Haldan's One Shining Moment 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Overview: This deck is part of a two-deck fellowship designed to defeat the location-centric quest, Wrath and Ruin. This deck handles locations, threat, and cancellation out of the box. The other deck quests, pumps out allies and contains the Burglar contract. Dain defends while the others heroes aim to quest and be ready to attack. Their attacks will hopefully be bolstered by weapons from the Loot deck.

Heroes:

Unlike most Spirit Dain builds that use Zigil Miner/Ered Luin Miner/Hidden Cache to profit from his discarding ability, this deck really just needs him to block for 6 against big enemies like Thane Ulchor. Dain was paired with Gandalf and Glorfindel for a while with the aforementioned cards to help them trigger reliably, but too many losses had me reconsider the number of cards devoted to make the combos work.

Of course, the downside to seeing all those cards go into the discard pile is a certain sadness upon not being able to play those cards. With Reforged, Stand and Fight and Will of the West those key cards can be brought back as needed.

I rarely use Idraen and Haldan, because in one or two-deck fellowships a lack of locations shuts them down and that happens all too easily. This duo shines, however, in a quest like Wrath and Ruin where the quest nearly guarantees there will be a location available every round. Haldan makes the deck work by drawing into all those spirit events and more location attachments to keep the engine running and does a much better job than Gandalf did in earlier iterations.

Allies:

The criteria here are efficient healing or questing. Súlien never made that cut before, but in 2 player Wrath and Ruin the location count can easily run as high as 8. I've never used her ability before playing this quest and it was very rewarding to do so. And it's nice to have a card that isn't needed in the opening hand, but really shines as a mid- to late-game card.

Attachments:

The focus here is providing fuel to the Haldan's card draw engine. The big surprise in playthroughs was how important Woodmen's Path became when interacting with the loot deck. Adding +1 quest point for each attchment on the active location is no joke when adding cards like Put Off Pursuit and Elf-stone. There were times when the active location was normally 3 quest points, but the Loot deck turned it into a NM level 8 quest points with Put Off Pursuit, the loot card and any other attachment. Woodmen's Path turned into a game-saving card avoiding location lock several times. This deck never aims to add progress to locations in staging, so most locations will be a target for Path.

Events:

The normal suite of cancellation and recursion here. South Away! is one of two ways the deck reduces threat. South Away! isn't an epic card, but it fits with the theme here and Elrond's Counsel is tied up in another deck.