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 4 cards included with The Countdown Collection and 5 cards used in The Weta Collection. The term fell out of use when the marketing for those collections ran its course, but more characters were made than what was originally announced, and their release was sprinkled throughout later sets.
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, senior designer at Weta, gathered up these concepts and spearheaded the creation of more ideas for characters 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 most of those articles have been recreated here on the wiki:
Weta also contributed digital art and CGI images for some cards at a later date, including the Barrow-wights of The Wraith Collection and the Horror of Harad (14R13)
.
Identifying
Sharp-eyed fans will be able to recognize characters that don't show up at all in the films, but for the rest of us there is a more plain indicator used: Book Cards designed by Weta are marked in the lower right-hand corner of the game text box with a Weta cricket, the logo for Weta Workshop:
There were additional card images photographed while Decipher was in New Zealand capturing the Book Cards, but for the most part Decipher declined to mark those cards with the Weta symbol. These include the images used for Ithil Stone (9R+47)
and Seeing Stone of Minas Anor (9R37)
, as the props used were all utilized in the films themselves; the only new thing being done was the modeling and posing.
