The Wisdom of the Istari

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Warden of Arnor 5911

Essentially a Vilya deck built around using OHaUH Gandalf and Wizard Pipe to set up your big Vilya plays. There are some inherent problems with the setup - you may take a little while to get going, but with Gandalf boosting your threat every round you can't afford to wait too long. The Loragorn reset button obviously was the original solution to this, but you start at 30 already so by the time you really hit your stride with a sizeable force of powerful allies backing you up you could easily be approaching 40 threat for the second time. Enter that rarely-played card, The Fall of Gil-Galad! Can be dug out by Master of the Forge, if you really want you can Vilya in Landroval to bring Aragorn back after you kill him off, but with Vilya you don't really need resources, and with all the allies you don't need his stats tat much, so if you just kill him for real it's not as big a loss as you might think.

If you do need some extra resources to get things going, Gandalf's Staff can provide them. Elf-stone offers another way to bring in powerful allies, or a cheaper route to Gandalf, though it may be harder to clear the active location without Gandalf. Your card draw can become less relevant once the full Gandalf/Pipe/Vilya combo hits becuse you don't want to run out your deck and thus block Vilya; other than Master of the Forge to dig out the attachments, as some will be important and others will be superfluous so you don't want them eating up your regular draws. If you can bring in Glorfindel, all those superfluous cards can be pitched to give him more actions if needed.

I don't think this is necessarily the optimal way to build a Vilya deck, but be honest - which is cooler, some poncy Stargazer or the Grey Wizard? And taking it further, which is the more stylish way to buy a few extra rounds of Wizard time, repeating a Greeting or having a hero go down in a blaze of glory? Always remember: It doesn't matter if you win or lose - so long as you look really cool doing it! (But seriously if you get up and running you'll probably win as well)

Original poorly-built version is talked about here: https://wardenofarnor.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/decks-the-wisdom-and-spirit-of-the-istari/

2 comments

May 28, 2016 Kakita_Shiro 41

Love the reference. I've always wanted to build around OHaUH Gandalf.

May 28, 2016 Warden of Arnor 5911

I also have a mono- Gandalf deck if you're interested: ringsdb.com That one is more actually focused on Gandalf himself whereas this one mostly just turned into a Vilya deck.