Bryon said:

well there are times you will have a lot of cards in hand (e.g. Escape from Dol Guldur, one ally per turn) and it is perfectly normal to draw and keep over the initial hand size of 7

I'd love to have the rule of 4, at least it was not a problem to me when I was playing the decipher Lotr TCG

Drawing caps would kind of suck since it's another thing to remember. Not hard to do, just annoying.

I think in a perfect world I'd just like a hand limit you must discard down to at the end of a round. However that doesn't stop this deck at all so it would have to be in addition to some errata.

Where does "Master of Lore" come? I can't find it on lotrlcg.com

On the other hand I get the point that it's "not fun" that many are making, but keep in mind that FFG is trying to get this game into competitive and these combos aren't good for that…

Maggical said:

Master of Lore just came out in the Heirs of Numenor box.

Let's say…if I'm interesting in infinite combos to break the game, I'll go back to play Magic the Gathering

Y'know, this will be laughed off, but it occurs to me that something does stand in the way of this combo… it is the real, physical world!

To make this combo work, you have to discard Born Aloft -- actually, physically put it in the discard pile -- pick up Hammersmith, grab a resource token, play the Hammersmith, pay that resource token, draw a card, take Born Aloft out of the discard pile, play it on the Hammersmith…. I mean, actually physically do those actions.  

I am guessing that this is not happening.  More like, once one has the combo on the table, he says "ok, let's say I cycled through that 40 times, and now I'll just draw my whole deck."  

If you consider the physical act of manipulating cards a compulsory part of the ruleset, this is a highly unappealing combo, even as powerful as it is.  Imagine a competitive environment though -- people would train to cycle this combo quickly!  And how awesome would it be to see some guy do this and draw his whole deck in under a minute?!

GrandSpleen said:

Lol yeah, I do go through the motions a few times so everyone can understand what it is exactly that I'm doing, but then I just skip to the part where I have my whole deck. Repeat for the part where I get infinite resources, let everyone else draw their whole deck, loop other events, etc.

Though I'd think at a game night or something more formal, you'd be glad for me to skip over the "physical" act of doing it if you are at my table so that you aren't sitting there for 30 minutes waiting while I go through every motion. Lol, that would suck, but would be a funny rule to enforce. I'm confident I could do everything & have enough resources in maybe under 20 minutes if I tried, but that'd still suck horribly for everyone.

Just wanted to point out that, although we're saying this combo is an example of a broken ruleset, you actually have to "cheat" … in a soft sense of the word… to make it bearable :)

GrandSpleen said:

since there is no loop rules or infinite rules like MtG, I'll anyone playing this deck to do every step of their infinite combo, including each deck shuffling, as a punishment