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LORD OF THE RINGS TCG - Articles |
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Have/Wants Resources Articles Players |
Why Pay For Virtual Trading Cards? This topic has become the subject of some hot debate recently, due to the recent release of the online version of Decipher's Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game. Consequently, I've decided to write a multi-part article which should provide an answer to this question, and hopefully be informative enough to help you decide how to spend your money. Since the online and offline games are the same in terms of rules and cards, this article will be concerned with all the other aspects that make the two different. I'm grouping the differences into 5 categories, which I will address one by one over the next few weeks: Collection Management What I mean by collection management is both how/where you store your cards and also how you record what you've got. With traditional (offline) card-based collections, there are a number of trade-offs to consider when finding a home for your cards.
There are probably others, but these are the ones that I see. In terms of storage solutions, there are maybe 4 broad choices for card storage: binders, purpose-built card boxes, suitcase, or just anywhere there's space. I've tried to quantify the various factors in the table below, to try and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each.
The Anywhere strategy involves putting your cards anywhere there's space. No sorting is involved - you don't even have to take them out of the boosters they came in - and you don't need to spend money on binders, boxes, etc, so this option gets full marks for Maintenance Time and Cost. The downsides to this non-strategy, however, are that it's very hard to find a given card for deck building and you can't easily admire your collection or show it to others, so for Aesthetics and Search Time I've given this no marks. Overall, this strategy is not recommended, since making decks becomes very slow and it's hard to keep track of what you've got and where it is. For maximum Aesthetics, you will want all of your cards in binders - one per expansion perhaps - sorted by card number or rarity, or something like that. In this form, it is very easy to spend hours flicking through the pages, appreciating the beauty of your collection and gaining inspiration for decks. In terms of cost, binders are below average because the binders themselves and the pocketed sheets they contain are not cheap. Space Efficiency and Maintenance Time are neither great nor terrible - you can fit maybe four full binders in a reasonably sized box or on a shelf, and maintenance merely involves sorting your cards into piles and then putting them in the appropriate pages. For good Space Efficiency, custom-made boxes or the suitcase are the best option. Searching through these will generally be slower than a binder, but you should find what you're after reasonably quickly. The downside of both of these is that the Maintenance Time is very high. As you get more cards, each one has to be fitted into the space you allocated previously, which can easily create overflow and hassle. At this point, your scheme will probably start to resemble the Anywhere strategy, where boosters are left in their original packs (minus the rares). The factor I haven't addressed yet is future proofing. How future proof your storage is will depend on how you've organised your cards. Arranging by culture means that every new expansion requires a reshuffle, whereas arranging by expansion makes things much easier. Right, now that we've got that out of the way, let's consider the online version.
In my view, apart from having the pleasure of looking through a collection of real cards, collecting virtual cards has all of the other aspects nailed. Your entire collection lives on a server somewhere and you can easily filter or sort it based on many criteria. When you open packs, they are automatically put into your collection and you can easily see the number of each card you have at one time. One additional benefit of the online game is that the contents of your collection is automatically recorded. With real life cards, you will usually require an additional strategy for recording what you have (e.g. Excel spreadsheet, notebook, etc) which takes up even more of your time to keep up to date. Next time, we'll be looking at Deck Building. Deck Building Deck building is probably the most time-consuming part of being a LOTR TCG player (aside from actually playing games). I say "probably", because it may be that you keep one or two decks and just tweak them now and again, or perhaps you can't afford to buy too many cards and spend a lot of time trading. Still, I don't think we can argue with the fact that building a deck from scratch can be a long process (of which some will be tedious). I, personally, enjoy looking through the cards and trying to come up with new combos, and planning out my next deck. This part is fun and also a good way to pass the time on public transport: I always keep spoilers of all the cards in my bag for this reason. Sometimes, I scribble down notes, such as what cards are must-haves in the deck. I'll usually focus on one side too, since I will rarely try a new Shadow and Free Peoples side at the same time - there's less risk involved if you can have confidence in at least one side of your deck. :) The next part of deckbuilding is finding the right cards that are going to fill the remaining slots in your deck, after the must-have cards. It is at this point that offline deck building used to get long-winded, since you either had to have very good knowledge of the cards, or you had to trawl through your collection, or the spoilers, to make sure you haven't missed card that would be perfect for your deck. It is here, where the deck building software for the online game comes into its own. Thankfully, we can now use this for building offline decks too (and I do), so we can search for "burdens", "ranger" or "discard" and find all the relevant cards that are candidates for inclusion into our decks. Once your deck is finished, you will probably record the contents of it somewhere. Again, thanks to the software we have now, we can just save it or print it out. Before it, we would have to write it out by hand. So far, the online and offline versions of deckbuilding are equally matched (since the highly useful software from Worlds Apart can be used for offline deck building). Where they diverge is actually putting the deck together (i.e. assembling the cards into a shuffled pile). For the online game you have to do nothing except ensure you have saved your deck; for the offline game, you have to track down each card from your collection (which could take a long time if your collection management strategy scores poorly for this) and probably get a protective sleeve on it. Dependent on the number of cards you have, you may be able to keep all of your decks made up at one time, but this is unlikely. It's more likely that you will have a few Shadow sides and FP sides made up that you borrow cards or sleeves from to make others (this is what I do). The online version suffers none of these problems, since you can share a single copy of a card in multiple decks and there is no need for protective sleeves. It should hopefully be clear from this part of my article that the online version wins hands down, since there is no effort involved in bringing the contents of the deck together: you just select which deck you want to use. In addition, no shuffling is required before the game starts - which leads nicely onto the third part of the article... Playing Games This part has not been written yet. Trading This part has not been written yet. Pricing This part has not been written yet. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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