Pippin makes a Good Meal of the Encounter Deck 1.0

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• 1.0

Pippin makes a Good Meal of the Encounter Deck, or "Why don't you wash it down with another Out of the Wild fatty!?"

So my quest (fruitless thus far?) for a Rossiel deck that works consistently continues. So working from my Victory-A Secrect decklist, and Cardboard of the Rings very own Sean's, Become the Forest list, I decided to tinker under the hood and see if we can squeeze a bit more performance out of the victory display deck type.

The point of today's deck being that, in my opinion, it's the speed that you can get cards into the victory display that determine the success of a "Rossiel/Victory Display" deck.

Now while cards like Leave No Trace and None Return are great, they are "slow". They rely on waiting for an enemy/location to leave play, and if you're going for speed, you don't have the luxury of waiting for the 'perfect' target.

Out of the Wild however is the 'Shadowfax' of victory display cards. It's cheap in secrecy and gives you a choice of 5 cards to pick from with minimal restrictions. The problem being, once you're out of secrecy, the wind drops from your sails a bit. So how can we keep this going for as long as possible? Given that the easiest way to recur Out of the Wild is to use Scroll of Isildur we don't really have the option of packing excessive amounts of threat reduction. So we need another way to reduce the cost, enter one hungry, hungry Hobbit.

Opening Hand:

The most obvious card you're looking for is Out of the Wild but making note of what's NOT in your opening hand is also important. If you don't have a Good Meal and/or Scroll of Isildur then Resourceful should be a priority during the first 2 turns. If you don't draw into a Good Meal then having the resources to pay for a full cost Out of the Wild is going to be crucial to keeping pace with the encounter deck.

At The Table:

Pippin's hungry so you're going to want to keep him fed. Now your standard schtick for this deck is to play Out of the Wild as many times as possible. It should be relatively easy to get 4-5 times in a game, Scroll of Isildur to fish one out of your discard pile, before it goes to the bottom of your deck. Add in a liberal use of Galadhrim Minstrel to shuffle your deck and between Pippin's card draw and Mithrandir's Advice there's a good chance you might see that same copy of Out of the Wild you've already played twice again. Can you get a perfect score and hit 9 times?

Editors note: "The second quest in the Grey Havens box has an interesting way for players to pull the bottom card of the deck, I wonder how much of the encounter deck you can thin out in that quest?"

Good Meal is, in my opinion, a brilliant card. There are a whole slew of events that don't generally see play due to being a little over-costed, and being as we're packing enough "Tomatoes and nice crispy bacon" we're going to try and squeeze a couple of those into the deck.

Gildor's Counsel I think is one of those event cards that's just a little bit on the expensive side. And as this deck would probably be a better fit for a 3+ player game we're going to try and use it.

Risk Some Light is also a good contender for Hobbit side-dish. with a Good meal at 1 cost outside of secrecy you can use it to stack the encounter deck for staging, or ensure that no shadow cards go to attacks that would cause disaster during combat.

The timing on when you drop your Erebor Hammersmith to the table is key, you want him to be running back to the kitchen to bring Pippin another Good Meal though the Scroll of Isildur is also a good target in a pinch.

With limited action advantage in the deck, you're probably going to need to make a choice early how best to set-up Rossiel, if your allies have a strong sentinel presence on the board then having Pippin eating from the location menu is probably better to ensure you can support your group better during questing.

If you find yourself needing to lean on Protector of Lórien a lot in a given quest, then tossing your non-essential events Risk Some Light, None Return and Leave No Trace to fuel it shouldn't be a problem as you can always bring one back if needed with your Scrolls.

Gandalf is here as your beat-stick. Outside of him and one or two allies you have a pitiful combat presence on the board, and as we don't NEED to rely on secrecy to pull off our victory display shenanigans, the threat hit for keeping him in play isn't such a big deal. You always have Keen as Lances as a cheeky threat valve if you need to, and it should be pretty much free to play for the majority of the game.

Sideboard:

The deck list is primarily set-up for multiplayer, but the sideboard has some tweaks to make the deck a little more solo-friendly (though probably not against every quest)

Gildor's Counsel is the first thing to swap out for Master of the Forge when switching the deck up for solo play

Risk Some Light is probably the next best thing to cut, with a combination of Henamarth Riversong, Lembas or The Long Defeat depending on the quest you're facing, and how much healing you think you'll need.

As always thoughts and suggestions always welcome.