Where now are the horse and the rider?

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Some Sort 3481

Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? -The Two Towers

I really like the idea of a deck that's just one copy of 50 different cards that are all great values for the cost, so it almost doesn't really matter what you draw at any given time. It sort of pushes you into using heroes to solve all your draw and resource acceleration needs, but that's hardly a constraint given the card pool that we have now.

So here's a thematic deck with Rohan reinforcing the armies of man. Beravor gets you the cards and comes with a suite of ranger-themed cards-- some traps, a Dúnedain Pipe, and also the only Lore Rohan ally.

Théoden and Hirgon handle the resources and bring with them a bunch of Rohan and Tactics Gondor allies to handle questing and combat.

Play should vary a ton from game to game, which is kind of in keeping with the feel of Rohan to me-- you never know exactly when or how they're going to arrive, but you know you can count on them to show up.

Mulliganing is an adventure every time. The deck's cost-curve skews a bit Spirit heavy, so I'd probably mulligan for a Tactics-heavy opening hand to help balance.

Against quests that punish you if your starting threat is too high, Éowyn is a fine substitute for Hirgon. The swap renders Well Warned and The Red Arrow unplayable, but Windfola replaces the arrow, and Necklace of Girion is a fun gamble when you have Eowyn's Hulk Mode on tap to potentially smash the guardian.

2 comments

Aug 12, 2018 Wandalf the Gizzard 2415

What do you do with Beravor's mountain of excess resources?

Aug 12, 2018 Some Sort 3481

Envoy of Pelargir can turn two of them into one Tactics or Spirit, Ioreth and Warden of Healing can burn them in perpetuity on healing, Gandalf can blow up a stack of them at once, and if you don't hit any of those they just pile up. Hard to have a consistent solution in an inconsistent deck like this.

Because of the smoothing, the cost curve is wonky, anyway. You could play every Tactics card in the deck for as little as 19 resources. Playing every Spirit card costs a minimum of 28. Every Lore and Neutral card combined cost 16. There are two resource-adders that can both go on Theoden to help with the Spirit resources. There are two Lore resource-sinks to help keep Beravor spending. Then Gamling is the big complicating factor as he can easily become a Spirit or (more likely) Tactics resource sink, too. And, of course, you're never going to hit every discount like that, so you're going to have to "overspend" on some Tactics or Rohan allies at some point.

Given the nature of the deck, consistency isn't really something you can hope for. One of your hero's resource pools is going to be overburdened. Another one's is going to be underused. Theoden is probably going to be the overburdened one and Beravor the underused one, but you never do know for sure until you start getting the cards.

Curving things better requires either adding more copies of existing cards (more Wardens of Healing are always welcome!), adding worse cards (Ithilien Lookout and Ithilien Tracker are both lore and ranger-themed, but they're pricy for what they provide here), or breaking theme, (I originally had an Elf-stone and Thror's Map, as well as a Daeron's Runes, but decided to go more strict on the "armies of men" approach.)

One card I definitely should have included is Mablung, though. And Guardian of Ithilien is another nice resource-efficient and thematically appropriate lore card, too.