Radio Free Decipher/Episode 110 transcript
Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 110 (11 January 2002) was the first episode after the end of the Star Wars license announcement. It opens with an update on applications for the Players Committee, then covers Star Trek CCG design and The Lord of the Rings TCG news. Participants: Kyle Heuer and Evan Lorentz (hosts). Speaker turns are inferred from the captions.
Source: Broadcast 110 - Radio Free Decipher (11 January, 2002): SWCCG Player's Committee, ST/LOTR News, Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 13 May 2022; originally released 11 January 2002). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript[edit]
[00:01] Kyle Heuer: Hello everyone, welcome to the first installment of Radio Free Decipher in the new 2002.
[00:06] Evan Lorentz: Yes, welcome aboard into the new year. It's been almost a month since our last installment, on account of snow days.
[00:12] Kyle Heuer: That's right, that's right. Well, we did have these announcements, the special interview with Warren that happened right at the end of 2001.
[00:17] Evan Lorentz: I listened to it while I was on vacation. It was really cool to get to hear straight from him exactly what had happened. And this may sound strange, but some of it was really news to us in the house. You know, we knew near the end that it was going to go down that way, but a lot of the particulars were coming to us at the same time [as] getting out to you.
[00:37] Kyle Heuer: Warren was still, basically up until the 11th hour, still having a lot of conversations with Lucasfilm about the details of some of the things. I mean, even up into the very end he didn't know if we were going to be able to release the virtual cards or if we weren't, and I think he found out only days before that they weren't going to do those. And by the way, Warren has passed along that he personally has received a tremendous amount of very positive feedback from the community out there, and we've seen it, well-wishing on our message boards. It's been really a tremendous outpouring of support, and we're very, very grateful to all of you out there who love the Star Wars CCG—
[01:22] Evan Lorentz: That's right. Thanks to everyone out there, and particularly those of you who have applied for the Players Committee, that's going to keep the game alive.
[01:30] Kyle Heuer: That's right. I want to just give everybody a little bit of an update on the Players Committee. We have received close to—actually I think it's just over now—200 people wanting to help out with the Players Committee, and the selection process is underway, and there should be some sort of announcement in the near future of those people that will be part of the Players Committee. And even if you don't get selected in the initial run of the Players Committee, please understand that we are going to give all of the names of all of these people that have applied, that have shown interest in being part of the future of the Star Wars CCG, we're going to give those names to the Players Committee, and they will probably start contacting you for support and to help, and even to possibly bring you on. I mean, once it's in their hands, they can do what they want. So if you don't get selected in the initial group, you're still going to be a big part of helping design the future of the game.
[02:41] Evan Lorentz: Yeah, it's great to know that they're going to be around to see that the game does have a future, even though we're not going to be able to continue to produce cards.
[02:49] Kyle Heuer: That's right, that's right. So, good news on the Players Committee front. You should start hearing things soon. A nice story. And speaking of nice stories—you like that segue?
[03:00] Evan Lorentz: Beautiful segue, man.
[03:02] Kyle Heuer: I hear you've got a very good Star Trek anecdote for us this morning.
[03:06] Evan Lorentz: Yeah. I know that on the way to work I was sitting there thinking of how I can talk about this, and, oh, maybe not, and this and this—
[03:12] Kyle Heuer: So did you finally choose an anecdote?
[03:14] Evan Lorentz: Yeah, I did. It's interesting: we're very early in the process of bringing the motion pictures to bear. We're ways off from what would be the release date, so it's hard to know what to commit to, because we say something publicly and then it gets written in stone and such. But I thought I would share something that very clearly is very much in flux, and that is, of course, there are going to be whales in the set. [Laughter] We're actually trying our best to implement the plots of just about all the movies to some degree, and this is the whale story. So you're going to be able to save the whales. And let me tell you what a pain in the neck these whales have been.
[03:58] Kyle Heuer: Really? George and Gracie giving you some problems, huh?
[04:01] Evan Lorentz: Yeah. Basically, back in Alternate Universe, for reasons that are rather mysterious to me, it was decided that animals should be personnel cards, and a lot of grief has stemmed from that. So now we're doing George and Gracie, and they're going to be personnel cards, no surprise there—dual personnel, it's George and Gracie. But it's problems. You know, they decided to say, you know what, how much cunning does Spot the cat have? Sure. It's compounded by these whales, because, for a start, okay, how integritous is a whale? We don't know. They save the Earth, so we'll say high. How smart is a whale? Now here's where it gets interesting, because a whale is obviously one of the smartest forms of animal life out there, whales and dolphins on Earth.
[04:57] Evan Lorentz: So we look at Spot, who got two for her cunning, and it seems like, well, a whale should probably be smarter than a cat. Maybe there are some cat owners out there who will debate that, but whatever. So it seems like a whale should be smarter than a cat, so we slap three on there. Except then you look, and there are actual people with the cunning of three in the game, like Mr. Homn. So a whale would be his kind—a whale is as cunning as Mr. Homn. I don't know what that says about him. So on any one given day George and Gracie are two, and then the next day they're three, and then we have this debate all over again.
[05:33] Evan Lorentz: But the real kicker is strength. Okay, how strong is a whale? So we're trying to keep, in the interest of rules simplicity and mechanics simplicity, we're not making you build a whale tank and find the transponder frequency and beam them up. No, you kind of carry the whales around; it's easier that way. So I guess you kind of have to assume that if you're playing the whales card, you've got some sort of virtual tank, like the [unclear] in Dune had, or I don't know. So really, I guess the George and Gracie card represents this tank of whales. So they're in a tank, so how strong are they? And there are so many ways to do it. Could George and Gracie help you open an impassable door—or, I'm sorry, a malfunctioning door? Probably not, so they're not that strong. But then again, could somebody come up and beat on their cage and bust a hole in it, and then they'd die on the ground? Who knows. So then we're like, well, does the strength number we're putting on these whales represent the strength of the glass? Does it represent their ability to hop up out of the water and flop on somebody in personnel battle? What's going on here?
[06:51] Evan Lorentz: So every day—today I think George and Gracie's strength is three, combined, that is, each. I think yesterday they were four. So combined these two are stronger than some, like Pakleds—
[07:04] Kyle Heuer: A few.
[07:05] Evan Lorentz: But, you know, who could kill a whale with their bare hands, I guess, is the question. I don't know. The average Klingon warrior, maybe? Who knows. Headlock. Like I said, today they're three. I think yesterday they were four. I think the day before that, literally, they were five, and the day before that they were four again. So who knows. But the whales are a problem, so I thought I might share that.
[07:33] Kyle Heuer: It's even got to be compounded by the fact that you're putting them both on the same card, so it's not just a strength of three, but it's three plus three.
[07:41] Evan Lorentz: Well, in ways that helps, because then you can accurately represent what the strength of a whale would be, but not have them so feeble that you go and save them and then [unclear] comes up and slides a knife in them and they die. So, right. Anyway, whale stories.
[07:58] Kyle Heuer: Wow, I couldn't imagine.
[07:59] Evan Lorentz: It's kind of silly, yeah.
[08:01] Kyle Heuer: So let's talk some Lord of the Rings, because we've got a lot of Lord of the Rings news we have to share, starting with the big announcement of the errata for The Mirror of Galadriel that is effective immediately for tournament play. If you have not seen it on the website, the Mirror now has the following text: "Plays to your support area. Each Elf ally whose home is site 6 is strength +1. Fellowship: If an opponent has at least 7 cards in hand, exert Galadriel to look at 2 of those cards at random. Discard one and replace the other." So instead of being able to abuse the Mirror strategy with cards like Shoulder to Shoulder and multiple Galadriels and Celeborns in your hand to keep healing them over and over, so you can discard like four to six cards out of your opponent's hand every turn before they're able to even play those cards, now it's been brought back to where it was originally intended, and [is at a] much more manageable level of basically getting two cards out of their hand per turn.
[09:11] Evan Lorentz: Right. It's constrained by the opponent's hand.
[09:13] Kyle Heuer: So it should still be powerful, very, very playable still, very strong. You can still use cards like Curse Their Foul Feet to help get more cards out of their hand. White Arrows of Lórien, even though it happens later on, that still can hurt their hand. Cards like Far-seeing Eyes will still be able to do some damage. So it's still a very useful card in combination with others, but it's not abusable anymore.
[09:37] Evan Lorentz: And it's not that the deck was necessarily unbeatable.
[09:40] Kyle Heuer: Yeah, we actually had a lot of people respond. We've been getting a lot of feedback on these Mirror decks, and many people were saying that they were beatable, but even they said it's really negative to have to play one. I mean, basically the only thing that you can really do, if they get their engine up and running, is run ahead of them every turn, just try and outrun them to the end. Because, it's funny, because the Mirror gets cards out of your opponent's hand during the fellowship phase, it really becomes the counter to any counter cards that are made against it. Because, let's say we put a counter card for the Mirror in Mines of Moria: the Mirror can get rid of that counter card out of your hand before you have a chance.
[10:25] Evan Lorentz: Right, exactly.
[10:26] Kyle Heuer: So it becomes a little bit of a negative play experience, when you're not even able to basically play your deck strategy, where it gets stripped out of your hand before you even get a chance to play. So the Mirror should still be out there, but the nature of the deck design will change.
[10:44] Evan Lorentz: That's right, which will affect all of you deck designers who are submitting for the Designers' Challenge 2.
[10:49] Kyle Heuer: That's right, that went up on the website today, the Designers' Challenge 2. We had a very fun time in the last one, and Scott Valentine [unclear], from upstate Virginia, won the first Designers' Challenge. Now, that challenge happened, gosh, less than a week or two after the original release—
[11:10] Evan Lorentz: No, it was about a month.
[11:12] Kyle Heuer: It was about a month. But it was still like tournaments hadn't been going on for very long, and there weren't big websites up dedicated to deck design and stuff. So now you've had more months to get schooled at this game, so we expect the quality of the decks to go up significantly, which is going to help the selection process a lot. There's a nice little auto form that you fill out your deck into now, so it's all arranged nice and neatly, so that'll help a lot as well. So we look forward to those decks. And a very cool thing is that the first-place winner is going to get the very first Witch-king T-shirt, as well as a signed Aragorn, King in Exile card signed by actor Viggo Mortensen. Second place still gets the Billy Boyd–signed Pippin card. So that's really, really cool. So looking forward to all those decks, and looking forward to playing in this next tournament. We all had so much fun in the first. I don't think that I'm going to play in this one this time. You know, I got to win the last one, thanks to Scott.
[12:26] Evan Lorentz: Retire while you're on top.
[12:27] Kyle Heuer: That's right. No, but a lot of other people in the office wanted to play in it and didn't get the opportunity last time, so since there's only eight slots, I figured I'll bow out and let somebody else.
[12:38] Evan Lorentz: There you go. All right, we have a lot of Lord of the Rings–related product releases to be discussing here, so let's start with the big news that you'll be seeing next week.
[12:49] Kyle Heuer: On Tuesday we are going to be putting up the current image of the Balrog, the preview card, [and] the distribution on that. We're going to be talking about what that'll be. Some people may not have heard yet—not everybody goes to other websites to look for the most current Lord of the Rings [news]—but there is a new Balrog card that is coming out early, before the release of Mines of Moria, and there will be a story going up about it this Tuesday, and we've got special reasons why we're doing it this Tuesday. So even though some people may know the game text of the new Balrog card, this will be the first opportunity to actually see the card, see the picture, see exactly how terrifying it is. It's very cool. And you'll be able to, when you see the story on Tuesday, find out exactly how to get your hands on that card before Mines of Moria comes out, and it'll talk a little bit about what the tournament legality of the card is, and it will give you pretty hard dates on exactly when it becomes tournament legal. So do watch the website next Tuesday and witness the Balrog.
[14:13] Evan Lorentz: That is right. The starter decks—your good old Gandalf starter decks—are sold out.
[14:19] Kyle Heuer: Sold out. The demand on them has been that extreme that the warehouse has no more. We have what we've got set aside to be able to do promotions this summer when we go to the shows, and that's it. There will probably be some updated news about starter decks in the not-too-distant future, but those things we can't talk about—
[14:40] Evan Lorentz: Right, we're still laying down our plans for making starter decks available. We can say for sure there will be starter decks for Mines of Moria—
[14:47] Kyle Heuer: Yes, so you can look forward to that, if nothing else. But there are other plans being discussed. And also the deluxe starter decks are still available for a while, although I understand that those quantities are starting to get down. Well, particularly now that you won't be able to get Gandalf or Aragorn [starters].
[15:05] Evan Lorentz: Right. Well, I mean, it'll still be out there a little bit. The distributors might still have some; your local store might still be able to get them. But distributors cannot buy them from us anymore. So there still could be a significant amount being pulled through the pipeline, but if I wanted them, I would pick them up now. I would assume that the starter decks will still be not too difficult to find for the next couple of weeks, but you're starting to get around a month from now, it's probably going to start getting tough to find starter decks. So, not to create a rush, but there you have it; you are now informed.
[15:38] Kyle Heuer: I guess your other option would be if you happen to speak Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and one other I'm not sure of, because we are beginning to release foreign-language translations of the Fellowship of the Ring set.
[15:54] Evan Lorentz: That's right. And as a matter of fact, the majority of those sets will be available by the end of January in all of those various languages in those countries. You'll probably, a little while after that, see those sets go for sale on the Decipher store online. You'll be able to get the majority, if not all, of the translations through our website online.
[16:20] Kyle Heuer: That's cool. But I could be way off base here, but I think that we're going to have to pay duties and stuff to bring them back in, because they're all being printed over in Europe. So if that happens, they will be more expensive on our website, because we have to pay extra to bring them back over here. They are all being printed, I think, at Cartamundi.
[16:43] Evan Lorentz: Cartamundi, yeah. So they're very busy over there, running the press on every language. Which brings up an interesting point, which I didn't think we were going to talk about today, but I should just mention it: it's being printed in all these various different languages, so expect the championship circuit to be broadened this year, because you will probably see people at the World Championships—I mean, there's going to be a Chinese translation, so expect to see not just one Chinese representative but probably multiple Chinese representatives at the World Championship this year, as well as Israeli. There's going to be a South African championship, Brazilian; there will be a South American continental, there will be an Asia continental, there will be an African continental. Expect it to be very huge.
[17:33] Kyle Heuer: Yes, it's going to be massive this year. Not like the old days. This is truly a much larger international community than with our other games.
[17:47] Evan Lorentz: All right, exciting stuff. So next up—all right, now let's talk about the league kits. When are we now to expect them?
[17:56] Kyle Heuer: I believe it's still end of January. There was a story that went up yesterday on the website. It accompanied two cards, the Book of Mazarbul, which was a Dwarf card, and the alternate image of Balin's Tomb. If you are interested in finding other images and spoilers of the league kit cards, you can find two of them on the Game Players Network, gameplayersnetwork.com, and two of them on TheOneRing.net. So if you do want to be a part of league play—one of them is one that everybody's been looking for, which is Bill the Pony. I think Bill the Pony is up on TheOneRing.net.
[18:51] Evan Lorentz: Francis told me a very funny story about having to translate Bill the Pony into French, but it would probably lose something in my translation.
[19:00] Kyle Heuer: You were talking to me about some of the funny translations that we've had into some of the languages. My favorite was the French version of Bag End.
[19:08] Evan Lorentz: Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I have been one of the people in the TCG studio that has been proofreading the layout of the cards. Now, I don't speak all of these languages, but what we do is basically make sure that when the press sheet is arranged, it's in the same configuration as the English press sheet. So we basically look at the cards, look at the numbers, look at words that we do know, words that are close. And on some occasions—I speak some French, and Mike speaks some Spanish and some German—so we make do. But we're basically checking that everything is in the right place, and we get the fun of seeing what some of these cards look like in other languages.
[19:58] Evan Lorentz: The best one, hands down—there are three cards that are always real winners in the translation, always make us laugh. The first one is Fool of a Took. It always gets translated funny. The Italian one is stupido, and that's been the source of a lot of jokes this week. The second one is Barliman Butterbur, Prancing Pony Proprietor, and it's funny for two reasons. One is the whole "Prancing Pony Proprietor", which inevitably translates into something that will barely fit, and then the fact that, you would think Barliman Butterbur is his name, right? Don't translate it. No: when those books were originally translated, apparently the translators decided that his name needed translating. And I'm not sure of the logic behind the translations, but it's something to the effect of, oh, well, it's the word "bar", so the word for bar is this; it's the word "butter", so the word for butter is something to that effect. So it's always something that doesn't remotely resemble Barliman Butterbur. That's always funny.
[21:00] Evan Lorentz: And the third one is Bag End, because in English it's sort of a play on words, Bag End also meaning dead end, so end of the street. And then in French that became "cul-de-sac", which we're all familiar with. So if you happen to live on a cul-de-sac, congratulations, you're at Bag End. There you go. And then in other translations they decided to take the other route and go for the pun, so they tried to translate Bag End with Baggins somehow, and so in Italian it became Casa Baggins, right? Casablanca. Those three cards are inevitably pretty funny in the translation.
[21:39] Kyle Heuer: Good stuff. Anyway, enough about translation. One more really significant product release we really want to talk about, also at the end of January: January 30th is the release of the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game. This is sort of the prelude leading you into the roleplaying system, and we got a sample of it in the office this week, and it's absolutely incredible. I think we're playing this weekend, as a matter of fact.
[22:04] Evan Lorentz: Yeah. You open it up, and the character sheets are in full color, double-sided. They have images of the characters on them. They have this kind of weathered look to the layout of them. They're really awesome.
[22:16] Kyle Heuer: So yeah, we're going to be testing this out this weekend, hopefully, and maybe we'll let everybody know what we thought of it next week. So you do not want to miss the Adventure Game. We'll give you an update.
[22:28] Evan Lorentz: That's right.
[22:30] Kyle Heuer: So I think, shall we bring this 20, 30 minute epic to a halt? Did everybody catch everything? If not, go back, listen to it again, because Evan and I are so witty anyway that it's just a delight to hear us. [Laughter]
[22:44] Evan Lorentz: Yeah, right. In 2002, watch for all the big news coming up in the weeks ahead. Thanks a lot for listening. Have a great weekend.