Mining Deck 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Holy crap, this actually works!

You read that right -- 70 cards. Though, in a good draw, you are ONLY really looking at 68.

Here's how this deck works.

Bilbo Baggins is our Messenger of the King, going to go fetch one of the many pipes in this deck (The Wizard Pipe is the most obvious one, if you don't have it in opening hand).

Mulligan for Ring of Thrór and it would be great if you had a Imladris Stargazer. Otherwise, go to town on your deck. Mine like crazy. King Under the Mountain is a discard from top of deck and will therefore trigger Ered Luin Miner and/or Hidden Cache. You will want to recycle those cards as often as you can. The high cost of these dwarfs (despite their tricks to getting into play for cheaper) actually helps A Very Good Tale. For example, for 5 cost, you can get Erebor Guard and Erebor Toymaker into play... and then play A Very Good Tale to get Gildor Inglorion, Zigil Miner, and Armor of Erebor into play. You could then also trigger Zigil Miner and get two of your coins back from the transaction.

To be clear, that combo (not very hard to pull off) costs net 3 resources, earns you 4 allies (costing 2,3,4,and 5), a two cost attachment, all by discarding net 5 (2 for the dwarf reduction, 3 for AVGT) cards to the discard pile. Have a couple of Dwarf Pipes and you won't even miss those cards.

If it sounds finicky, it is. It's a Gandalf deck, after all. I know it's a little overkill to bring Shadowfax just for the readying (for true solo), but man... here we are all about attachments! An okay substitute if you want is Miruvor, which will actually recycle fairly well.

Where this deck really shines, and is still somewhat annoying, is when you bring either Gildor Inglorion or Imladris Stargazer into the mix with your discarding effects. You have to plan very carefully on when to use Ring of Thrór, a baller card to put on your attacker Thorin Stonehelm. Notice his ability has no limit, so you can work down a high defense enemy by triggering his ability every time you attack, which should at least be twice (given that you're engaged with another enemy).

I've included a sideboard for you to tinker with, especially if you are playing multiplayer. One thing this deck REALLY struggles with is with willpower. The attack swarm I eventually was able to bring made me consider if we need to trade out some of these more niche cards for some good old fashioned questing attachments. There's a good number listed on the sideboard. Song of Hope is a great one for when you have the Zigil Miners and the Hidden Cache flowing. The Necklace of Girion suffers from the guarded keyword, but it's a fair substitute for one copy of Durin's Axe. As always, if you have a friend who wants to bring a dwarf deck, Dáin Ironfoot is always welcome.

Tinker around and have fun with this deck. I know I did.

[Bonus points to me because I found a deck where Well-Equipped is actually used. Also, with the new pipe cards coming out in Land of Shadow, it might worth running them here in a pseudo-pipe, major-mining deck.]