Ally Cost Value

After seeing that the designers of LOTR LCG had used a formula (most of the time) to calculate the Threat Cost of each Hero card, I wondered whether a formula had also been used to calculate the Resource Cost of each Ally card. After all, both Heroes and Allies are characters which share the same stats of Willpower, Attack, Defence and Health. Could it be broken down into numbers?

After a bit of trial and error, I worked out that a formula for predicting the Resource Cost of an Ally was:

Predicted Cost = (Willpower + Attack + Defence + Health) / 2

This is basically the same formula for calculating Hero Threat Costs except it is divided by two.

This formula is not spotted as easily as the Hero one because Allies vary a lot more than you would expect. With this formula, only about a third of all the Allies released so far (up to the end of the Ring Maker Cycle) match their predicted Cost Value 100%.

So is this formula for Allies less certain that the ones we have used for Heroes? No. Because although most of the 125 Allies released so far do not get a Cost Value score of 100%, the average of all their Cost Value scores is 100%!

So, just as with the Hero Threat Value, we want to compare the Predicted Cost with the one printed on the card to work out whether we are getting good "value for money" for this Ally when we play it. The formula to find an Ally Cost Value is:

Ally Cost Value = Predicted Resource Cost / Printed Resource Cost

The result is shown as a percentage. A result higher than 100% is good, a result lower than 100% is bad, and a result of exactly 100% is perfectly average.

For an example, take the card Longbeard Orc Slayer from the Core Set:

Predicted Cost = (Willpower + Attack + Defence + Health) / 2 = (0 + 2 + 1 + 3) / 2 = 6 / 2 = 3
Ally Cost Value = Predicted Cost / Printed Cost = 3 / 4 = 75%