[Balance] Leadership and Tactics need card draw options

[Kjeld]

Leadership and Tactics suffer from a severe lack of card draw. I understand that card draw is supposed to be primarily a Lore ability, but drawing cards is key to pretty much any strategy -- it doesn't much matter what cards you put in your deck if you never see them!

Other spheres need some (weaker) access to card draw if anyone ever wants to run a truly top-tier deck without Lore. Spirit has two cards which allow draw -- Barliman and the new "secret" hero -- but I can't think of any for Tactics or Leadership. Gandalf can draw cards, but he's expensive and you can only include 2 copies.

There is precedent for sphere-bleed in other key mechanics like resource generation and healing, such that all spheres have some access, although it's more limited and condition in an off-sphere card. Why not also allow all spheres access to card draw?

[Twiton]

Leadership has Summon capacity instead of Draw, that's the trade off. Raise the Shire, Sneak Attack, Reinforcements and The Tree People are their Draw Alternatives.
Tactics is rather blunt if you go full sphere. There's a lack of any options in it besides ATTACK (Funnily enough not that tactical :P) But you do have Lock Shields!

[Twiton]

So the TL;DR:
Leadership uses Summon as a mechanic instead of Draw, allowing it to summon a variety of random cards or even your high powered cards.
Tactics has 1 Draw Card, since it's almost entirely intended for damage and beefy summons.
Neutral is still the best Sphere.

[deltaarena-92]

In my opinion Summon is way better than Drawing. You save resources and an action. My best deck is a Leadership only deck. With the 3 dwarven leadership heroes.

[Kjeld]

Originally posted by Twiton:

So the TL;DR:
Leadership uses Summon as a mechanic instead of Draw, allowing it to summon a variety of random cards or even your high powered cards.
Tactics has 1 Draw Card, since it's almost entirely intended for damage and beefy summons.
Neutral is still the best Sphere.

My point is that these are insufficient, especially for mono-sphere or even dual-sphere decks. It doesn't seem right that Lore and Spirit are so much stronger than Tactics or Leadership, and a lot of it has to do with ability to get more cards out of your deck and onto the table.

Just look at the tabletop LotR LCG, which is a good case because there is a huge cardpool and RingsDB provides a good source of data on what the most powerful and popular decks are.

Just looking at the top 30 decks on the RingsDB Hall of Fame -- https://ringsdb.com/decklists/halloffame -- 19 of them include a hero who directly draws cards (Galadriel, Beravor, Erestor, Pippin, Arwen+Light, Damrod) while another 5 include a hero who indirectly draws cards (Gandalf, Elrond+Vilya, Prince Imrahil [Ta]). Only 6 of 30 -- that's just 20% -- don't start with a hero that can pull extra cards out of the deck.

On top of all that card draw that these decks start the game with, on average they include 8.2 cards that directly draw other cards (16% of a 50-card deck) and 1.9 cards (4%) that allow for pseudo-draw (e.g. Wizard Pipe, Mirror of Galadriel, Gildor ally). Among those 30 top decks, the average deck space devoted to card draw is 10 cards, or 20% of a 50-card deck.

If we translate that to a 30-card deck, then a top-tier deck has to have around 6 cards that allow for draw and most likely a hero that allows for card draw as well. Right now, there are two heroes in our game that let you draw cards directly -- Faramir and the new Spirit hero. (Rossiel sort of lets you draw a card by recovering an ally). These are all Lo or Sp. Ta and Le have none.

For cards in Ta, Le, or Neutral that draw other cards, we have direct draw in the form of 2x Gandalf, 2x Erebor Hammersmith (effectively card draw), and 2x Lock Shields. So mono-tactics can kind of get to that 20% threshold, but w/o hero support. If we count, as you suggest, summoning cards, then there is also Radagast and Farmer Maggot.

For Leadership, that's 2x Gandalf and maybe 2x Reinforcements, though that's an extremely limited form of card draw (and is arguably more about resource acceleration, which Le has in gobs anyway). So that's, generously speaking, a max of 4/30 (13%) of cards that draw other cards, far short of the 20% benchmark and also with no hero support. [Note: I don't count Sneak Attack or Raise the Shire since they are 1:1 (no net gain in cards) AND they don't thin your deck b/c they take the card from outside your deck pool.]

If we combine Ta and Le, we could 8/30, or just shy of 30% of cards which can draw other cards if we include all of the above.

[KingsKnightTwitch]

I disagree regarding Leadership. I've played mono Leadership on Expert difficulty and it does just fine without card draw. Leadership has such consistently strong cards that a simple "good stuff" deck negates the need for card draw. Though I suppose if we want other viable mono / dual Leadership builds, then perhaps some card draw can make sense; it's just I don't feel much of an imbalance.

For Tactics, I definitely agree. What Tactics needs isn't so much card draw as card selection. I have a fun mono Tactics deck which would be thrilled to have a card that did something like say "Draw 3 Cards, then Discard 2 Cards". Mono Tactics is very difficult to play even when you have a full collection as you desperately need to get high willpower units on the board and that generally means you need Gandalf / Radagast with Narya.

[Kjeld]

Originally posted by KingsKnightTwitch:

I disagree regarding Leadership. I've played mono Leadership on Expert difficulty and it does just fine without card draw.

I partially agree that Leadership's access to all-around strong cards -- and the resources to play them -- helps offset the issue a little bit. However, I feel like you have to build a deck that doesn't rely on any key pieces, because you absolutely cannot rely on ever drawing them. Mono-Le decks can still work, but they're very limited in scope compared to the other spheres (other than Tactics, which as you note is screwed by lack of card draw to access key willpower sources).

I have also played a lot of games, including multiple campaign play-throughs with mono-sphere decks from every sphere. Recently, I've been playing a mono-Le dwarf deck against Campaign 1 on challenge/expert, and I definitely noticed that I barely dent my deck, not even getting through half of it before the game is over. I was originally running a decent number of events (around 8, I think) and it was absolutely devastating when Evil Storm would come out and I'd lose several cards b/c I had no way to replace them. And then if one of the hazards came out that negates card draw, it would completely shut down my deck (exacerbated because the dwarves don't have amazing willpower). Sometimes I could slog through, sometimes I lost, but it always felt very frustrating.

[deltaarena-92]

Originally posted by Kjeld:

Originally posted by KingsKnightTwitch:

I disagree regarding Leadership. I've played mono Leadership on Expert difficulty and it does just fine without card draw.

I partially agree that Leadership's access to all-around strong cards -- and the resources to play them -- helps offset the issue a little bit. However, I feel like you have to build a deck that doesn't rely on any key pieces, because you absolutely cannot rely on ever drawing them. Mono-Le decks can still work, but they're very limited in scope compared to the other spheres (other than Tactics, which as you note is screwed by lack of card draw to access key willpower sources).

I have also played a lot of games, including multiple campaign play-throughs with mono-sphere decks from every sphere. Recently, I've been playing a mono-Le dwarf deck against Campaign 1 on challenge/expert, and I definitely noticed that I barely dent my deck, not even getting through half of it before the game is over. I was originally running a decent number of events (around 8, I think) and it was absolutely devastating when Evil Storm would come out and I'd lose several cards b/c I had no way to replace them. And then if one of the hazards came out that negates card draw, it would completely shut down my deck (exacerbated because the dwarves don't have amazing willpower). Sometimes I could slog through, sometimes I lost, but it always felt very frustrating.

Curiously I have very few events in my leadership deck, most of my cards are allies in that deck. And the events I have are just to ready characters and take as many actions with them as I can.

[Kjeld]

I was running 2x Against the Shadow, 2x Reinforcements, 2x A Light from Within, 2x Strength of Arms. Maybe I had a Khazad-ai-Menu for that game, as well, but I've since taken it out.

[KingsKnightTwitch]

Yeah, mono Le dwarves is very difficult to build for Expert. The main problem is that the Leadership dwarves have no willpower. I actually have managed to make 2 Le 1 Ta dwarf semitribal and 1 Le 1 Ta 1 Sp dwarves work fairly well (I have their deck lists on RingsDB if you're curious). The card First to the Party also requires a lot of card draw in order to get a lot of value from it (otherwise it will get countered or Evil Stormed).