Triple Action Ranger Relief! 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Steed of the North is the card that glues this deck together, along with action advantage in heroes from Aragorn and Halbarad, as well as from the attachment Wingfoot. In full swing you get:

1) 2 standard actions for each Ranger hero (quest, then either defend or attack) 2) 1 "fancy" action.

Typically I put the first Steed on Damrod (sometimes on Halbarad). Wingfoot goes on Damrod. Dúnedain Warnings are for Halbarad, and Aragorn gets his toys Celebrían's Stone and Sword that was Broken. He also gets Steward of Gondor and the last Steed if you get that many.

Then: all three quest. Aragorn uses his ability, Halbarad does not exhaust because you have Forest Snared an enemy, and Damrod uses Wingfoot. After questing, this is your chance to use a "fancy" action. This is an action that results from a card effect, like requirements for a Travel effect, or player cards not featured in this deck: Athelas, Expert Trackers, Mariner's Compass, Distant Stars, etc..

This deck turned out waaaaay better than I originally hoped. It's still not a top tier deck, but it does the work and, high marks for this part: it's quite fun to play. One of its strengths is its flexibility, it can be easily transmuted into a different deck. More on that at the end.

In this deck, Guarded Ceaselessly (also known as Power in the Earth 2.0) covers all of your 'fancy' actions (note that you can exhaust multiple Rangers for a single Guarded Ceaselessly, at need, or you can put multiple in play and spread the threat reduction around).

Reducing threat from locations, rather than exploring them, is a budding strategy and I must say it's been more effective than I thought. Why do this? Well:

1) You avoid travel. This means you avoid Travel effects, Forced effects that trigger when the location becomes active, and you avoid the quest points on the location, so progress tokens can be placed directly on the quest.
2) If you don't explore locations, you avoid any Forced effects that trigger when you explore the location. These have become very common lately. 3) You neatly sidestep the all too common issue of locations being immune to progress while in the staging area. 4) Leaving threat in the staging area, then reducing it at will, gives you flexibility in questing. Think of this like "I can flexibly add between 2 and 6 willpower every turn." This gives you the freedom to advance, or not advance, to the next stage of the quest as you see fit.

You'll still want to travel to some locations, and other decks on the table might be handling location control as well, but this deck has a pretty effective contribution. That was a major aside, but Guarded Ceaselessly is not a card that ever hits the table, so I needed to extol its virtues.

The "shell" of the deck is: Steed of the North with heroes who have action advantage-granting abilities. They do need to be Rangers, but if you're feeling combo-happy you can now include #Doughty Ranger and then anyone is a target. Beyond that, you can fill the deck out at need. In this incarnation, I put in a preference for allies with the statline 2-cost, 1-willpower, 2-attack for maximum flexibility. You have questing and combat well covered and you have plenty of resources to manage it. I've also run it as a primarily attachment/voltron deck (A Burning Brand, Armored Destrier etc.), a deck more focused on Dunedain allies (Heir of Valandil, Ranger Summons for Ranger of the North, Sarn Ford Sentry), and I tried Idraen in Halbarad's place, which I didn't like much. Beravor subs in for Damrod very well and has a native "fancy" action. I also found out that Son of Arnor combos pretty well with Peace, and Thought when you have Steeds of the North in play!

I took this decklist here against Foundations of Stone, Flies and Spiders, and Journey Down the Anduin. I thought Journey would be rough because the deck starts at 31 threat (immediate Hill Troll engagement), but with a Forest Snare and a Dunedain Warning in my starting hand I actually pulled it off without much trouble. Flies and Spiders I actually lost : although the other aspects of the quest were well managed, the deck is vulnerable to 'when revealed' effects and that can cause cascading pain. In Foundations of Stone I got the quest stage which makes you reveal 4 encounter cards, things got dicey, but I won. I haven't taken it against a really hard quest, mainly because of death and doom. This is how I spend my evenings.

That's all -- thanks for reading and hope you enjoy!