YOLOR (You Only Live One Round) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Note: This deck proxies an as-yet unreleased card that has been officially spoiled by Fantasy Flight. If you are avoiding player card spoilers, stop reading now.

This deck is not meant for serious play. It's sole purpose is to assist other decks as much as possible on turn 1, and then be eliminated. This deck uses the card Justice Shall Be Done (proxied here by The End Comes) to put together a massive first turn to assist the other players, and then is eliminated at the end of the round (or possibly sooner).

This deck looks for one of two cards in its opening hand: Justice Shall Be Done or Word of Command (to fetch Justice). If you don't get either, take a mulligan. If you still don't get either, the deck has enough card draw that you've still got a good chance of drawing into one of those cards. With Erestor, you enter the planning phase with 10 cards in hand. Daeron's Runes, Deep Knowledge, Heed the Dream, We Are Not Idle and Song of Eärendil can net you more, plus Gandalf's ability lets you play the top card of your deck.

Once you've played Justice Shall Be Done, you'll have 12 resources, 4 on each hero. You can go a number of different directions at this point, but the idea is to set up the other player(s) as much as possible. This deck does that in two main ways: creating a free hero, and playing Doomed cards Deep Knowledge and Legacy of Númenor essentially free of their Doomed cost.

The free hero comes from the combination of a unique ally, Defender of the West, and Sword-thain. Sneak Attack can get you the ally into play for a single resource, and once the ally has Sword-thain attached, they no longer have to leave play at the end of the phase. You'll need to play the ally, then attach Defender of the West first so that the ally immediately goes under the control of the first player (make sure this deck is not the first player), and then play Sword-thain to make that ally a hero. Note that you cannot play Sword-thain first because Defender of the West cannot be played on a hero. Also note that Defender of the West will no longer cause the ally to move once the ally has Sword-thain because Defender of the West only causes the first player to gain control of "attached ally", which the character with Sword-thain is no longer.

The deck includes a number of different options for this hero, and gives you the choice of three different spheres. Faramir is a powerful ally and becomes even more powerful if one of the other players plays Unexpected Courage on him. Ingold can have up to 4 as Sword-thain. Bilbo Baggins and Quickbeam are cheap options if you miss out on your Sneak Attack. Bilbo Baggins' ability won't find a pipe since there are none in the deck, but it can be handy to shuffle your deck if the top card isn't useful for Gandalf to play. Gimli can get you a resource with We Are Not Idle if you're short one, and Haldir of Lórien is solid with his ranged and sentinel keywords. Any of these allies can be replaced with unique allies of your choice, even allies, which can be played with Sneak Attack or A Good Harvest. It may seem like the deck could use more unique allies, but even with just these 8, you have an 89% chance of seeing at least one before your first planning phase.

The deck also includes three each of Deep Knowledge and Legacy of Númenor for card draw and resource acceleration. Normally playing multiples of each of these in a round is a bad idea, but this deck can eat the threat of these cards so that they are practically free for the other players. This is achieved using the Wandering Took/Song of Eärendil combo. This is how this combo works:

1. Play [Wandering Took](/card/01043) and [Song of Eärendil](/card/04034).
2. Use the Took's action to pass it to another player, raising their threat by 3 and reducing yours by 3.
3. When the other player raises their threat from this action, trigger [Song of Eärendil](/card/04034) to raise this deck's threat by 1 and reduce their threat by 1.
4. The other player triggers [Wandering Took](/card/01043)'s ability to send it back to this deck, reducing their threat by 3 and raising this deck's by 3.

The net result of this sequence is that the other player's threat has been lowered by 1, and this deck's has been raised by 1. Repeat this as often as you can without reaching 50 for this deck. With a starting threat of 31, you won't be able to reduce the other player(s) threat by a lot, but it should be enough to cancel out much of the threat they add when this deck plays Deep Knowledge and Legacy of Númenor. If you don't draw a Took, you can use Song of Eärendil to at least cushion the blow of those Doomed cards, especially if you get 2 or all 3 copies of the Song into play (they are not limited to one per hero).

Song of Kings goes on Gandalf to allow you to play the cards, but A Good Harvest can do that as well. The main reason to play the song is to be able to play the 0-cost cards Legacy of Númenor and Cram, which can't be played with A Good Harvest. Additionally, I'm fairly certain Gandalf cannot use his resources with A Good Harvest because Gandalf's resources do not belong to "any sphere" (since he has no sphere), but I have not seen a ruling on this.

Cram can be used to ready Gandalf in order to play a second copy of Word of Command, or allow him to take some actions in the first round. Otherwise it can go on another player's hero. We Are Not Idle is primarily in the deck to simply replace itself with another card and reduce the effective size of the deck, though you can get a resource out of Gimli if you get him into play.

At the end of planning, if you've got a spare resource or two left, you can throw a Song of Kings or Song of Eärendil on another player's hero, and/or play Heed the Dream on another player to give them a card.

When you are done planning, if you have the Wandering Took/Song of Eärendil combo in play, you can decide if the group would be better off using this deck's heroes for the rest of the round, or if it would be better to draw one fewer encounter card during the quest phase. If you decide on the latter, you can use the Song/Took combo to threat this deck out, which if done before the staging step will mean you do not need to draw a card for this deck. Alternatively, you can start the quest phase and then use Fatty Bolger's ability to cancel the of an enemy in the staging area for the phase, threating this deck out in the process. Note that the enemy has to have been added to the staging area before the staging step begins for this to work.

In most cases you'll probably want to threat this deck out before questing (using its 3 heroes once is probably not worth an encounter card, especially if you have exhausted Gandalf for Word of Command), but there are a few scenarios where it might behoove you to keep this deck alive until the end of the round. If you didn't exhaust Gandalf and/or got one or two other allies into play who were not made Sword-thain, this deck could quest fairly decently. Additionally, if you have a setup that is heavy in enemies (especially enemies with archery), you can use this deck to engage several of them (since its threat will be very high) and take those enemies' attacks undefended since you don't care if this deck loses heroes. You can also soak up all the archery for the round. This is in fact why the deck includes The Fall of Gil-Galad. You can play The Fall of Gil-Galad on Gandalf, take undefended attacks and/or archery until he dies, which lowers your threat and allows you to absorb even more threat from the other players with the Took/Song combo. The enemies will return to the staging area when this deck is eliminated, but you'll have kept the enemies away from the other decks for one round at least. And if the other decks can kill some of those enemies with ranged attacks, so much the better.

So why does this deck use Fatty Bolger? In addition to the trick above of using him to cancel an enemy's threat before threating the deck out, he's mostly in there because he's low starting threat (leaving more room for the Took/Song combo) and because very few decks include him, so he's not likely to cause uniqueness clashes with the other players. If you're not worried about uniqueness clashes, you could consider swapping him out for Glorfindel or Merry for lower threat options, Arwen Undómiel for an extra resource, or Galadriel for an extra card and threat reduction.