearing a weapon.
9. You Have My Sword - Plays on Frodo. He is strength +3 while you can spot Aragorn bearing a weapon.
8. And My Axe - Plays on Frodo. He is strength +3 while you can spot Gimli bearing a weapon.
7. Narya - Skirmish: Exert Gandalf to skip your next regroup phase.
6. Evenstar - Gave Aragorn +1 vitality.
5. Depart Silently - Cancel a skirmish involving a Hobbit at any site.
4. Deep In Thought - Spot 4 twilight tokens to discard all Shadow conditions.
3. Galaldriel - Regroup: Exert Galadriel to discard a card at random from an opponent's hand.
2. Arwen - Skirmish: Exert two Elven allies to wound a minion Arwen is skirmishing.
1. Citadel of Minas Tirith - Each time a Gondor companion wins a skirmish, you may take a Gondor card from your discard pile and take it into hand.

One of the crazy ideas above actually made it into the set. In the 11th hour we came to the conclusion that it was ok to go. I'll let you all ponder which one until part 2 where I'll discuss the Shadow portion of Realms design, and sites (what would people think if we made a new site 5?)

May 10, 2002