Getting started in The Lord of Rings Adventure Card Game can be an overwhelming experience. There’s a lot going on and one of the most fundamental ways to improve your chances against Sauron is to collect new cards to add to your pool to give you more options when it comes to deck building. This article will outline all of the different ways that you can add new cards to your collection.

Fellowship Card Pool

The fellowship card pool is available to all players and are acquired using the aptly named Fellowship Points (FP) which are the in-game currency you get for completing quests. You can view the cards available to you by navigating to the deck builder from the main menu and toggling the Owned filter; the cards that you have yet to unlock will be greyed out.

Fellowship cards Collections of fellowship cards get released periodically out of cycle with adventures and encounters and have historically contained four cards for each sphere and a neutral. Since you are getting about 2000 FP for each successful quest, it shouldn’t take very long to pickup these, though there are some that you should pickup straight away. But that’s a whole different article 😉

Hero Card Pack

When each hero is released they come as a “pack” which has got a card from each sphere that lines up with their character thematically. These cards are viewed in the deck builder the same way as fellowship cards, but you get two copies of each of the cards in the pack when you unlock that hero so you can save your FP for other cards.

Hero card packs A hero for each sphere gets released alongside each campaign which is a paid DLC. This can be problematic in a way, because there are some very strong cards not available to players who only have the core game, such as Glorfindel and Imladris Minstrel and is only bypassed by paying for the new content.

Quest and Campaign Rewards

There are cards that you unlock by completing quests and encounters for the first time, as well as a “bonus” card for completing the campaign which are pseudo surprises that I won’t spoil explicitly here. You will unlock two copies of each of these cards by completing the associated quest on any difficulty (yes, even narrative is fine here). You can view the rewards for each quest on the campaign map and viewing the quest rewards tab.

Quest rewards It might seem obvious, but to be able to unlock the reward you need to have accessed to the quest itself. At the time of writing, this isn’t such a big deal as there is only a single paid campaign and the first quest is freely available, however there are some cornerstone cards in amongst the current selection of rewards like Northern Survivor, granting some much needed willpower to leadership and Honeycomb, allowing non lore decks some access to healing.

If you haven’t done it yet, make sure that you finish the tutorial quest Flight Through Darkness because the tutorial campaign reward is a very handy card that is often overlooked!

Hero Awards

Another slightly obscured method to expand your card pool is to complete the challenge for each hero. You can have a look at what they are by navigating to the hero’s card in the deck builder and drilling down into Hero Award icon above the card. Note that at the time of writing, you were able to see the challenge and the card award however you were not able to track your progress towards it. This is made even more obscure by the fact that these cards are not visible in the deck builder prior to being unlocked.

“It will not be our end but His.” – Aragorn The challenges themselves vary in difficulty, from filling all seven character slots on your board with different dwarves to the fiendishly challenging take eight actions with a character in a single round. Others like Arwen and Legolas’ are just pure grind which is where the frustration around not being able to track progress becomes apparent. The challenges can be completed on any difficulty on any non-tutorial quest. It’s worth noting that you need to complete the quest for the progress to count towards your hero award.

If you’ve not worked it out already, increasing your available card pools is the easiest way to increase your likelihood of success in The Lord of Rings Adventure Card Game. So much so that in the encounters or on Challenging difficulty, you’d have to be a veteran player and still have a considerable amount of luck to come out successful. Hopefully this article has highlighted the different ways that you can expand your card pool and encouraged you to chip away at some of those more challenging encounters and hero challenges.