Weta Book Cards
The majority of cards within the LOTR-TCG use imagery directly crafted for Peter Jackson's film trilogy, even if that imagery never made it into the films themselves. However, Decipher also took the opportunity to partner with Weta Workshop to imagine how certain characters from Tolkien's work who were cut from the film script would have looked like had they been included. These semi-original creations were dubbed the Book Cards.
"Book Cards" as a label was originally used for four cards included with The Countdown Collection:,,, and. The term fell out of use when the marketing for that collection ran its course, but more than just the original 4 characters were created, and those cards were sprinkled throughout later sets, as were other Weta Cards in general.
Creation
Many of the characters depicted in the Book Cards had gone through various stages of conceptual design at Weta for the films during pre-production; in some cases such as for Radagast the Brown the character had gone so far as to have an actor cast before ultimately getting cut. Daniel Falconer,.. at Weta, gathered up these concepts and spearheaded the creation of more for some which were cut far earlier in the process, such as the infamous Tom Bombadil.
Actors were then brought in (or Weta designers were used, such as, costume designer, for Goldberry) and costumes were created and salvaged out of existing props which were used from the films. For example: Elladan/Elrohir's hair reused Arwen's wig, Tom Bombadil's hat was a reworked Hobbit hat, and Erkenbrand's armor was Theodred's.
Decipher documented the creation process in a series of articles on their website. The Internet Archive in this case was inconsistent in its archival, so those articles have been recreated here on the wiki:
List of Book Cards
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