The 2023 World Championship is only a few months away–Format Championships will run in August, the Walk-on Qualifiers will run in September, and in October we will see the best of the best go head to head for the right to be called Champion.
Before then, there are some errata we would like to deploy to address some of the issues in the current meta. There are represented here some trends that have existed in Movie for as long as it’s been a format, and some other trends which have more recently cropped up in PC-Movie. In each case, our goal is variety: it’s no fun to see the same old cards rearing their head again and again, so we aim to mix things up.
Many of these changes were motivated by the results of the two PC-Movie Qualifier Leagues which have been ran this year (reference February’s and May’s top 10 deck lists on TLHH).
These represent the last functional changes the Player’s Council will make to PC-Movie before the World Championship kicks off in earnest (except bug fixes), leaving 3 months or more change-free for players to dig in and optimize their decks.
Shoulder to Shoulder has long been a thorn in the side of Elf-based balancing concerns, even partially fueling Decipher’s decision to add Elrond, Lord of Rivendell and Galadriel, Lady of Light to the X-List.
There are several ways that we considered altering STS, and if the result isn’t great we can try one of those other angles, but for now we will push the ability to the Fellowship phase instead of Maneuver. No more infinitely tanking Shotgun Enquea, and no more dumping twilight into the pool after Shadow has already played their minions.
Vilya and its usual bearer Elrond, Herald to Gil-galad are a common splash combo. For a one-time cost of 4 twilight, you get 1 heal per regroup phase and the ability to infinitely juggle a Shadow condition back to its owner’s hand. This particular form of removal is far more annoying than simply discarding would be, since it bypasses discard protection and clogs your opponent’s hand right before switching sides. Worst of all, with the +1 vitality, it grants Elrond the flexibility to do it twice in a pinch.
To rework this interaction, Vilya’s exertion cost has been dropped to disconnect the HtGG requirement, and the Shadow player is granted the flexibility to either ditch the returned card or cycle another card out if they’d really rather keep it. And then to curtail Vilya’s own flexibility, the ring itself is returned to hand, requiring the Free Peoples player to stop and hold onto the card for a turn if they wish to use it on multiple successive sites.
(The clog shoe is now on the other foot; let’s see how you like it.)
Careful that you don’t accidentally kill Elrond while doing this; bonus vitality removal is one of the few guaranteed unblockable sources of death in the game.
Oh, Dauntless Hunter. Love him, or love to hate him, he’s been a controversial card since his release. Way back when we first issued an errata to get him off of the X-List, we were clear that this was only taking the bare minimum action to bring him in line. Time has proven that he is no less viable than at his peak, and so we will finally take action against this menace.
The change here is subtle but distinct: rather than increasing the up-front cost of all events and conditions played against you, it instead tacks those costs onto the end of the transaction. The crucial difference is that if there is no more twilight left in the pool, the card is not prevented from being played. This means that the last condition or event played by the Shadow player will always be able to go out, and 0-cost events and conditions will always be playable.
This should grant enough breathing room for opposing condition-heavy shadows to avoid being completely choked out, while still paying through the nose for any indulgences.
This is one of the shake-up errata intended to knock loose a stuck strategic decision. If you are running a mono Elf deck, who goes in your starting fellowship? Answer: Glorfindel, a 2-cost Elf of your choice, and GLR (assuming you are not running the Galadriel Alternate Ring-bearer). There is no better starting choice than Glorfindel, because there are no other starting options with such a high strength for so cheap.
(On a side note, there is now plenty of room for a lore addition here. Let us know what quote you think we should put!)
As mentioned above, GLR is another very common mono Elf choice, although unlike Glorfindel she has not exactly flown under the radar. Our initial X-List errata reduced her ability to only working once per site, but in spite of this she still rubs people the wrong way, which may be a long and salty history speaking more than the specific power level of the card.
Nonetheless, we are taking a second stab at her. Her ability is restored to being a repeatable Fellowship/Regroup action, with the additional cost of an exertion, putting a ceiling on repeated use. The big change however is the alteration of her previously-free starting fellowship inclusion, instead reducing her down to a starting cost of 1.
The cost (more than the tweaks to her ability) should tone down the salty feelings of seeing her on the board: rather than being a fourth companion, played for free, she now represents an investment that requires some other person to be bumped from the starting roster, or else paid for fair and square in the normal manner.
Since Radagast was released, move limit increases have been trivialized: build up your fellowship as you please, drop Radagast, and then triple-move to victory.
Counterplay has now been added by making the move limit increase dependent on his continued survival; there are rules ensuring that move limit alterations are permanent, and so text is added making a move limit -1 kick in if he is discarded, killed, or returned to hand. Shadow can now use their tricks to remove him from the field, halting any triple move in its tracks if successful.
While the move limit is the most obvious contribution of the Brown Clown, an 8-strength Wizard has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, and so we’ve weighed him down to be less of an automatic inclusion in Ent and other Gandalf-heavy decks. His strength is reduced from 8 -> 7, and the 2-card cycle is altered to trigger on every move, not just regroup.
Speaking of wizard tricks…
Sent Back does just a little too much. On top of its (nearly unmatched) ability to resurrect a key dead companion, it also permits for defender combos to send hordes of minions to a shallow grave, only for the wizard in question to pop right back a phase later.
The resurrection text has been altered to require a stop and rest before returning during the Fellowship phase, which should curtail whirlwind combos.
In addition, an awkward edge case that technically permitted the Skirmish ability to target Saruman and place him permanently out of reach in your own dead pile has been worked around (it now requires the target be “your Wizard” instead of “a Wizard”).
One of the few straight buffs in this batch, Shadow Host’s play requirements are made a little more lenient, mirroring the change made to Rohirrim Army with the same intent.
One of the missteps by the PC has been our bungling of the Corsair errata, which centered around addressing 3 cards: Castamir, Corsair Marauder, and Corsair War Galley. Each of these cards have since gone through a second round of errata: Castamir lost fierce instead of nerfing enduring, Marauder was reworked to more fairly address the core of why he was frustrating, and now to complete the hat trick we return to Corsair War Galley.
The Galley was originally nerfed for two reasons: first, Corsairs were just crazy. But second, it also was a part of the powerful Moria Navy archetype, and this (and the nerf to Marauder) was viewed as a two-birds-one-stone situation.
However, the results have not been what we wanted. Corsairs were sunk and dead, never to rise above the waves again. We are thus entirely reverting the alteration to the War Galley’s game text, and instead restricting it to be unique. With this more gentle touch, we hope that this will permit the Corsairs to sail the high seas once more (if a little humbler).
As for Moria Navy, well, it was brought to our attention that the real lynchpin wasn’t the initiative-enabling Galley, but instead:
So to address the problem of Moria Navy (and even other Raider strats) from playing multiple copies of Under Foot per turn to reconcile one’s hand over and over, this card has been altered to only be possible to invoke once per site.
Since the card stays in play to self-discard during Regroup, the Shadow player may as well double-dip to use the strength boosting ability early, but more importantly never getting more than one early reconciliation.
Sam, Sam, Sam. Even with his X-List nerf, he has remained the most popular burden-stripping splash option, showing up in 7 out of the top 10 decks in the May qualifiers. We knew at the time that we made the original errata that it wouldn’t be enough, but we felt like we had to wait until there were more burden-removal options for more cultures before we could feel comfortable taking him further.
With the introduction of Gilraen’s Memorial and the errata to They Sang As They Slew also removing burdens, that time might well be now.
Sam will now exert twice per burden removed, but like Dauntless Hunter, the second exertion is paid after the fact, which goes unpaid if he is exhausted. This means that upon playing him, at most 2 burdens can be removed without additional healing, unless played in a Shire-heavy deck.
One of the many discard-based errata made around Yuletide last year, Hand of Sauron’s new paired ability was a little too good: you couldn’t ever risk permitting the exhaustion to go through, because a Sauron deck would of course be packing Hate for a one-two instant kill combo, meaning that this card effectively read “discard 2 cards at random from hand”.
The effect has been reduced to an exertion and a possession discard, which is a rare effect in FOTR block, making the choice more of an actual nuanced decision.
Morgul Orc-based decks have been on the rise, largely due to the fall of some of the shadow decks that were above them while they themselves remained untouched. In particular there is a common style that pairs 4x Morgul Destroyer with 4x Morgul Brute and a mess of support Nazgul, aiming to bury the fellowship in a horde of cheap Ring-bearer wounds and efficient ‘roided Orcs.
Of the two, Brute is harder to touch due to burdens and corruption being more nuanced of a strategy, so Destroyer gets the nerfbat. Its twilight cost is increased from 2 -> 3, making it harder to dump a bunch all at once, and the ability has been reworked.
Instead of 2 threats for 1 Ring-bearer wound, the ability is now 1 threat for 1 wound that the Shadow player gets to place (which can still optionally be placed on the Ring-bearer). The reduced threat generation will make the minion’s self-pump harder to utilize (especially en masse with the cost increase), but in return the payoff can occasionally be much sweeter if it nets you a dead Gandalf when the fellowship is backed into a corner, and players will be tempted to combo it with Brute a little less when the situation rises.
Enquea TOTO is a staple of the “turbo-corruption” genre, which aims to place enough burdens onto the fellowship in one turn that it doesn’t matter how many Sons of Hamfast you brought along. With Between Nazgul and Prey and other tools on the field for adding exertion fodder for Enquea’s ability, 4 or more burdens can be added each turn the fellowship faces him, which is more than all but the most staffed of Hobbit Hospitals has even a shred of a chance of defending against.
TOTO seldom hits such lofty heights, but when he does he’s a menace. In a straightforward move, his ability now has a 1-twilight tax per burden added, which won’t always reduce his solo efficiency but will affect his ability to be combo’d alongside a swarm of Morgul Brutes without cutting corners one way or another, not to mention risking his ability to pay for BNAP.
These changes should be released live later this week. As always, feedback is welcome.
The White Council 