A Stereotypical Secrecy Deck 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck is not creative at all, it is a crowdsourced secrecy deck.

My procedure was as follows -- I looked at decks using Resourceful but not Strider, and with a starting threat of 24 or less -- this should cover all the decks that expect to spend most of their time in secrecy (Éowyn decks appears to be 3 higher than they really are, and Galadriel decks can use threat reduction cards to get then stay in secrecy. Much to no surprise at all, the most popular lineup was the classic hobbit lineup, but substituting Merry for Merry for repeatable threat reduction. At the time I did the analysis, there were such decks from 30 different creators. I then analyzed the contents those decks to see what the most common cards were. I posted the results of my analysis here for heroes, allies, and attachments:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1520495/deck-analysis-part-15-secrecy

But then a BGG outage ate my long post on secrecy events, and I was annoyed enough not to get around to recreating it right away. And at this point, I'm not sure I still have those notes -- but I had already created the deck, so I think I should just go ahead and publish it.

As usual, to turn my analysis into a deck, I used the median deck card count to apportion card slots to the most popular choices in each category, trying to use the most popular count for each individual card until I ran out of space. I also limited the cards to a single core set.

The end result should be a stereotypical Secrecy Deck -- one that only includes cards that others have used the most (by percentage, not raw count) in their own Secrecy decks. If you want the typical Secrecy experience, this may be a good fit -- and if it's not, don't blame me, blame the committee!

Merry is the key to this deck, since he can keep your threat low and ensure you spend most of the time in secrecy -- unless you decide to commit to keeping OHUH Gandalf in play. Although you want enemies for Merry's ability, this deck lacks native combat power; you want Fast Hitch on Sam Gamgee so he can counterattack with the help of Rosie Cotton. Friend of Friends can also help, as can the Gandalfs, Ithilien Lookout, Treebeard and Quickbeam. Three copies of Heed the Dream plus Gather Information can help you find what you need.

The defects of constructing based on percentage rather than raw count can be illustrated by the presence of Fireside Song in the deck -- cost 2, and can deliver only 2 wp maximum with only one other song in the deck. A subset of the decks in this lineup were song decks, using a lot of songs to get absurd willpower from Fireside Song -- but since most songs were old enough to be considered for the other decks, they weren't popular on a percentage basis. Black Serpent and Beneath the Sands were recent enough that the song decks were a higher percentage of decks, and so they made the cut. Still it's weak, not useless -- it gives 1-2 for 2 cost and Merry doesn't have a ton of spirit cards to spend money on anyways.