A Stereotypical Strider Deck (LoAragorn edition) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

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

I looked at all the decks with Strider to see what the most used heroes were with that card. The most used hero (excluding Folco Boffin) was actually Éowyn, but the most used hero combination was Arwen Undómiel with one of the Aragorns, and Lore Aragorn was the most popular of the three.

This called for two Strider decks -- one with the most common combination, and the other supported by Strider's best friend Folco Boffin. Lore Aragorn is the rarest of heroes, the one who doesn't want to be in a deck with Folco. Ordinarily Folco is a no-brainer, you start with him, and then discard him when Strider shows up and/or you want to play your secrecy cards. Even if you discard him in the planning phase of turn one you'll have an effective threat of less than if you had started with just two heroes.

But Lore Aragorn's big power is returning you to your original threat, and that original threat would include Boffin's initial cost -- adding Folco as a temporary measure weakens LoAragorn's big ability. So I looked for decks with LoAragorn, Strider, and Arwen. I found those decks from eight creators (though one of the decks used Folco anyway, and another one added SpGlorfindel).

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 (non-Folco) Strider deck -- one that only includes cards that others have used the most (by percentage, not raw count) in their own decks with this lineup. If you want the typical thematic experience of LOTR's most famous lovers traveling alone, this may be a good fit -- and if it's not, don't blame me, blame the committee!

Strider is of course the key card and the one to mulligan for. Light of Valinor may seem not too exciting on Arwen, but it sets her up for using Tale of Tinúviel to bolster Aragorn. Gandalf and Magic Ring and Deep Knowledge can be used with impunity, just drive that threat up and then reset back to 21. Resourceful is full price at the starting threat, but if you have Elrond's Counsel in hand at game start or at reset you can get it for cheap -- in any case you have a lot of turns before you threat out, so the long payback on a full-price Resourceful isn't too much of an issue.