The Secret Fire 1.0

• Versions
• 2.0
• 1.0

This is a thematic deck built for an ongoing series on my blog, Darkling Door.

Theme: The Fellowship of the Ring

Played Against: Nightmare Shadow and Flame

"'You cannot pass,' he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. 'I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.'"

—Gandalf, The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm, The Fellowship of the Ring

Strategy

This is a Secrecy deck built specifically to beat Shadow and Flame.

The entire deck is based on the fact that the quest reduces my threat to 0 at the start of the game. This grants me two advantages:

1. I can use the Secrecy cards Timely Aid and Resourceful to help me get expensive Allies out quickly
2. I can use Frodo Baggins' ability to turn the Balrog's hefty damage output into threat raises, giving me the ability to tank attacks round after round with little danger

I generally mulligan for Timely Aid, because that allows me to get a powerful Ally like Boromir, Gimli, or Legolas down on turn 1. In the early game, these Allies are critical for helping me to deal with the small-to-moderate sized Enemies which sometimes come off the top of the encounter deck to harass me. In the late game, I'm going to need as much as I can get so that I can deal enough damage to the Balrog that it can't just heal it off right away.

When I can't cancel the Balrog's attacks with cards like The Wizards's Voice or Feint, Frodo is always the defender. If the Balrog gets an extra attack during the questing phase, I generally take the attack undefended and use Frodo to convert the whole thing into a massive threat gain. boosts like Dúnedain Warning and Arwen Undómiel's ability go on Frodo to reduce the amount of threat gained each round. Even though it starts at 0, threatting out is still the biggest danger this deck faces; boosting Frodo's helps me buy a little more time.

The other key card in this deck is Gandalf's Staff. While Frodo's ability to cancel the Balrog's damage does render many of the shadow effects in it's special Nightmare Shadow Effect Deck moot, a few of them (like the one that deals it 3 Shadow Cards from the regular deck) can still cause serious problems. Gandalf's Staff allows me to discard the Balrog's shadow card consistently every turn, before it has the chance to do any damage. This allows me to weather many attacks over the course of the game without a worrying about a stray shadow effect resetting me back to square one.

EDIT: Warden of Anor pointed out that Gandalf's Staff can only discard shadow cards from non-unique Enemies, meaning that Durin's Bane doesn't actually qualify. The deck seems to work fine with Hasty Stroke instead, though. Seems the staff wasn't such a key card after all!

► For more analysis, check out my blog post on this deck.