Cards From the Cutting Room Floor: Part 2
The Shadow Cultures 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.

"Permanents that draw cards are bad" – Remarks from a playtester's comments sheet.

With hundreds of cards floating around ones head it's sometimes difficult to pick up on something that's horribly broken. A playtester usually needs to scream in our ear to get our attention on these kinds of issues. Bless their souls.

In coming up with different mechanics the Isengard Orcs could perform during the regroup phase, we went to the edge. Wound a companion, kill a companion, discard all possessions, discard all conditions, and on and on. After all, if you were going to go to all this effort to get this Orc to survive until the regroup phase, he had to be worth it, right?!

A couple damage +1 weapons sent these Orcs straight to the cleaners. They didn't have the strength to stand up to those kinds of weapons, and they'd usually end up exhausted after the assault as well. The first solution to this was giving the Orcs a new keyword (designer Tom Lischke first thought the keyword could be thrall, I didn't like it though...) that would make the Orcs immune to damage bonuses. It sounded good enough to work, but the concept never made it to the cards. Instead Trapped and Alone was born, and it will keep the Isengard Orcs alive long enough to do some major damage to the fellowship.

But thrall was only one of many edgy concepts that got cut during the final days of Realms design. Direct damage ran amuck until the playtesters screamed for mercy: Lurtz had a condition that gave him abilities comparable to Greenleaf, and the Cave Troll had an event that allowed to 'exert to hurt'. We also had Shadow permanents that drew cards: a Moria condition that stated each time you played a Moria Orc, you could remove 2 pool to draw a card. We even had an Isengard condition that said each time you play a weapon on an Isengard Orc you could draw a card. Like I said, we really do love our playtesters.

There were two Sauron Orcs in the set who discarded during the regroup phase to wound a companion. These guys were unbelievable in conjunction with the Isengard Orcs, and in the end instead of just discarding them to cause a wound they had to exert. They still work really well together, just not too well...

To close out, I'd like to share one last concept that got cut. We weren't certain until late in the process if we needed another site 5 or not. While The Balrog is a good thing, we weren't sure if people would get bored with going across the bridge in FoTR tournaments for years and years to come. The Dimrill Gate, a new site 5, was going to make an opponent move again that turn, if possible. That card may still turn up, someday, you just never know. Until then, have fun playing what actually did make it into the set, and be thankful that we never made those permanents that draw cards.

June 17, 2002