A Fire in His Veins 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

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

Theme: Boromir

Played Against: Nightmare The Blood of Gondor

"Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten. By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West."

—Boromir, The Council of Elrond, The Fellowship of the Ring

Strategy

This is a thematic take on the Boromir / Blood / Fire combo deck.

I built this deck before Boromir's errata, but even post-errata it's effective at handling large numbers of Enemies—and it can Siege quest with the best of them. It would be useful as a strong combat deck in multiplayer.

The key combo is to get Boromir set up with Blood of Númenor, Gondorian Fire, and Steward of Gondor. Then Denethor passes his resource over to his son for a total of 4 resources for Boromir each turn. Once the combo has been running for a couple of turns, Boromir becomes an unstoppable force. And if Steward of Gondor is a little late to the party, Boromir can use Captain's Wisdom effortlessly, simply by raising my threat by 1 during the Resource phase.

Most of the Allies in the deck are primarily used for chump blocking in the early game before the combo gets set up. When combined with Valiant Sacrifice, they turn into card draw, too, to help find the missing parts of the combo, and when combined with Horn of Gondor they can help generate some extra resources to fuel Boromir's engine of death.

The most important card in the deck turns out to be Gondorian Fire, since it's the only major source of extra attack power in the deck, whereas every other part of the combo has some form of backup. For that reason, Gondorian Fire is the card for which I mulligan, unless I have a great hand that brings together all of the other parts of the puzzle. In practice, if I get Gondorian Fire, I can usually keep the momentum going for a while until the rest of the combo clicks into place.

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