And Forth He Hastened 2.0

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And Forth He Hastened or The Mother of All In-Laws

"And forth he hastened, strong and fleet, And grasped at moonbeams glistening." - Song Of Beren and Lúthien.

This is a combo-centric deck, based around setting up Aragorn as your defender and then using Tale of Tinúviel to ready him for the return attack. We're going with a Noldor heavy deck, Aragorn grew up in Imladris surrounded by the Noldor, and learnt much of their ways.

Opening Hand:

My usual approach to a Noldor deck is to be as flexible as possible with your opening hand. However as this deck is built around showcase Tale of Tinúviel we're going to ideally want at least one in our opening hand. Elven-light is also a prime target to mulligan for, as it's arguably the primary 'engine' for a lot of combo decks.

Rivendell Minstrel will allow you to dig for your Tales, and you can get her on the board as early as turn 2 with Arwen Undómiel's resource smoothing on Aragorn. If you have a Nenya as well you can get her into play turn 1, but you'll not have any resources left to pay for the Tale that turn.

At the Table:

The Unexpected Courage should go to Galadriel first so you can make use of her Action, Nenya and/or Tale of Tinúviel. She's such a flexible hero once her suite of support cards hits the table anyway, and with 1 more than Arwen she's a better choice to exhaust to fuel it's effect.

If you're a few turns into the game and you're still missing a Nenya or a means to dig for it, Master of the Forge, then put the extra Unexpected Courage on Aragorn, otherwise it's probably better to have both on Galadriel

The deck has quite a robust toolkit to let you dig for exactly what card you need for a given situation, between Galadriel's innate card draw, Elven-light. Mirror of Galadriel and Master of the Forge you should be able to handle many of the encounter deck's obstacles.

Our combat tricks aren't just limited to a super-buffed Aragorn, with some powerful Noldor allies on the table such as Glorfindel, Guardian of Rivendell and Gildor Inglorion, you can swing from some impressive numbers in every phase of the turn thanks to Lords of the Eldar

Sideboard:

The sideboard is a little barebones, and is essentially what was cut from the deck to trim it down to 50 cards and/or make room for newer cards from the previous version.

Daeron's Runes is an odd fish for me in Noldor decks, if you're running at least one set of the "Echo" events (Elwing's Flight, Skyward Volley, Anchor Watch) it's perfect card draw, but as we're running Aragorn we can take the threat hit from Deep Knowledge and save our card discards for our Noldor nonsense.

Fair and Perilous is a card I love the concept of but unless you're building around it or a couple of Noldor heroes it's probably not worth the deck slot. You could drop Dwarven Tomb for it you feel you need it but I think they're probably better used to recycle our Tale of Tinúviel

Warden of Healing I swapped out for Imladris Caregiver just for theme, but in all honesty the Warden's are probably the better 'low maintenance' version, if you're comparing card for card.