Most other prominent TCG’s (Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, Artifact) have the concept of mana as opposed to the Twilight used in the LotR-TCG. On the surface the concept is pretty similar: currency is generated (often by playing cards), and you then spend that currency to play the other cards you want. The devil however is always in the details, and beyond this surface comparison the differences between mana and twilight can be pretty stark.
For starters, the amount of additional mana you have available each turn grows at a very steady rate. In Hearthstone and Artifact, you start the game with 1 mana and gain 1 additional mana each turn, meaning by hand 5 you have 5 mana, and so on. (Magic is similar except you play a Land card each turn to increase this mana, meaning your pool may or may not grow if your hand is clogged, but the concept is the same.)
What this results in is the concept that Hearthstone players call “playing on curve”, or every turn playing cards that efficiently utilize your available mana pool. On turn 1 you have 1 mana, so you ideally play a card costing 1. On turn 5 you have 5 mana, so you want to play a card costing 5 (as those are more powerful, and more likely to win you the game than a 2-, 2-, and 1-cost combo). And so on.
This more structured, abstracted view of card play means that players spend more time analyzing and comparing different cards. If you are always, every game going to try and play a 1-cost card on turn 1, then it makes sense to try and get the best 1-cost you possibly could for your given strategy. Why play 1-cost card X when you could play objectively superior Y?
Some, like in this article here have devised formulas that allow them to calculate what the expected mana cost of each game action should be. For instance, in the table shown on that page they calculate that one point of Health on a card is worth ~0.4 mana. Thus, if a 2-mana blank creature card has stats of 0/8, it can be calculated that this card is “undervalued” for it’s effect– you’re getting 3 mana’s worth of card but paying only 2. Finding such undervalued cards (and avoiding “overvalued” cards) is one way to narrow down which cards you should thus include in your deck.
In this case, the translation to twilight cost in the LotR-TCG is pretty straightforward. However, unlike Hearthstone, the LotR-TCG has an additional set of costs to take into account: that of cultural enforcement. (Hearthstone’s classes, the culture equivalent, are restricted to one per deck and do not permit mixing.) We’ve all seen cards that follow this “to play, spot X” pattern:
To find a similar concept we’ll need to move from Hearthstone to Magic. In Magic, you generate your mana pool by playing down Land cards, which are used on future turns to generate one mana apiece. Each type of land is associated with a different color–famously, either White, Blue, Black, Red, or Green. When paying the mana cost of a card, it must match not only in count but in color:
Here we see a card that requires 3 Red mana, see the upper-right. It’s easy to think that this just translates to a cost of (3) in the LotR-TCG, but remember that each of those Land cards had to be laid down one turn at a time, and thus represent at minimum 3 turns of investment (barring other card effects). In other words, besides the straight mana cost of each card, there’s an expectation for any given card in Magic that you have to have invested a certain percentage of your deck in the appropriate color before you can play the given card.
In LotR-TCG terms, this is almost like a Shadow card saying “Pay (3) and spot your 3 [Red] conditions to play,” besides getting into whatever additional costs are in the card text itself.
However, crucially, Magic also permits cards to have more generic costs, such as this one that costs 1 Red and 2 mana of any other color:
This is like saying “Pay (3), spot 1 of your [Red] conditions, and spot 2 of your other conditions to play.” Yeah, you’re probably going to have this in a Red deck, but if you wanted to splash it in with Black or something, you can do that. The effects of the card are somewhat weaker than they would be if it required a whole-hog 3-[Red] investment, but there’s plenty of room for weaker, less restricted cards that are as a result more flexible to play.
So why bring all this up? Well, there are two concepts that I think these other games show competent grasp of that should be represented more strongly in the design of LotR-TCG cards (especially any potential future virtual cards).
First, equivalence of costs and effects. In the LotR-TCG, cards tend to be paid for with combinations of one of a myriad of things: twilight, cultural spot requirements, and what could be termed “active resources”, which are exertions, tokens, discarding cards from hand, and so on. I don’t know if Decipher had an official reckoning that “one enemy exertion == 2 twilight”, or that “one friendly exertion == 3 twilight discount”, or that “one card discarded from hand == 0.6 enemy wounds”, but even if they didn’t, we should. There’s 3500 cards to analyze, and even if you cordoned things off by block there should still be plenty of data to use for coming to a conclusion of what a standard, canonical cost for a given effect should be.
The hard analysis of the existing game is sorely lacking, which can perhaps be forgiven since the game died down long before this sort of thing was commonplace. But having that data in hand would make balancing troublesome cards significantly more standardized (and would also streamline the creation of virtual cards). I would encourage any of you with python experience and a knack for data science to read the linked article series above more closely and see if you can’t come up with a similar system for this game.
Second, expansion of enforcement costs. Alongside the cost analysis it should be possible to identify just how much an enforcement “purchases” in card effect. In particular, I would like to see the expansion of race-based enforcement costs alongside cultural ones. How much more “expensive” is it to have a card that says “Spot 3 [Moria] minions” over “Spot 3 Orcs”? There is clearly a design difference; one can be used with at least four different Movie block Shadow cultures, while the other cannot. Yet we almost never see race-based spot costs, and rarer still are card-type based spot costs (except for when saying “Spot 5 companions”).
One of the major weaknesses of the game is Decipher’s decision to wall off the majority of spot requirements at the cultural-enforcement level as opposed to using the full card-type/race/culture gamut. It actually makes it harder to introduce new cultures; imagine for a moment if we were to create a new Radagast-based culture. If we did, could we possibly utilize any of the existing Gandalf-culture cards as a splash to interact with them…? Hardly! There are exactly 13 separate cards out of the entire Free-Peoples side that use language that says “Spot a Wizard” etc instead of “Spot a [Gandalf] Wizard”. Only 1 of those is from before set 9.
Likewise, if I wanted to introduce a new Dunedain culture, it would be hamstrung by the existence of only a handful of existing cards that work with Men as opposed to strictly-enforced [Gondor] and [Rohan] cards. There are only 5 possessions that can be borne by Free Peoples Men without any other cultural enforcement, for example.
Some would say “well look, that’s a lot of baggage that you avoid”, but I would say “do I really need to make [Dunedain]-specific armor and swords and horses and bows”? There really ought to be a place for weakly-enforced cards that spot off Race or Card Type, which, yes, should be weak. If the [Dunedain] culture could step in and be able to take advantage of a small trove of cards that spot Men, or spot Companions, or whatnot, then it would be less of an investment to create that culture! Instead, the existing lack of diverse spot requirements means that every new culture must bring its own possessions, event pumps, and other such basic things that ideally ought to be served by commonplace, weak, weakly enforced workhorse cards that, unfortunately, do not exist. If every new culture must have 50 new cards in it to feel fleshed out, then very few cultures will ever be made.
This, I think, is the core of why Decipher eventually chose to throw the Shadow cultures into a blender in the post-Shadows world. They wanted the flexibility to just introduce a new keyword-enforced subculture of generic race-culture cards, which would be able to fall back on all the generic pumps, weapons, and conditions that existed at the culture level. It was a good goal, but the wrong execution.
You didn’t have flinch so bad from Flaming Brand, you guys! You learned the wrong lesson: that card was overpowered in effect, but the enforcement cost could have been perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately Decipher was burned (womp womp) and the knee-jerk from that mistake killed an entire swath of game design space that was never fully recovered.
The White Council 