Victory-a Secret 1.0

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• 1.0

Victory-a Secret, or Glorfindel's into lingerie

So since Rossiel release she's been one of my favourite heroes to try and build a functional deck around. I put together a deck with the same hero line-up as this, when she was released but it wasn't quite working correctly.

Team Covenant recently posted a video of a 4 player game of Murder at the Prancing Pony, with develeopers Matt Newman, and Caleb Grace. Matt played a similar themed deck, with the same suite of heroes, so I dusted off my old list and tried to crib some ideas from the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk6xX0O1VeA

The trick with Rossiel and the victory display shenanigans is how quickly you can get the ball rolling stocking up the victory display. And for a long while I thought the 'success' of the deck was how often I could The Door is Closed! on some wretched encounter card. And some games it just doesn't happen.

A more realistic goal is probably how big a percentage of the truly awful cards in an encounter deck do you only ever want to deal with once at most. And it's a tricky thing to balance, especially against the sleek, efficient encounter decks of more modern quests. Surge especially, if you start thinning out the encounter deck without accounting for surge, and you'll leave yourself open to the mother of all surge-trains.

The Opening Hand: Picking one or two cards for this deck is tricky, any and all of the following are perfect Elrond's Counsel, Light of Valinor, Resourceful, Out of the Wild and Galadhrim Minstrel. And that's not counting the actual events you need to get the victory display train rolling.

Because of this I thought about cutting Glorfindel and the spirit sphere entirely for a long time, with Glorfindel you NEED Light of Valinor in your opening hand, especially if you want to stay in secrecy for very long at all. So the focus of the deck shifted to trying to control the encounter deck as much as possible. So A Test of Will was a given, but cards like Celduin Traveler and O Elbereth! Gilthonial! are very strong encounter control cards, especially if you're able to use their secrecy discounts.

So ultimately the spirit sphere, and Glorfindel had to stay in.

The best way to approach playing the deck is to be as flexible as possible with your decisions, let the encounter deck's setup help you determine what you need most in your opening hand. But a good rule of thumb, especially if you don't start with Light of Valinor, is try for Elrond's Counsel and at least 1 card draw event like Daeron's Runes or Mithrandir's Advice.

Elrond's Counsel will give you more time to plan, scheme and draw into the 'weapons' you'll need to help your fellow players face the encounter deck. It's like the good book says (Lord of the Rings), power is built by waiting, and perils known and unknown will grow as we go on.

As the deck lives and dies on the options it has available, card draw is king, but given that we're aiming to keep things secret, and safe, staple card draw effects like Deep Knowledge aren't ideal, and as the deck is very event heavy Peace, and Thought would leave our heroes vulnerable given the low number of allies to back them up.

Keen as Lances is perfect for task, we get a nice hefty discount the better we're pulling out victory display shenanigans. A couple of times I've played it I felt a little more card draw couldn't hurt, having most of your None Return and Leave No Trace in your bottom 20 cards can really take the wind out of your sails, so sideboarding in The Long Defeat or Lórien's Wealth for the Cloak of Lórien, Lembas or Fair and Perilous couldn't hurt to keep things more consistent.

Ultimately I feel the deck is very flexible, given a turn or two to prepare. So, do you have the nous to play for time?