Noldor at its Best, uniques style 2.0

• Versions
• 2.0
• 1.0

A Noldor based deck, which uses the Fellowship card. As a sidenote: Unlike other decks which did pop up here on ringsdb, this deck will not be able to fullfill the contract within the first one or two rounds. Noldor game play is/was mostly to turtle until your deck is strong enough. With the tweaking of its current iteration its mostly possible to fullfill the contract in round 5 or 6, sometimes even in round 4.

Setup and Style of Play

Muligan for To the Sea, Drinking Song, A Burning Brand, Light of Valinor. In that order of importance. Probably, Steward together with Reforged is also a nice option to keep. (Sadly, Eleven Jeweler cannot be included in this deck, so the options for a starting hand which is able to make use of all the 11 cards from your starting hand are quite limited.)

With 2 resources from two spirit heroes, Arwens additional resource and 2 from Stweard (and maybe a resource from Magic Ring) there will be 6 blue resources in end game. That is enough to play two Lords of Eldar each round.

Together with the contract this results in +3 to each attribute for all the Noldor characters. Which is huge!

In end game, the remaining green resource can be used to trigger Ioreth each round.

General Notes and Tweaking

Reforge can bring Stweard and Rivendell Blade into play (as well as any other attachment you had to discard earlier). Also, they can cheat Explorers Almanac some additional times into play.

One Burning Brand is ment for Erestor the other for Galdor. If allready in play, Galdor gets the first one.

To defend against more enemies, both Unexpected Courages are ment for Erestor.

Gildors ability doesn't make much sense here (except you can save a card from discarding and get it back next round), so basically its a stong ally. Questing for 3 (+3 from contract and LotE), then be readied with Narya to defend for 7. Well, or could defend twice.

The Magic Ring can add a resource every now and then, but most the times it is not needed at all. Even in the very end, the heroes do have some spare blue resources, so the ring does not need to be triggered.

Rivendell Blade is brought onto the table via discard and then Reforge. It is a nice boost to Glorfindel and/or any other ally. Anyhow, that card might be not needed, because of the +3 to everything.

3 Will of the West are not needed to get the core of the deck into play. The faster the deck is empty the faster you can re-play the two Lords of Eldar. I usually play with two copies (if I play with one and that gets discarded by the encounter deck I regret not having a second copy) but most the times I do not use any of them. Either I lost some of my allies or I need thread reduction or location control when I play a WotW.

Gather Information can fetch a lot of cards here: a Dinking Song, if there is a valuable card in your hand, a Reforged if there is a good attachement in the discard, Stand and Fight for an ally. Even a Elronds Council (just for reducing the threat) or a Lords of the Eldar (to have it in the discard) is a good choice.

Sideboard

In meantime, I had three copies of each ally in the deck, but that blocks your hand of 4 cards each round. It seems to be faster to have only 2 copies each and use the "spare slots" for cards like Stand and Fight and card draw.

Lindir is my most unwanted unique Noldor. Most the times other cards/allies are more tempting to play. Also, Ioreth plus the other unique Noldor allies allready sum up to six. So in the end I decided to remove Lindir from the deck. Adding him again would probably speed up the assembly of the needed 6 allies.

Elven Light will speed up the crawling through the deck even more, but felt unneeded for me.

Unexpected Courage has often a lower priority, so I decided to remove it. If there are lots of enemies it would be good re-adding them.

Cards for considering to switch are: Will of the West (if feeling secure about the six allies), Explorers Almanac (if location control is not a problem) and Double Back (if threat is not a problem).