Deck Tech: Elrond, Elf-Friend

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chrsjxn 4881

Hey everyone,

Inspired by some brief discussion on the various Elf archetypes in LOTR, I decided to build on the jankiest of Elf synergies: Silvan Tracker!

Elf-friend gives anyone you want the Silvan trait, and Elrond amps up the healing.

Deck Strategy:

The core of the deck is Big Elrond, to borrow a Hearthstone naming convention. Steward of Gondor on Elrond, plus resources from Théodred and Arwen Undómiel mean we can play hefty allies very fast. And the deck is full of them.

To help support that, Light of Valinor is for Elrond, so he can quest and defend once we get our healing online. Envoy of Pelargir helps us shift resources, so the deck can play Steward, even if Theodred only has one resource.

The best second target for Elf-friend is probably Treebeard. Unfortunately, Silvan Tracker is worded to avoid readying and healing during the round, but Treebeard can still take a 7 power attack and heal up quickly with the combo online.

Final Thoughts:

Playing this against The Steward's Fear, I'm reminded of just how good Elrond's ability to pay for any ally is. Slap on extra resource generation, and the value grows immensely.

Of course, this healing combo is inefficient, even if it is automatic and relatively safe. You could very easily swap in Warden of Healing and Vilya, instead of Silvan Tracker and Elf-friend, for a stronger deck.

And, turns out, Galdor of the Havens with Arwen is very strong. Who would have guessed...

You can watch the video of my quest against The Steward's Fear on youtube here, or look for my other decks here on ringsdb!

3 comments

Dec 20, 2017 stokesbook 3004

@chrsjxn Do you think you can make any deck work around your 'deck skeleton' cards like Theodred, Steward, Rod, Runes? When we get stuff like Necklace of Girion do you think your 'skeleton' will change significantly?

Dec 20, 2017 chrsjxn 4881

@stokesbook Yeah, there's definitely a consistent skeleton in my quick deckbuilds. I think largely because I like expensive allies, and I post and play decks without a ton of playtesting. So those cards get the deck to a reasonable place easily.

I do have a few decks bouncing around in my brain that don't use all/most of the skeleton, in case you're bored of these cards.

I'm not sure what's going to unseat them, though. Daeron's Runes is great deck filtering if you have access to lore. Steward of Gondor is the easiest, least restricted resource generation in the game. Rod of the Steward is the best draw in leadership, sadly.

And I just like Théodred. I'm not sure I've convinced people he's a good hero yet, though.

Dec 20, 2017 stokesbook 3004

@chrsjxnI wouldn't say bored, I just think it's a good example of a weak area of the game that these cards in your skeleton are kind of 'elemental' to building a good deck at this point. All the decks you post around them work really well, very efficiently, in fact i'd say the skeleton you use is probably the most efficient as it gives you a pretty solid resource/draw engine in a very small number of cards.

I think exo-skeleton might be a better description as it seems like you can graft that engine on to 'any' deck force a sub-par deck to work, so was curious if there were any deck archetypes you'd tried it with and it still just doesn't work. Anyway, mostly irrelevant to this specific deck I was just impressed with how you still get some variety around a pretty static skeleton