I spent my honeymoon in New Zealand dragging my wife from Gollum's fishing hole to the valley where Isengard was located.
Ayyy, samesies. But I'm from NZ, so it probably cost us less - we were strapped for cash, but we're also both LotR nerds so it suited us perfectly. To the point where on of our tour guides invited us into his Middle Earth society and the rest of the tourists spent like half the day getting not a word in past us
Honestly, I care less about this than I thought I would. Partially because WotC has shat the bed pretty well on their own lore in recent sets anyway (lookin at you War of the Spark), and partially because it's just not that critical.
Addressing some of the stuff I've seen come up in this thread:
- WotC are already out to make money, whenever they sell you cards, whatever is on the face of them. It literally doesn't matter what the IP is, they're a business first and foremost.
- Is this selling out? Well, maybe, but at the very least we've seen tropes for years, so they've been edging towards it for a while. Do I care? Well, I love Middle Earth (I'm listening to the Silmarillion audiobook while I jam some work out rn) so not really, I'm kind of in.
- Power creep: Are these cards going to be busted? Probably not, but if they are, how is that different to
Oko, Thief of Crowns,
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath,
Omnath, Locus of Creation,
Koma, Cosmos Serpent,
Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, more or less any Simic mythic in the last 2 years,
Golos, Tireless Pilgrim, Eldraine brawl commanders, need I go on? To paraphrase The Two Towers film, you seek to avoid war, yet war is already upon you. They're not going to be any worse than what we get from R&D today with the game's inherent lore. In fact, the last couple of releases (Commander Legends and to some degree Kaldheim) have been a little more restrained in design. So there's a pretty good chance these will be relatively balanced if R&D is aiming the way they appear to be aiming. The point is it really doesn't matter what the IP is, when you've had more bannings in the last year over multiple formats than the previous five years combined, what's it to ya? Sure, there's a chance some of these cards push out your ol' faithfuls in terms of being strictly better, but that's part of exploring different design space anyway, and that's inevitable with a game that constantly introduces new parts and mechanics.
- LotR art design - I'm down for Bakshi,
so long as the Gondorians are wearing pants. A case could be made for Rankin/Bass, but honestly I kind of just hope they take the lore and allow some really great artists to make it exquisite. I'd like to see what Rebecca Guay could do with it, Chris Rahn I like too, everyone has their faves. If they have to go thematic with representation from previous franchises, Allan Lee would be nice (without going for actual movie footage; his concept art is top notch).
Honestly as a fan of one of these IPs my biggest hope (knowing that it's inevitable and they're going to do it anyway) is that they do the franchise I love (and the other that I know nothing about) justice in their representations. For Middle Earth it's going to really depend how far down the rabbit hole they go. I hope they go all the way, because getting an Ungoliant, Melkor/Morgoth, Feanor, Hurin, Balrogs, a Witch-King (I've always looked at
Kulrath Knight and thought of WKoA) and so forth would be awesome. Beren and Luthien as partners would be wicked cool. A TDFC Smeagol/Gollum would be perfect - hell, you could do the same with the ring itself - beautiful on its own, once equipped it transforms or something. I doubt they will go all in on every piece of lore considering how deep Tolkien went, but so long as the representation is good I'm ok with it. In a way, I'd be less happy with skins. Like
Sol Ring - sure, it looks the same as the one ring, but it's not a very good representation of what the ring actually is or does.
I'm a little sad that vorthos decks are going to be less imagination-driven moving forward; there's going to be less motivation to say 'this
Llanowar Elves is Haldir' rather than just running a Haldir card, but that doesn't mean it isn't still possible to do that. If you want your deck to stay true to your representations and your flavour, run what you like, you've already sacrificed competition for theme anyway.
I guess my two cents boils down to 'I'm happy to just see what happens here'. Do I want to end up playing, years from now, a Double Whopper with cheese commander deck against your Chicken Nuggies and a large Coke? Hell no, but slippery slope arguments are not a great way to view the world or to extrapolate. My ethics lecturer used to tell us slippery slope debates always end up with Nazis, so just don't use them. Same goes here - there's no genuine evidence that this is a horrible thing, it could be great. There's a chance it could herald the sky falling, but I have a feeling that isn't going to be the case.