Make Safe the City

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Seastan 42045

I'm a big fan of decks that can get off to a really strong start with minimal luck. One example of this concept is my Rohan, meet Dunedain that can reliably set up a strong defender and attacker and still put out decent willpower on turn 1.

Here's another deck in the same vein, with a similar theme of a mixture of two traits: Rohan and Gondor. Theoden and Eowyn ride to the defense of Minas Tirith, to make safe the city. The Silvan Refugee might seem out of place, but less so when you read about Nimrodel and her company of refugees that got lost in Gondor.

This deck also has the oddity of featuring tactics Théoden as the sole tactics hero. It felt really weird building it but it actually works. Thanks to Snowmane/Herugrim he gets to use his willpower twice each round.

Early Game

The early game is all I'm going to talk about because this deck sets up really fast.

Mulligan for Herugrim and play it on Theoden. Open the Armory serves as backup to ensure you find it consistently. You can now potentially quest for 4+, defend for 4, and attack for 6.

Turn 2 you can get out Snowmane on Theoden (findable with Westfold Horse-breeder) and a Gondorian Shield on Beregond (findable with Open the Armory).

Now you're questing for 7+, defending for 6 (with threat reduction), and attacking for 6.

The rest of the attachments are not as important, but still useful depending on what kind of quest you're up against:

Against a quest with a lot of swarming enemies, you will want Unexpected Courage for Beregond, and Firefoot on Theoden to let you deal with more than 1 enemy at a time.

Against a quest with bigger enemies, you will want to increase Theoden's willpower. With Firefoot, 3x The Favor of the Lady and Necklace of Girion, he can reach a maximum of 12 .

6 comments

Aug 13, 2018 The BGamerJoe 4832

Nice! I’m going to build this up and try it. Tactics Theoden is the best!

Aug 15, 2018 Some Sort 3506

What do you think about an Eowyn / Theoden swap? Costs you one attack (and post-Snowmane, one willpower), and also Spirit Eowyn’s quest control. In exchange you get -3 threat, a bit of resource acceleration, and Tactics Eowyn on-demand splatter mode, (to offset that consistent -1 point of attack). Obviously different pros and cons and each pairing would be better-suited to different quests, but that seems like a very simple sideboard swap.

Aug 15, 2018 The Broken Meeple 60

The main issue with that is Elven Light then never hits the discard pile, making it useless for the deck. The idea here is presumably that Elven Light is the first card you discard to Spirit Eowyn's ability.

Aug 15, 2018 Some Sort 3506

Yeah, you'd lose the Elven-light with Tactics Eowyn. I guess my question here, having not played the deck, is how much work that Elven-light is really doing when you're not mulliganing aggressively for it.

If you hit on a Herugrim in your opening hand, there's only a 33% chance you also get an elven-light. Your odds of seeing one don't reach 50% until round 5. Then when you trigger it on round 5 it's just replacing itself, so you're not actually seeing a benefit from it until round 6, at which point you've paid two resources and gotten one net card. If the quest goes 8 rounds, you can pay 4 resources and get 3 net cards, which is a terrible payoff rate, and a pretty expensive proposition in a deck with no resource acceleration.

It definitely helps if you miss out on a key piece early on, though even then you're unlikely to see an Elven-light until round 4 or 5, and the first play only replaces itself, and it's still a very expensive way to draw cards in a deck with no resource acceleration, (albeit one that is curved pretty cheaply). It's really the most expensive draw in the game this side of Rod of the Steward, (though of course you do get the constant +1 WP bonuses, and those are not worth nothing.

I'm not saying I wouldn't use Elven-light if I already had Spirit Eowyn. But I definitely wouldn't run Spirit Eowyn just to get access to Elven-light.

Meanwhile, with Santa Theoden it becomes a lot more viable to use Mustering the Rohirrim, which thins your deck and can make grabbing Firefoot and Snowmane much more reliable, (because Mustering can fetch the Horse-breeder to fetch the mounts), and he makes other Rohan allies much more resource-efficient. And dropping threat from 31 to 28 definitely has practical value in more quests than just Journey. Seems like there are some quests that would favor one lineup and other quests that would favor the other.

Aug 15, 2018 Seastan 42045

@Some SortGetting an attacker that can consistently hit for 6 starting from turn 1 is the major focus of the deck. If I'm going to settle for Spirit Theoden's 5, I'd also have to consider Spirit Glorfindel with Rivendell Blade, Tactics Aragorn with Dagger of Westernesse, Tactics Éomer with Firefoot, Beorn, etc. That one point of extra attack is what makes this deck special.

Also relevant to me (but maybe not others):

  • Tactics Eowyn is overused
  • Tactics Theoden is underused

Aug 15, 2018 The Broken Meeple 60

Nah nah, it's relevant. I totally get the over-use of cards (says me with Tactics Eowyn in my Ranger Trap deck I borrowed from RingsDB) :P

I've always been surprised how underused Tactics Theoden is. I mean do Tactics heavy decks not like 3 extra willpower? Is Theoden, Eowyn and another Tactics Rohan guy not a decent trio?