Delve Greedily, and Deep! 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Originally, this deck started as an attempt to make good use of Dori in a Solo deck. What I landed on was a Dwarven mining deck on steroids. I haven't had this much fun with Dwarves in a long time!

I tuned this deck against the Nightmare versions of the three Khazad-Dum decks (Into the Pit, The Seventh Level, and Flight from Moria), and got a better than 50% win ratio on all of them.

General Strategy

You're going to dump your entire deck into your discard pile at least once, maybe twice. Be careful until you get a copy of Will of the West in your hand and Narvi's Belt down on Bifur--but then start dumping your deck with impunity until you've seen every copy of Hidden Cache and Ered Luin Miner. Longbeard Sentry can help to this end, dumping two cards per phase.

Then use Will of the West and do it all again.

It takes a turn or two to gather enough to quest comfortably, but due to the snowball effect of A Very Good Tale once things get rolling you should be able to maintain your army pretty easily. If you need to chump, use an Ered Luin Miner since you'll probably see him again on your next go through the deck.

Dori

So what does Dori do for this deck? Well, the reason he's so widely panned is that he's got two main competitors: Beregond (who is a better defender than Dori) and Gimli (who is a better quester and attacker than Dori).

What does Dori have on Beregond? Well, he's a Dwarf, so we'll have to use that. Enter Erebor Record Keeper, which gives us easy readying for Dori as long as we're willing to pay for it. Bifur makes it even easier to trigger this effect. It would be harder to find readying for Beregond in this particular deck. Furthermore, Dori has 3 and 2 when paired with Dain, which makes him a serviceable attacker or quester when needed (mostly in the early game).

But what does Dori have on Gimli? Well, he's a generalist. In the early game, he's not much worse than Gimli at providing attack power. In the late game, our Erebor Battle Masters are perfectly capable of handling the offense, but what we really need is help with defending so we don't lose our ally army.

The primary defender of this deck is actually Dain. What happens next depends on the situation:

• Big enemy with 5+ attack > Use Dori to bolster Dain's
• Two small enemies > Use Dori to defend one
• Attack power needed > Hold Dori back, use a Record Keeper to ready Dain, and use Dori to attack

Side note: Unthematic though it may be, Armored Destrier is incredible on Dain

Sideboard

When I played this deck, I actually played with the sideboard in the deck as well. These are just the cards I felt after the fact could be cut to get the deck down to 50 cards. Feel free to play with or without them as suits your fancy.