MECCG Background What is a Collectible Card Game? (If you already know about CCG's, skip to the next section) To understand the Middle Earth Collectible Card Game, it helps to have some background. So, here is how the Collectible Card Game (CCG) came about. In 1993, Magic: the Gathering appeared in specialty game stores. You could buy a 'starter deck' with 50 or so cards or 'booster packs' which looked like baseball card packages. Two people buying what seemed to be the same product, a starter deck, would actually get different contents, though a few of their cards might be the same. The idea behind this game was that two players would play each other each using their own deck, rather than sharing a deck as in more traditional card games or Rook or Melbourne. Further, each player would almost certainly be using different cards in their decks. Before a game, you would build you deck, and your opponent would not know exactly what he would be up against. It was hoped by makers that players would enjoy their first few games using the deck that came in their initial Starter Deck box, and that they would want to buy $2.00 booster packs in order to add cards to their collection, giving them more options in building their decks. There hopes were wildly surpassed. To their surprise, thousands of players across the country (and soon around the world) bought not just a few more booster packs, but entire boxes of booster packs. The game was good. Not only did it posses the novelty of surprising your opponent with the cards that you would use in the game, but it was very well designed. It had an elegantly simple premise: Each player is a wizard dueling for supremacy, each attempting to dispatch their opponent by draining his life points, aided by summoned fantasy creatures and other spells. The game was easy to learn and difficult to master. But people tried and competition was fierce. One way to increase your ability was to have more cards in your collection. This would increase your pool of available cards, make you better able to surprise your opponent, and making you more likely to have cards that worked well together. Further, some cards were better than others, and those tended to be more 'rare'. These cards appeared in the booster packs substantially less often than other cards. People were buying booster after booster just to get more of the particular hardtofind cards that they wanted. They quickly sold out of the game. They printed more, and sold out of those, printed more and sold out of those. That third time they printed a lot and it took them longer to sell out at least. It was a huge financial success. So, others wanted a piece of the pie. Soon there were other collectible card games (CCGs). Many attempted to gain an edge by being based on preexisting brands. As the '90's went on we had the Star Wars CCG, the 1 Star Trek CCG, and others based on Highlander, Babylon 5, xfiles, Hercules/Xena, and many more. There are a LOT of these now. Many do well at first and then fail to keep people buying. Others don't even do that well. Most are eventually discontinued. I use the present tense because this is still going on; new games are coming out this year. Some will do okay, others won't, most won't last. That first game by the way, Magic: the Gathering (MtG), the one that started it all, is still going stronger than any others. Almost all of these games follow the format of having starter decks to get new players going and booster packs for really making money. The starter decks usually have 60 or so cards and are theoretically all you need to play, though your opponent will need one also. This is more the case with some games than others. In fact, they don't want the deck to be too good, because they want you to buy more. A typical game has, say, 300 different possible cards you might get in your starter deck or boosters. They want you to want to get them all. And almost always, there are varying rarity levels to the cards. So, you can't just get 300 cards and tradewith someone else to get them all. Oh no. Try 3000+. And in most games, you can have multiples of at least some cards, so to have all your options, you need to spend many $100's. Then, some months or maybe a year later, they come out with an expansion set. Which means more cards. If a game is popular, it keeps going. MtG has put out almost 3 sets a year for 10 years now. It's not hard to find players who have spent thousands of dollars on the game over the years. The Middle Earth Collectible Card Game Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) possesed the liscense to make and sell games (and some other items) based on The Lord of the Rings since the 1980's. They made quite a few (usually quite good) board games based on Tolkien's world, as well as the Middle Earth materials that took advantage of their excellent Rolemaster roleplaying system. In 1996 they jumped in the exploding CCG market with Middle Earth: the Wizards, the first set of cards for the Middle Earth Collectible Card Game (MECCG). This set contained 400+ cards. There were starters and boosters, varying rarity levels, the usual deal. It was probably the most inovative CCG since MtG itself. In MECCG, each player is one of the 5 Istari (Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, or two more obscure ones, Alatar and Pallando.) doing the best they can to further the fight against Sauron. It would seem then that the players should almost be on the same side, right? Kindof, but the key is that on your opponent’s turn, you have a completely different job. At that time, your job is to be the forces of evil arrayed against your opponent. A lot of fun. The game did very well, soon necessitating a reprinting of the first set. It won awards. The first two expansion sets were snapped up. Then, as is often the case, the game waned in popularity. Two main reasons for this. First, this is the usual pattern. There are always so many new, cool games coming out. Many games have rivaled MtG for a year or two, but none are able to keep up that level of popularity. The second reason is that the game, already with a steeper learning curve than normal, added complexity too quickly. The 3rd set (or one might say, the second expansion) added new rules that took a bit to get used to, and players were still getting good at the original rules. The 4th set added complication in a different way, and, combined with the regular tendency of players to 'move on', many players did just that. Seven sets were published in all, and in 1999 it was thought that the 2 game needed to be redone somewhat, simplified, easier to learn, streamlined. The chance never came, as Tolkien Enterprised revoked the liscense to Tolkien's work, gutting ICE. To many people active in 'gaming', who know the current hottest game and are usually playing it, MECCG sometimes appears 'dead'. Mention it at your local gaming store (if you're lucky enough to have one), and someone will say something like, "The Middle Earth game? Yeah, that was a great game. Very cool. Too complicated though to get a lot of new players though. Yeah, it's dead now. Too bad." Well, there's dead, and there's dead. What people usually mean by ‘dead’ is that a game no longer has an active, visible, and pervasive tournament scene that is supported by the publishing company, that the game isn't played much (or at all) in the evenings at the game store, that the serious games don't know many people (or any) that are playing the game. However, it would be more accurate to say that MECCG is halfdead. Perhaps undead. MECCG has slightly different dynamics than most other games. This has to do with the game itself and those who tend to play it. The game is more involved than perhaps any other CCG. It takes a while to build your deck. You can't build a good deck quickly unless you have some experience. A game can take a couple hours to play. It also takes longer to learn than most other CCG's. Despite these disadvantages, the game was so darn good, so thematic, and so unique, that it managed to be the hot thing for a while. A game so involved couldn't keep that up though. But the game is very good and very unique. There might never be another game able to capture the roleplaying feel that MECCG does. People come back to this game. The people who play MECCG tend to be a different lot than most other CCG's. At tournaments for other CCG's, you'll see a lot of kids and teenagers playing. In MECCG, it's mostly adults. This has to do with the aforementioned (relative) complexity of the game, but it is also because of the Middle Earth theme. This means that the people who tend to love MECCG are also people who, relative to other CCG's, don't go to big gaming conventions, and aren't frequently playing at their local game store. So you see, this lack of visibility for MECCG is deceptive. Compared to other 'dead' games, that are dead because there was nothing special about them, MECCG appears dead because, in addition to not being quite as popular as it was before, the MECCG players are less visible. Though we would all like to have new cards from new expansions, many of us are actually happy that the game has stopped expanding. We won't have to keep spending money to play this wonderful game. Future cards, as is so often the case in other games, won't render our current favorite cards useless. Currently the tournament scene, with National Championship tournaments, a World Championship tournament held each summer (in the U.S. for the first time in the summer of 2004), tournaments held at the big conventions and at local gaming stores, is run by players. (If you ever want to get involved in this, let me know.) Most MECCG games though happen in people's houses and apartments. Usually a small group of people 3 discover how incredibly cool this game is, get some cards, and play when they can. Thousands of MECCG games are happening today around the worlds in living rooms and dorms. For most any other game that your local game expert would label 'dead', this is definately not the case. MECCG compared to other CCG's. The incredible thing about MECCG is its depth and openendedness. Sometimes it feels more like a roleplaying game than a CCG. You have a party of characters (or multiple parties) that travels around Middle Earth. You can go wherever you want, and do an many varied things. Your characters can acquire items to make them more powerful, they gain allies, and your party of characters can grow. Your wizard can cast spells. You entice groups of people (factions) to actively join the fight against Sauron. Your characters can become injured and die, at the hands of orcs and other monsters and through other ways. Your characters can succumb to other dangers. They can become corrupted and forsake your cause. The depth is incredible, and only made possible because Middle Earth is already somewhat known to us. Each character has a race, skills, points they’re worth, cost of recruiting, differing amounts of influence they possess, fighting ability, constitution (‘body’), and special attributes. It would be impossible to get straight. But because we already know these people, it’s not. You don’t have to memorize that Frodo is a hobbit, with low fighting ability, high constitution, and exceptional resistance to evil. Further, it’s not hard to remember that in terms of the game, he has the diplomat andscout skills, slightly more mindpower than the average hobbit (though not as much as, say, Aragorn or Elrond), a small amount of ‘influence’. These things just make sense if you know Frodo. Let’s take the ‘Rangers of the North’ faction. It’s worth a pretty good amount, is playable at Bree, and is more easily influenced by Dunedain characters. Not hard to remember that stuff, because it all makes sense. You might guess that having Aragorn II in the party or (to a lesser extent) other Dunedain in your deck would help in getting them. Surprise surprise, you’re right. So, with this game you can quickly be having very involved, thematic adventures. During your turn your characters fight the good fight against Sauron. During your opponent’s turn, your job is to be the forces of evil for him! It’s a lot of fun. You can smite his characters with orcs, wargs, dragons, and all kinds of good stuff. You can corrupt them, steal their items, make them hungry, sick, tonguetied, homesick, delayed, and more, by playing hazard cards. You exist in the same world with your opponent. You can’t both be using Gimle! If your opponent has Gimle working for him, and you want him, then you have to go to where he is and convince him to join you. There’s only one Orchrist. If your Legolas has it, you’re opponent can’t use it also. If you get Tom Bombadil on your side first, your opponent is out of luck. Of course, he might try to convince Tom to dump you and join him. Unlike a certain 4 other Lord of the Rings game, this really gives the feel that you’re in a real, interactive world. Unless both the players really know what they’re doing and are quick players, a game takes over an hour to play, perhaps 2 or even more. In a standard tournament game, there is an 85 minute time limit. Most tournament games are ended by this time limit, though some end earlier in a natural fashion. It is however enough time to get in a good game. Even in casual play, some people use the standard time limit, though many of us like to add some time, making it an hour and a half or an hour and 40 minutes. There is a shorter version of the game (“1deck”) which good quick players and easily finish in an hour. This time required to play is a drawback for some people. (“It takes too long to play”). Well, if you want a quick, simple game for a spare 20 minutes, you’ve got MtG or Decipher’s LotR TCG, or other good games. MECCG takes a bit more. About the Sets: Note about 'Hero' and 'Minion': In Middle Earth: The Wizards, you are a Wizard battling Sauron. This was the only type of thing (avatar) you could be. When the 4th set, Middle Earth: The Lidless Eye, came out, it added another dimension to the game. You could now be a Ringwraith, rather than a Wizard. People began to use the terms Hero to refer to playing as a Wizard, and Minion to refer to playing as a Ringwraith. Actually, you need not reveal a Wizard or Ringwraith character card, and indeed as a Minion you can be Sauron with one of a couple special cards. So, the terms Hero and Minion are better terms to describe the type of deck you're using, rather than Wizard or Ringwraith. (That's enough to get started with, but if you want the full picture: The 6th set added a new kind of thing that you can play as, the Fallen Wizard. In tournaments, this is a completely different kind of avatar, with some different rules just as playing hero or minion has slighty different rules. The 7th and last set, Middle Earth: The Balrog, add the Balrog as something you can be. However, this is considered a subset of the Minion alignment, inheriting the special Minion rules from The Lidless Eye. In tournaments, if you are the Balrog, you are considered Minion.) I tend to consider the Hero alignment as the 'basic' alignment. It is the alignment new players usually want to and probably should start out with. The Fallen Wizard alignment assumes experience with both Hero and Minion alignment, and could reasonably be thought of as an 'advanced alignment'. Meaning, don't worry about it now; it will mess you up. The Minion alignment is really a parallel to the hero alignment in every respect, and you could start out playing that way. However, on this page (and in the rest of my site) I will assume that you're starting out playing hero. That is, you've got cards from Middle Earth: the Wizards, and maybe Dragons or Dark Minions, and you'll start playing with that. Note about the coloring of the set titles: For the title of each set, I used the peach heroresource color if it's a hero set, darkpurple if it's a minion set, green it it's a Fallen Wizard set. The title of set will be spread amongst these colors in proportion to how much that set is for each alignment. This is just to give you a visual cue as to how applicable the set is to you if, for example, you want to concentrate on playing hero at first. Now, the vast 5 majority of hazards from any set can be used against anyone. So to a certain extent, every set is beneficial to you no matter what alignment you prefer. For example, I have the Wizards set colored completely has a Hero set, but this is in terms of resources, characters, and sites. Many of the hazards in the set would be helpful to a minion player, whether they're playing against a hero or another minion. The Wizards Main set This is where you'll start. Only this sets contains key cards that are hard to play without, cards which cards in other sets depend upon. This set contains almost all the hero characters and sites, as well as the Wizard character cards and most factions, allies and items. The first thing for you to do when getting into this game is to get one of each of the fixed portions. Each Starter deck contains, randomly, 3 rares, 9 uncommons, 40 commons, and one of five differentfixed portions. Each fixed portion contains 2 wizard character, 5 other characters, 2 factions and sites that you can't get anywhere else. Bottom line: you really want to get these 5 fixed packs. Problem is, it's a pain to get them. You don't know which you'll get until you open the little starter deck box. You might think a Starter box, which contains 10 starter decks, would have 2 of each fixed pack in it, and you'd be wrong. It'll probably have 3 of 2 of them, 2 of another, and 1 of the other two. Something like that, or worse. Pretty annoying. You can get started pretty well with just this set. If you have at least one of each fixed portion and a booster box's worth of cards, you're ready to go. The fixed portions give you a good core of characters (Aragorn, Glorfindel, Gimle, much more), sites, and factions. The booster box will give you allies and items, plenty of support cards, and more characters (Legolas and Sam for example are uncommons, not hard to get), factions and sites. And of course hazards with which to smite your opponent. You may want to consider getting a set though if you think you'll really like this game and want to get going quickly, and have the money. Make sure you get a set with plenty of extra nonrares. (Remember, you can have up to three of card in your deck if it is not unique.) Alignments: Just hero. That's all there was when it came out. Numbers: 484 cards. 121 each rares and uncommons, 182 commons, plus 57 fixed cards. Starters and boosters. Boosters: 1 rare, 3 uncomons, 11 commons. The only set reprinted in bluebordered 'Unlimited Edition'. Cost: Not bad. There was a lot printed. Boxes are almost as cheap as Dragons. But, it will take some money and effort to complete because it's a full set with 121 rares. A couple rares (The One Ring, Assassin) are expensive ($710 for UL), but the rest aren't bad at all. "UL" by the way means Unlimited edition. First they printed the Limited Edition with black borders, and when they were running out they printed the Unlimited Edition with blue borders. No other sets have any cards with blue borders (they printed enough of the black. The Dragons First expansion. Few new rules, just cool new cards This is a great expansion. It only added one little rule (hoards), and added a lot of great cards. Basically a site contains a hoard if there is a dragon autoattack. Some things 6 (added in this set), including some items, can only be played at hoard sites. This set added a new major class of creature hazards (drakes) and added some nice cards for other hazard themes. Drakes like deep wilderness (usually 3 wilderness in the site path) so you've got to find a way to maximize that. (Withered Lands!) As you might guess, Dragon creatures benefited from this set, not to mention adding 5 new Dragon creatures. The hazard Foolish Words became a staple. On the resource side, the card Marvels Told changed the game. You're no longer at the mercy of nonenvironment hazard permanent events. This card along with some others made the sage skill helpful, whearas before it hadn't really been. Also doing this are cards that utilize Information sites. This set added a few new factions, an ally, and plenty of items. It also added a few characters and a good number of sites. Alignments: Just hero. Other alignments were just an idea at this time. Numbers: 180 cards. 70 commons, 60 uncommons, 50 rares. Boosters: 1 rare, 4 uncommon, 10 common. Some rares are 'R2' and some 'R3', appearing on the print sheet twice and 3 times, respectively. The better rares are usually R2's, with some notsogreat unique R3's. Moreso than other sets (except Against the Shadow), most packs are either winners or losers, with many rares worth $.25 and some worth $4.00 Cost: The cheapest boxes. You can get them in the U.S. for $20. There's no reason to not get all the Dragons cards you need, especially since many are great cards, from rares down to the commons. Dark Minions Second expansion. Some new rules and new kinds of cards. There were three big new (groups of) rules, as well as cards that took these rules into account: Underdeeps sites. You can now travel into the bowels of the earth! You can get to each underdeeps site by traveling down to it from its surface site. It's not for the faint of hear. Hazards are often more playable and there are especially evil things waiting for you, but the payoff can be great. You can play more items and do special things there. Most of the new sites in this set are underdeep sites. Agents. You can now play evil agents of all races as hazards. They remain in the game from turn to turn and can move from site to site, attacking your opponent, influencing away his factions, and messing with him in a variety of other ways. Agent cards (a whole new template, with a purple background) are introduced, and other cards to take advantage of them, as well as combat them. Prisoners. Your characters can now be taken prisoner by the forces of evil. While prisoner, they still take up general infuence but are useless to you, and their MP count as negative! You must get them back, but that might not be easy. Besides these new complications, there are plenty of other good cards. Undead (The Moon is Dead, Chilldouser, others) and Man (Rank upon Rank) hazards are beefed up. Also added are hazards to punish your opponent for daring to enter the underdeeps. You can do much more evil even if you don't get into using agents and taking prisoners. You might want to take a look at the hazard Trollpurse though. It makes the prisoner rules 7 worth learning! Many great resources added. Items and other cards to take advantage of the underdeeps of course. "Quest" type cards (permanent events that give points for doing certain things) can make for some interesting adventures. The ally Noble Hound begins two interesting trends. First, it is a nonunique ally, so you can get more than one. (There will be more such allies in the future, and even nonunique factions.) Second, it is the first Ally/Item/Faction playable at an already tapped site. There will be a few more cards like this for hero players, but this type of card will be key for Minions and Fallenwizards. Two cards that greatly affected the game were the resource Smokerings and the hazard An Unexpected Outpost. Before this time, the Sideboard (I'll write an article on this this Spring) was only accessed via a couple hard to remember rules. These two cards added easy accesss to the sideboard, as well as card recycling, which is bringing a card to your playdeck from your discard pile. Previously you had to do this with a few specialty cards like Vilya or Palantir of Orthanc. This is a very cool expansion, but it was a bit of a problem too. The game was already more complicated than most other CCG's, but with the added rules in this expansion, a large chunk of people came to see it as too complicated. This perception (rooted in reality) hurt the game. If you're new to the game, sure, get this set. You can do a lot of neat things with it even if you don't want to use underdeeps, agents, and prisoners. I'd put off learning those things until you have the basic rules down though. They add neat dimensions to the game, but you could win Worlds withough using any of that stuff. Alignments: Just hero, but there a twist on this set though. They knew they were going to do the Minion alignment in the near future. This set introduces "agents". These are actually minion characters with the agent keyword. They can be used by Minion players as characters! It's the agent keyword that means they can be used as agent hazards (by anyone). At the time people didn't know this, and just thought they'd only ever be used as agent hazards. When Lidless Eye came out, people said, "aha! ICE was thinking ahead." So, if you're only going to play as a Minion, you'd of course want the hazards from this set as you would from any set, but you'd also want the agent cards from this set, that you could use as characters. Numbers: 180 cards. 70 commons, 60 uncommons, 50 rares. Boosters: 1 rare, 4 uncommon, 10 common. Has R2's and R3's, but with a more even spread in value and utility because the R3's are all nonunique and the R2's mostly unique. Cost: A little more expensive than Wizards UL, but that's still cheap. And it being a 180 card expansion, it's much cheaper than Wizards to complete (second only to Dragons). Many of the great cards are commons, so you could just get half a booster box and it would greatly add to your abilities. The Lidless Eye Parellel to first set. Now you can be a bad guy instead of good guy. When playing as a Minion, instead of having 2 (or 3) Wizard character cards in your deck, you can have up to 2 (or 3) Ringwraith character cards. When playing as a Minion, you can only use minion resources and minion characters. Hero players cannot use the new Minion resources, characters, and sites introduced in this set. As I said before though, the new hazard cards provided in this set canbe used by hero players. Anybody can use any 8 hazards. (Actually, there is a small list of hazards that can't be used against Minions, but don't worry about that now.) Some hazards though are more effective against certain types of opponents. This guide for beginners assumes you'll be starting off playing hero, so I won't get much into playing as a minion here. I'll just say that it works basically the same, but there are some additional rules for Minion players. For this reason, it is slightly more complicated than playing hero. It would be easier if you got into playing minion after getting some experience with playing hero. But, some (usually experienced gamers who like being the bad guy) have started right off with this set playing as a bad guy, and had much fun doing it. Alignments: Minion. The whole point of this set is to introduce playing the Minion alignment. Numbers: 419 cards. 121 each rares, uncommons, commons, plus 54 fixed cards. Starters and boosters. Starters have one 'fixed portion' of about 20 cards, 1 rare, 12 uncommons, and I'm guessing about 40 starteronly commons. Boosters: 1 rare, 4 uncomons, 11 commons. Rares (and uc's and c's) all appear once on the rare sheet, though some are much better than others. This is the set where they really screwed up the rarities. Some cards were made rares that really shouldn't have been. Cost: This is most expensive set to complete. Not only are boxes expensive, but it's a fullblown major set with 121 rares, with one rare per booster. This set has the most expensive rares, with The Lidless Eye and ElfLord Revealed in Wrath sometimes going for $20. For a couple years, 20002001, this set was even more expensive, but luckily some more stock was found to relieve the pressure.Be prepared to drop some money to complete a set. Some people though, like me, use hero for serious play but dabble in playing minion for fun. If so, you could just get the fixed portions, commons and uncommons somehow, with maybe some of the cheaper (but still very good rares). This would save you a lot of money, since the many very expensive rares make up the majority of the value of a full set. And I'll take this opportunity to plug my LE Budget Starter box in my Cards for Sale section. Against the Shadow More cards for both hero and minion players This expansion is like Dragons in that it is very simple; no new rules, just cool new cards. New hazards to use against anyone, and cool resources for heros. For minions, there were some holes left over from Lidless Eye that needed to be plugged; mainly sites. There were previously sites that heros had that minions didn't, so heros could go to these sites and the minions couldn't follow them there! After this set, minions have all the sites heros do, even the hero havens. Of course, minions tend to have a tough time when they go to, say Lorien. Also added were a lot of hazard creatures aimed at minions, dwarves, elves, and dunedain. It's hurts when your orcs run up against Arthedain Rangers. Nine hazard creature/PermEvents were added to parellel the Nazgul hazard cards. Minions now have to deal with hazards for the 5 Istari, Cirdan, Elrond, Galadriel, and Beorn. Very cool! The common hazard Alone and Unadvised gives those annoying one or two character companies something to worry about. Full of Froth and Rage beefed up Spider and Animal attacks. Power Built by Waiting addresses the problem of your 9 opponent having low hazard limits, and adds a potential cost to him leaving characters squatting at havens. Some other nice hazards too. The minion resourceDark Tryst was basically added to help minions, perceived as being at a disadvantage against heroes. It's considered required in minion (and Fallen Wizard) decks. There are a few nonunique allies for minions that are quite good. Alignments: Resources for both Hero and Minion, 5 sites for heros and a bunch for minions, a few new minion characters. Cost: This is an expensive set to complete, second only to The Lidless Eye. It's an expansion and smaller than the two main sets, but boxes are somewhat expensive and the R1's are tough to get. Completing this set is all about getting the R1's, which can cost $10 (or more) easy, while the R2's go for < $1.00 on average. Numbers: 170 cards. 50 commons, 55 uncommons, 65 rares. Boosters: 2 rares, 4 uncommon, 6 commons. 9 rares are R1 and the rest R2. The R1's are thankfully not necessary to any good deck. Cost: Boxes are about $60 per box, but that goes up and down. Even though there are 2 rares per pack, completing a set is difficult/expensive because the 9 R1 rares are so hard to get. However, if you don't need to get every card, this set is not bad at all. You could buy a box and sell/trade the R1's to get some of your investment back. Or, buy a set from someone without the R1's. Or ask an older player for his extra AtS commons/uncommons and then (easily) trade for the R2 rares. And once again I'll take this opportunity to plug my Budget AtS Set, which has everything you need from this set minus the 9 ultrarares. The White Hand Adds the third type of thing you can be: Fallen Wizard. This set introduces a new alignment, the Fallen Wizard. Most of the cards in the set are special cards for Fallen Wizards, and not usable for anyone else. However, there are some cool hazard and resources for both heroes and minions also, and these are mostly common or uncommon. Alignments: The whole point of this set is to introduce the Fallen Wizard alignment. A Fallen Wizard is a wizard on his own, who has despaired to defeating Sauron. The minion alignment could be considered slightly advanced in that it added special minion rules on top of the initial wizard rules. Well, this alignment is much more 'advanced'. There are quite a few new rules that can take a while to keep straight, and many of the new Fallen Wizard resources (with a green template) are a handful. Add to this that you can use both hero and minon resources. Definatley an alignment for advanced players. Cost: Although the boxes are slightly more expensive than average, it's not that expensive to complete because one box should be all you need to make a set. There's 2 rares per booser, only 47 rares, and none of them are annoying R1's like in Against the Shadow. Numbers: 122 cards. 35 commons, 40 uncommons, 47 rares. Boosters: 2 rares, 4 uncommon, 6 commons. R2's and R3's. Like Dark Minions, they arranged them reasonably well. Unlike the Lidless Eye, which introduced the minion alignment, this set does not have starters. The Fallen Wizard character cards have to be pulled from boosters, which isn't a problem, because they're plentiful. The Balrog 10 Now you can be the Balrog. Look Mom, I'm a Balrog! This set introduces being a Balrog. This is not technically a new alignment, like Fallen Wizard. Being the Balrog is considered being a special kind of Minion. So, you use Minion rules with a few special added rules of your own, if you're going to be the Balrog. For the rest of us, this sets adds some good hazards, some most useful against the Balrog, but others very good against anyone. There are also some resources for minons and, to a lesser extent, heroes. They're all very good though. YOu can certainly do without them in casual play, but if you're going to be a serious hero or (other kind of) minion player, consider getting a set of Balrog. Even just one of some of these cards adds some neat twists. Ever tried ring decks and they were just to darn unwieldy? Rumours of Rings (and its minion counterpart Whispers of Rings) singlehandedly makes ring decks better. Having a single Beorning Skinchangers in your deck or sideboard is nice in case your opponents uses nasty hobbitesss. Unabated in Malice is nasty, and Elven Rope is cool. Alignments: This set doesn't actually create a new alignment, but creates a new type of Minion player you can be, the Balrog. The Balrog is much geared towards underdeeps sites. Cost: Though boxes (3 of each deckbox) are expensive, you only need 1/3 of a box for a complete set! If you are a serious player though, you may want two sets or three (an entire box). These are getting hard to find and you might have to pay more than retail price, which is $114 a box. If you see a set of both boxes for < $40, grab it. Numbers: All Fixed. It was released in two set decks. Buy both, you have the set. That's right, nothing randomized in this set. 11