Коллекционная карточная игра «Властелин колец»

Collectible card game
the trading card game by Decipher

The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game (a. k. a. LOTR TCG) is an out of print collectible card game produced by Decipher, Inc. Released November 2001, it is based on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and the J. R. R. Tolkien novel on which the films were based. Decipher also had the rights to The Hobbit novel but did not release any cards based on it. In addition to images taken from the films, in 2004 Weta Workshop produced artwork depicting characters and items from the novel absent from the films for use on cards. In 2002, LOTR TCG won the Origins Awards for Best Trading Card Game of 2001 and Best Graphic Presentation of a Card Game 2001. Decipher's license to The Lord of the Rings expired on July 30, 2007, after which all official promotion and distribution of the game stopped. The game also had an online version that maintained identical gameplay as well as a market economy. However, since the game's print run has ended, sales for online cards have been stopped and the servers closed in June 2010.

The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game is a game for two or more players, each of who uses his or her own deck consisting of equal numbers of Free Peoples and Shadow cards, with a minimum of 30 of each. On a player's turn they are considered to be the Free Peoples player and their Fellowship and Free Peoples cards both in their Support Area and on their characters are active. A player uses his Free Peoples cards to attempt to traverse the site path and destroy the One Ring by reaching the ninth site. Each of his or her opponents, the Shadow Players, use their Shadow cards to prevent this by attempting to kill or corrupt the ring bearer, or by forcing the Fellowship to slow down long enough for their Fellowship to race to victory. At the end of each turn the position of Free Peoples player rotates to the next player in turn. The game is won by the first Free Peoples player to survive to the ninth, and final, site or the last player whose Fellowship is left alive or when you corrupt the opposing fellowships ring bearer. An innovative mechanic called the twilight pool is used as a costing mechanism for cards. Each card has a numerical cost (which can be zero). When the Free Peoples player plays a card, tokens are added to the twilight pool equal to the cost of that card. The Shadow players, however, remove twilight tokens equal to the twilight cost of their cards in order to play their cards. Thus the more powerful cards the Fellowship the Free Peoples player plays, the greater the threat from the Shadow players. Each Free People and Shadow card belonged to a specific culture such as Gondor, Gollum or Isengard with cards within a culture complementing or even requiring one another, but players were free to construct their decks with a mix of cards from any culture. Throughout a game, a player will play companions (or Free People characters) to help defend the ring bearer. When it is his turn to play as the Shadow player, he then can play minions (or Shadow characters) to attack the opponent's companions. The Free People's player (the defender) has the opportunity to choose which of his companions will fight in one to one duels, called skirmishes, with the opponent's minions. This is called assignment. Since the Free Peoples player wants to defend his ring bearer, the only way a Shadow player can attack the Free Peoples player is by playing more minions than the Free Peoples player has companions, thus allowing the Shadow player to assign extra minions to any companion he chooses, including the ring bearer, or by using minions whose game text allows the Shadow player to assign them to the ring bearer. The character in a skirmish with less strength takes a wound, but if the total difference in strength is double or higher, the losing character is killed immediately instead. Other types of cards are possessions that character can bear to gain additional bonuses, conditions that retain their effect until they are discarded and events, which are discarded immediately after being used. However, the Ring bearer does not only face minions on his journey to destroy the Ring. The Ring bearer has to resist the temptation of the Ring. In the trading card game, when the ring bearer succumbs to the temptation of the Ring, burdens are added and most versions of the One Ring enable the Ring bearer to take burdens instead of impending wounds. Each companion has a given resistance stat, and whenever a burden is added, each companion's resistance is lowered by one. Once the ring bearer's resistance reaches zero, he is corrupted by the power of the ring and the player is eliminated from the game.

When the game's run had ended in mid 2007, nineteen sets in total had been released. Three of expansions (Expanded Middle earth Deluxe Draft Box, The Wraith Collection, and Age's End) were not available in booster packs.

For the first three years the game's releases followed the movies. A 365 "base set" was released each November containing material from the upcoming movie. These were followed by two 122 card expansions at four month intervals. Each base set and the following two expansions formed a "block" named for that base set. Cards were sold in eleven card booster packs consisting of one rare, three uncommon and seven common cards. In approximately one in six packs a common was replaced by a foiled version of a random card from that set. Each set also had two sixty three card starter decks containing two copies of a promotional face card, three random rares and sixty fixed commons/uncommons (sets 5 and 6 had sixty card starters with three alternate image rares in place of the random rares). Between the second and third expansions of The Return of the King block an extra set, Reflections, was released. This consisted of 52 new cards, all foiled, half of which were designated rare plus and half rare. The new cards took material from all three films and material produced by Weta specifically for the game and did not belong to any block. Reflections boosters contained two of the new cards (with one R+ every 2.4 packs) and sixteen repackaged random cards from the first six sets. One of these old cards was always non English.

In November 2004 the new base set, Shadows, marked an overhaul to the game. All sets would contain sixty rare, uncommon, and common cards each, in addition to a varying amount of fixed cards, only available in Starter Decks. Instead of foiling every card, each expansion would only have eighteen pre selected rare foil cards that would be randomly inserted into one out of every seven booster packs. Shadows also had four, rather than two, different starter decks. The material used for the cards would also cover the entire trilogy instead of being tied to the films' releases. Additionally, a system of rotation was announced to be introduced to the game. Starting in March 2005, the entire Fellowship block ceased to be legal for use in the Standard tournament format. Then, each November, the oldest block remaining would also be "rotated out". Decipher claimed this helped keep the card pool down to a manageable size and would keep established players buying new cards. Detractors claimed it was a money grab and did not like being forced to purchase what they felt were inferior cards.

As the game expanded beyond the first base set, several basic deck strategies were identified and developed. As decks are separated into Shadow and Free People sides, the two sides are to some extent interchangeable, but the best decks usually contain some synergy between both types of cards. Later sets have introduced multiple additional keywords and mechanics and greatly increased the pool of available cards, massively expanding the possibilities for unique strategies, often depending on a specific card. For the Free Peoples side, the common basic strategies are tank, choke, minion wounding and mass healing. Tank Tank decks try to play as many companions as possible to combat the opponent's Shadow side with force. Choke Choke decks, the opposite of tank decks, try to put out as little twilight as possible, denying the opponent resources to play their minions, and clogging their hand with unplayable Shadow cards, thus hampering the set up of their Fellowship. Archery/Wounding Minion wounding decks try to use "archery fire" and direct wounding to destroy the minions before they even have a chance to attack. Mass Healing Mass healing decks rely on the cards that heal companions, with the expectation that if the Free People's removal of wounds can out pace the Shadow player's placement of wounds, the Fellowship will be unkillable. For the Shadow side, the common basic strategies are beat down, swarm, bomb, companion wounding and corruption. Beat down Beat down decks focus on making one or two minions very powerful with big damage bonuses, with the intention of killing all of the companions one by one; eventually killing the ring bearer. Swarm Swarm decks have an opposite strategy of a beat down: their goal is to play as many minions as possible as cheaply as possible. While one swarm minion might not be very powerful by itself, each minion is very cheap which allows many to be played, easily outnumbering the companions and assigning themselves to the Ring bearer. Bomb A bomb deck combines the strategies of both beat down decks and swarm decks. Instead of focusing on one or two powerful minions, they play several minions of medium strength. The goal of a bomb deck is to destroy the weaker companions, and then swarm the Free Peoples player. Archery/Wounding Archery and wounding decks rely on wounding companions outside of the skirmish so much that they die from their wounds. A variation of this strategy focuses on wounding the ring bearer and killing him. Corruption Corruption decks focus on adding enough burdens to corrupt the ring bearer, or playing cards that require certain conditions to be met to corrupt the ring bearer outright. Discard Used by both Free People and Shadow sides, discard decks focus on discarding cards from either your opponent's hand or their draw deck, disrupting their strategy and eventually leaving them with no cards to oppose you in later turns.

In 2003 Worlds Apart partnered with Decipher to produce an online version of the Lord of the Rings TCG. The online game's rules matched the physical game's rules, but utilized tradeable virtual cards that could be purchased through the system via starter decks, booster packs, or in draft. In addition to casual play, the online LOTR TCG system supported tournament play, league play, and sealed play including draft. The online system introduced a number of cards and formats that were online only (for example, King block draft packs), and offered players exclusive physical promotional cards and online avatars and movement tokens for participating in online events. The LOTR Online TCG software included collection management and robust deckbuilding features. For this reason alone many players have used the software to construct decks and print decklists. In 2005 Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) bought Worlds Apart, but continued to support LOTR Online TCG. On May 22, 2007 SOE Decipher announced the closure of all support for the Online gaming system. Lolli used a unique deck designed to pass the ring from Frodo to Sam, and deny twilight to its opponent. Almost all of the top players were using later banned card called The Mirror of Galadriel, and Lolli used that strategy against his opponents designing a Minion half of the deck to counteract it.

There has been much debate as to the legitimacy of the 2007 World Champions (Vince Accetturo & Chris Thompson). Since the rights to produce the Lord of the Rings TCG was not renewed by Decipher, there was no legal way for the company to promote a World Championship, but they did still hold an unofficial event where the 2007 World Champions were crowned. The event was still held in Indianapolis, IN at GenCon on Friday, August 17, 2007 at 11:00 AM. The field was bested by Vince Accetturo and Chris Thompson, both members of the player group Team Bison Bucks. They decided to split the championship in the finals.

With no official governing body for the game existing for years after 2007, no official World Championships could be held. No group stepped up to attempt an unofficial World Championship event until 2010 when the Star Wars CCG Players Committee decided to run a de facto World Championship for Lord of the Rings at their annual Worlds Weekend event. Brian Fred was crowned champion as the only undefeated player at the event, in which close to 20 players participated.

With the establishment of the Player's Council in 2020 (see below), an organization finally existed that could claim the right to once again crown a World Champion. In 2023 the first all digital World Championship was held on the Gemp platform over weekends in October of that year. 30 players competed worldwide, ultimately leading to basmelis being declared the World Champion, with the runner up thefaker being dubbed the World Challenger.

On May 22, 2007, Decipher announced that the game's official lifetime would be expiring later that year, with no further product to be produced or sold after the end of June 2007. Fans were eager to establish a "Players Committee" to continue managing the game (which would mirror the official group established for the Star Wars CCG or the unofficial one made by fans for the Star Trek CCG), but that conflict over whether to pursue an "official" or "unofficial" avenue stymied every attempt to organize for many years. The mass quarantines during the COVID 19 pandemic resulted in a resurgence of interest in the game (as it did for many others during that time), and riding that wave a group in the "unofficial" camp finally overcame the historical friction and organized under the name of the "Player's Council" in 2020. The PC quickly subsumed the various scattered community websites dedicated to the LOTR TCG, and took on the upkeep and maintenance of the card database, the dedicated wiki, and other tools and platforms. In 2023, the PC ran the first World Championship in 13 years on the digital platform Gemp, crowning basmelis as the new World Champion.