King Standard is a historical format that includes all of the sets up to the seventh set, The Return of the King. It's a snapshot of Standard immediately before the release of Siege of Gondor in March 2004. As such, it includes the first two waves of additions to the X-List, and uses the King Block site path, albeit without the sites from Siege of Gondor or Mount Doom. Ring-bearer skirmishes can be cancelled in King Standard as that rule had not yet been introduced, but Curse Them (4C113)
is the only legal card capable of doing so. It's a somewhat nonstandard format, supported mainly on GEMP and The Last Homely House forums. (mLOTRO has a similar format, called "Early King Standard", that includes sets 1-8.)
King Standard is one of several historical standard formats. It follows after Fellowship Block, which includes sets 1-3, and Towers Standard, which includes sets 1-6 and is a snapshot of Standard at the end of Tower Block. Unlike those formats, the snapshot comes in the middle of King Block, after one set of three. The historical standard format that includes all of King Block is the more-popular, somewhat confusingly-named Movie Block, which includes the first ten sets.
Sets eight, nine, and ten are omitted from King Standard because players felt that cards added in the three omitted sets suffered from unacceptable power creep, or that they would rather not play with the alternate Ring-bearers first introduced in set 9, Reflections.
X-list
The following cards cannot be included in King Standard decks. For more details, see X-list.
See Also
