A Stereotypical (post-errata) Hama deck 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck is not creative at all, it is a crowdsourced post-errata Háma deck.

Hama is perhaps most famous as the in-cycle solution (pre-errata) for Durin's Bane -- when playing Shadow and Flame, Hama could use Feint every turn to stop it from attacking you, then attack and discard whatever you drew to get Feint back. Simple and effective, it quickly led to errata of both Feint and Thicket of Spears so that they protected only one player. After that you could Hama-lock to your heart's content in true solo, but you couldn't stop Durin's Bane from attacking everyone in a multiplayer game.

However, as long as you were willing to devote one card (all you normally draw) and three resources (all you normally collect), a combat deck could engage as many enemies as possible in a multiplayer game and prevent them from attacking, slaying them at leisure. This possibility was there for years, and didn't seem to bother anyone much.

Then came the Dunedain. Mablung (ok, not a Dunedain) could give you a fourth resource from engaging. Amarthiúl gives you an extra resource if you have 2+ enemies engaged. Halbarad lets you engage more enemies optionally. Aragorn can steal engaged enemies. Over time it became easier for a Thicket-lock to monopolize combat, and even generate extra resources so you can do something besides play Thicket every turn, like play powered up Dunedain allies.

So when FAQ 1.9 came out in November 2017, Caleb took the unprecedented step of nerfing cards not because they were part of a broken combo, but because they were considered too powerful. Boromir, Caldara and Háma were the primary victims. Caleb had done more than anyone else to make Caldara powerful, before nuking her, but the release notes accompanying the FAQ directly attributed Hama's errata to the Thicket/Hama combo, which had been in existence since it was released, and acknowledged as a valid Hama use by the original Thicket errata. This dramatically changed the power of every existing Hama deck, most of which were not designed to be Thicket-lock decks in the first place.

So since the errata, what has been done with Hama? To find out, I looked not for what heroes are used with Hama, but which events are used with Hama. The three most popular were Feint, Foe-hammer, and Thicket of Spears -- of course. When you can only recur an event three times all game, they'd better be good ones. I then looked at the decks using at least two of those cards, saw that the most popular heroes chosen were Éowyn and Beregond, and analyzed the Hama decks withat least two of those three events and either of those heroes.

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 per my usual practice -- though I should note that nearly all the source decks used multiple cores, as otherwise it is harder to find Feint or Thicket. If you are trying this deck and have multiple cores, I suggest adding a third copy of both.

The end result should be a stereotypical post-Errata 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 (post-errata) Hama experience, this may be a good fit -- and if it's not, don't blame me, blame the committee! (If you wanted the pre-errata Hama experience, blame Caleb!)

So what about gameplay? This deck is actually solo-capable, besides the wonderful Eowyn you can get up to seven 2 willpower allies into play permanently. It's an Eagles deck, supplemented by weapons for Hama (so Foe-Hammer can be triggered) and armor for Beregond. With only Vassal of the Windlord for ranged attack, this is meant to kill enemies in place, but it's mostly meant to defend. Despite Thicket and Feint, you have Beregond, Winged Guardian and Defender of Rammas, way more defense than a normal Thicket-lock deck.

The decks used for this are almost entirely of two types:

1) Progression-style decks intended for Heirs of Numenor. All those defenders can siege-quest like nobody's business, and being able to shut down attackers really helps for battle/siege questing

2) Scenario-based decks intended for combat-heavy quests like Antlered Crown and Carn-Dum. The Thicket deck's goal is no longer to indefinitely shut down combat, but merely to survive combat long enough to make the enemies manageable.

General-purpose Hama decks by high-reputation creators were almost non-existent, a glaring contrast from the number of high-rep post-errata aggro Caldara decks proving that she was still useful and interesting.