PC Errata
The Player's Council is a group of volunteers who aim to nurture and guide the future of the Lord of the Rings TCG. One of the aspects of this responsibility is in issuing card-altering errata to address issues with the game--it's not perfect, after all, and we can always chase the elusive perfect ideal.
Decipher attempted to issue as few errata as humanely possible--their policy for the Star Wars CCG was to never even ban a card if it could be avoided, and that mentality carried somewhat. With Lord of the Rings, the standard methodology was to errata a card if it was in the most recent set, and otherwise just ban it from use. This was driven from an understanding that the game was in fact printed on physical cardboard with ink, and they wanted the game to be divorced from this physical reality as little as possible.
However, in modern times the landscape of the game has changed. Gemp, the digital platform, dominates in number of games played, with about 6,000 per month in 2021 up to a lifetime peak of more than 10,000. That's an average of 200 games per day in 2021, and more than 330 at peak.
Thus, the PC has opted to take an approach more akin to that used in competitive multiplayer video games, instead. Decipher's approach was understandable for the era in which they worked, but today with the growth of the Internet, the moving of the community into online communities, and the acclimation of players in general to the concept of regular balance patches, the idea of altering large numbers of cards on a regular basis is far more available to us than it was to Decipher. Altering ink is a painful process, but altering pixels is trivial.
In Gemp, all errata are indicated by a red line across the upper left-hand corner. In addition, all PC errata have a red box in the lower left-hand corner listing the date that the card was last errata'd.
PC Errata
Below is a list of every errata the PC has issued. These errata apply to all formats with "PC" in the name, including Fellowship - PC, Movie - PC, and Expanded - PC.
X-list Errata
The first batch of errata issued by the PC addressed cards which Decipher had already removed from one or more formats. Cards were banned for lots of different reasons, but regardless of source the PC attempted to bring all cards to the same standard of playability.
| Original | Errata | Decipher Notes | PC Notes |
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Announced in the January 11 2002 FAQ, reprinted as revision B | |
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Decipher Notes:
This card has been on our X-List radar for quite some time. The deck lists turned in by the top 16 players of each major event this year were a perfect example of why – in every case, at least 15 of them were stocking one or more copies of Sam. He is simply too versatile, offering huge benefits regardless of Free Peoples strategy, and regardless of who your Ring-bearer is. And he’s even better if your Ring-bearer happens to be Frodo. With Shadows, the need to address Sam became even more pressing. With resistance becoming an important feature of all companions (not just Ring-bearer) and it being directly tied to burdens, Sam easily undermined a large number of Shadow cards in the set, and made many Free Peoples cards too reliable (and thus, too strong). |
Sam is tricky, because not only is he approximately the best burden removal option, for many cultures he represents almost the only burden removal option, as many cultures plain do not have access to native anti-corruption options. Sam probably deserves to be nerfed more than he is, but it's not possible to do so reasonably until other burden options have been added to more cultures in the future. Full article here. |
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Decipher Notes: This card effectively doubles the number of skirmishes a fellowship faces by making all Uruk-hai fierce and then nullifying play that would serve as protection against those Uruk-hai. | Damage +1 and Fierce are no joke, and TTT's focus on uruks makes Saruman a no-go. By merging both of his abilities to use the same resource pool, the player is now forced to make an interesting decision--keep uruks alive, or keep them fierce? Full article here. |
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Decipher Notes: This card makes large-scale card draw too accessible to all Free Peoples strategies. It requires a very low cultural commitment to a culture that is not supposed to be the strongest at Fellowship phase card draw. | The complaint is straightforward: it permits lots of card draw (and card cycling, even if that goes unmentioned) when Gandalf is not supposed to. He's even worse with Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, whose Home 3 healing ensures that Ottar + Elrond permit a 4 card draw / 3 card cycle every Fellowship phase, which makes most other methods pale in comparison. Our errata is equally straightforward: knock Ottar down to essentially an out-of-phase reconcile once per turn. |
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Decipher Notes: Again, terrain is hugely important beginning with Shadows. And as with Gimli, this card was both too strong and out of culture. Pathfinding has never been a part of the Elven culture aside from this card, and suddenly Galadriel was enabling Elves to put out an uninterrupted string of forests onto the adventure path. She could even do this for free, since the cost of her exertion could be negated by using her to heal herself. | One wonders at this point if perhaps it's the title of “Galadriel” that needs nerfed rather than any other aspect of the card. Regardless, the Big G was a problem for the Shadows path more than anything. To reduce her ability to trigger literally every turn, her ability has been turned away from herself so that she cannot self-heal, and requiring her to exert twice. Now if you want to abuse her site manipulation, you'll have to pack other means of healing. |
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Decipher Notes: The secondary function of this card is too strong for its cost, and makes the card superior in almost all situations to any other strength event. | Savagery has long been a power card that requires the Free Peoples player to play around in FOTR block. Most anti-Fellowship-size cards are at the 6 companion limit, but Savagery triggers at 5, meaning that fellowships have to either go with a meager 4 companions or risk losing a couple companions anyway to one instance of this card. The PC has opted to keep the 5 companion spotting element and eliminated the +4 strength boost that lingers to the Regroup phase as the most frustrating aspect of the card. Fierce is scary, but not as scary as one event automatically winning the fierce skirmish for you by dint of the +4 persisting. |
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Decipher Notes: This card has no cultural enforcement, may be played in addition to another weapon, and has no cost. The resulting combination provides too much utility. | Flaming Brand has no downsides to including--it is never dead weight, as it is at least a +1 strength to any Man of any culture, and potentially quite a bit more. Its dead-simple ease of use makes it an auto-include, which dumpsters Nazgul in any format where Brand is legal.
The bearer restriction has been reworked to Ranger, which allows Arwen but disallows Eomer. A twilight cost has been added to make sure it's no longer zero-downside. And then the ability has been adjusted to burn the brand to kill a nazgul for one turn--not provide an endless beatdown. Full article here. |
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Decipher Notes:
One can look at deck lists before and after The Two Towers expansion and see a sudden, sharp drop in the number of conditions used by the average Shadow build, a trend which to this day many Shadow strategies don't dare to challenge. Playing against a Dauntless Hunter deck can be particularly negative to a new player, who is usually unaware that such a powerful deck type exists to stall playing Shadow events and conditions. In Expanded formats, 5 different unbound Hobbits are there to add to Merry and Pippin, and push the power of this Legolas to the max. I don't think conditions and events clocking in at a total of 7 twilight would be the greatest playing experience. |
A simple band-aid of applying a limit of 2 means that it sticks to the original intent of "Merry and/or Pippin" without permitting half the Shire to get in on it in Expanded. |
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Decipher Notes: Not found. | Madril basically guarantees that everyone is roaming so long as there's enough threats on the table, and if everyone's roaming then Ithilien rangers have enough tools to discard those minions or otherwise deal with them, ensuring the threats never actually threaten. Thus Madril's ability is capped to an effect of +1. |
2021 Yuletide Errata
The second major batch of errata issued by the PC was done as part of the 2021 12 Days of Yuletide event, which also coincided with the first public playtest release of set V1, Shadow of the Past. These errata intended to push the boundary of what had previously been done with errata, breaking away from Decipher's restrictions further and issuing buffing errata alongside the nerf errata. Several infamous cards were targeted, as well as a number of less-well-known ones.
Some of these were tweaked in the months after release.
| Original | Errata | PC Notes |
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Corsair Marauder of course is one of the reasons Castamir of Umbar (8R51) could be so deadly, since there was little chance to keep hold on your swords and other trinkets keeping you alive. Marauder's ability effect is unchanged, but moved as a trigger to assignment. This gives the Free Peoples a chance to counter his effect by killing him in the Maneuver and Archery phases. In exchange, the ability could be triggered twice per minion if the Shadow player can find a way to make him fierce. |
2022 Errata
A handful of repair errata released in August 2022 which mostly buffed previously-nerfed cards to address some concerns of over-nerfing. And also Mountain-troll was given some well-deserved nerfs.
| Original | Errata | PC Notes |
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Corsair Marauder of course is one of the reasons Castamir of Umbar (8R51) could be so deadly, since there was little chance to keep hold on your swords and other trinkets keeping you alive. Marauder's ability effect is unchanged, but moved as a trigger to assignment. This gives the Free Peoples a chance to counter his effect by killing him in the Maneuver and Archery phases. In exchange, the ability could be triggered twice per minion if the Shadow player can find a way to make him fierce. |
2022 Yuletide Errata
Another batch of holiday errata for the 2022 Yuletide Leagues, this batch consisted of 60+ cards in two categories: major balance errata, and a rework to the Fellowship Block-era Discard Deck archetype, which aimed to eliminate the NPE of playing against it entirely.
To quote the errata remarks blog post:
A Negative Play Experience, or NPE, is different from a card being merely overpowered or too strong. An NPE is when a card or mechanic is degenerate in the sense that it contradicts the basic reason for sitting down and playing the game.
In most card games, you are (bear with me) attempting to sit down and play your cards. It’s okay if your opponent plays better cards, or plays cards more cleverly than you, but if you are made inherently unable to play your cards at all, then you have to wonder what the point was in sitting down in the first place.
Discard decks are not overpowered or difficult to beat. You simply throw out any pretense you had of coming to the table with a fine-tuned deck, you run like a madman down the site path, and you win. Or else you cling to the plan you started with, and watch your hand get disintegrated site after site, alongside your deck getting eaten away little by little, until the number of cards you didn’t play outstrips the cards you did play by a large margin.
The discard deck is not strong! It is not OP. But it makes you question why you didn’t concede immediately, even if you win. It is, in short, an NPE.
With this errata batch, we are taking a systematic approach to excising this NPE from FOTR block. We are not satisfied with deleting those cards from the game via banning, and in fact we are also not satisfied with merely blanking those cards out and replacing the text with something else entirely.
Instead, we looked to Desperate Defense of the Ring (1R244)
, which out of all of the discard cards does not feel quite so toxic, somehow. We realized that this must be because of the choice, that even though it is making you choose between two horrible results, you still have the agency to decide which is the least painful path in the moment.
Ironically, after applying this formula to each card, For balance purposes, many cards which affect the draw deck typically had their numbers increased to compensate for the fact that it was no longer a guaranteed hit. In some cases, the increase was dramatic, but that’s what it took to make it work as an alternate choice.
In addition, Free Peoples cards which discard from the draw deck have been altered to discard from the bottom of the deck instead of the top. The topdeck discard is now reserved for more offensive and targeted cards, which in practice meant every Shadow card.
With that out of the way, let’s begin:| Original | Errata | PC Notes |
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Part of the discard deck rework. Discard a random card from hand -> exhaust a companion, or else discard 2 cards at random from hand. The cost was increased to require a unique Sauron minion, as well. |
Future Errata
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