Council of Elrond

Please share your Maxims of MECCG for new players:

• Resolve the strike against your weapon bearer first. If they die the next character can use the weapon.
• Play your allies with your wizard to prevent them from being influenced away.
• Place a card on-guard for each of your opponent's company to draw more cards.
• 12 MP cards is a good baseline when building a 30/30 card deck.
• Decide where to play your MPs while building your deck.
• Decide your dice-rolling risk threshold before you play so that you only reassess during the game.
• 2D6 roughly have: 90% chance of a 4, 80% chance of a 5, 70% chance of a 6, and 60% chance of a 7, but only 40% chance of an 8, less than 30% chance of a 9, less than 20% chance of a 10, and less than 10% chance of an 11. will happen if you avoid tapping in support.
• When rolling against your opponent (CvCC and agent attacks), your chance to beat them is 66% if up by 2 and 34% if down by 1.
• For METW get starter decks but for MELE get boosters (outdated at this point).

Of course, these are not universal truths. Just guidelines that can be followed in many situations.

Thank you very much. As a not new yet bad player myself, I wouldn't dare to add much. But I would like to convince other experienced players to share with us their thoughts.

Solid list!
I wish I could compile something so well. Oh well, I will get started.

Minimum deck size, my dude. (be it 25/25 for a 1 deck or 30/30 for a 2-deck game). Yeah but ...I don't care. Yeah, I know, but .... I don't care. Make it minimum. Period.
Repeat after me: I will play MPs every turn. (If you can't or your aren't, go back to the drawing board.
Hazard creature minimum is 12. I usually shoot for 15 or 16.
I tend to favor 2 character companies or fellowships. Hazard limits of 2 can be very frustrating. Kill the cards that let him increase that limit.
Your primary strategy is your deck resource build. Use your sideboard for hazard modification as early as you can.
That's about all this old brain can recall. And, of course, I probably ended up ignoring or forgetting about half of those while playing.

For in person game - keep your poker face. Do not give it away that you have a bad hand!

My maxims:
1. Have fun!
2. Resource and hazard portions of your deck should go hand-in-hand.
3. Smooth card flow so that you have the right cards at the right moment - and deny that to your oppponent.
4. Make your deck flexible, have backup if Plan A blows.
5. Be prepared to counter One Ring deck.
6. Each moving company should contain 1 ranger at the very least.
7. Card with less MP that can be played in relative safety is better (game result-wise) than 6 MP needing two other cards to be played BUT please also see point 1.
8. Keep in mind the "discard when a play deck is exhausted".
9. For tournaments, do not plan anything that could not be pulled out before turn 4, the game may end then (like raiding the Bag End for Red Book, Kill all But not the Halflings)

Here's another:

One of the best powers of Longbottom-leaf is that you can plan to get one card for your strategy AND a card to counter your opponent's hazards. Having something like Promptings of Wisdom in the sideboard is obvious. But you might also have something like Old Thrush for a Dragon At Home, Withdrawn to Mordor against agents, or even something basic like Dark Quarrels or Gates.

CDavis7M wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 11:09 pm Resolve the strike against your weapon bearer first. If they die the next character can use the weapon.

Something similar:

Resolve the strike against controller of ally first. If he will die, the ally will be discarded and will avoid a risk of elimination.

Yes, have fun.
If you get into an argument on the rules, think about you choosing the worse
case for yourself. Then talk about it to learn about game mechanics.
Then play the same game again with the other option.

Or you can say to your opponent: you are allowed to cancel automatic-attacks; I cannot.
let us see how this works. Is this the way the game should be played? Or has
too much changed to disallowed cancelling automatic-attacks. Experiment.

sarma72 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 24, 2022 12:09 pm For in person game - keep your poker face. Do not give it away that you have a bad hand!

Yes, I can confirm from experience that sarma72 has a good poker face ... but not as good as mine

CDavis7M wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 11:09 pm Please share your Maxims of MECCG for new players:

• Resolve the strike against your weapon bearer first. If they die the next character can use the weapon.
• Play your allies with your wizard to prevent them from being influenced away.
• Place a card on-guard for each of your opponent's company to draw more cards.
• 12 MP cards is a good baseline when building a 30/30 card deck.
• Decide where to play your MPs while building your deck.
• Decide your dice-rolling risk threshold before you play so that you only reassess during the game.
• 2D6 roughly have: 90% chance of a 4, 80% chance of a 5, 70% chance of a 6, and 60% chance of a 7, but only 40% chance of an 8, less than 30% chance of a 9, less than 20% chance of a 10, and less than 10% chance of an 11. will happen if you avoid tapping in support.
• When rolling against your opponent (CvCC and agent attacks), your chance to beat them is 66% if up by 2 and 34% if down by 1.
• For METW get starter decks but for MELE get boosters (outdated at this point).

Of course, these are not universal truths. Just guidelines that can be followed in many situations.

Thanks especially for the tip about the wizard controlling agents - didn't know this. Makes me want to play Gandalf + Shadofax even more!

If you can't play it this turn or the next, discard it. There's no sense in a "good" card clogging up your hand and keeping you from getting things you can actually use.