The deck that eats threat 2.0

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The deck that eats threat

what happens if you don't have enough willpower to quest succesfully? you raise your threat. What happens if you get attacked by enemies that are stronger than your defense? your heroes take damage. What if you have Frodo Baggins? you raise your threat. What happens if you can reduce your threat by more than 20 each turn? you get to played in a state of absolute relaxation. just make sure you only engage one enemy at a time since Frodo Baggins's ability only triggers once each phase.

This deck is designed to abuse Smoke and Think and Old Toby to draw insane amounts of cards and play them mostly for free.

The engine

card draw

Hobbit Pipe combined with a large collection of threat reducing events ( Smoke Rings, The Galadhrim's Greeting, Keen as Lances and The Shirefolk)
generates a lot of draw and threat reduction. With the addition of Spare Pipe which is already a fine attachment by itself, we can control up to 6 pipes, which makes Old Toby a draw 6.

on top of that, we have Daeron's Runes, Deep Knowledge, Keen as Lances in draw mode and Drinking Song which help cycle through the deck faster.

Pippin will also draw us an extra card, since we really don't care much about tanking an attack.

resource generation

Many of our cards are relatively low cost, with only The Galadhrim's Greeting and Keen as Lances (as well as a certain package of allies and attachments) being above a cost of 2. However, we do not intend to actually pay for them:

Good Meal helps us cast Old Toby or Smoke Rings for free, as well as sometimes a Dwarven Tomb or Will of the West.

The star of cost reduction however is Smoke and Think, which once we have played most of our pipes lets us play anything for free, usually 2 copies of Keen as Lances (one in resource mode and one in draw mode usually), 2 copies of Northern Tracker, Shadowfax and Narya/Gandalf's Staff.

we will also generate 1 or 2 resource through Love of Tales playing Drinking Song and Song of Eärendil, and one of the Keen as Lances will be used to add 2 resource to a hero.

the result

This overpowered combination of draw and resource generation usually lets us cycle through the whole deck by round 3, while playing the expensive allies and gandalf's attachments, playing A Test of Will whenever needed, and sucking up threat from accross the board.

After that, round 4 is Will of the West number 1, and a LOT of threat reduction for the rest of the game, while providing the table with a super-gandalf, location and treacheries control with Northern Tracker and A Test of Will, and essentially cancelling threat.

Gandalf and his toys and the trackers can be swapped out for any other set of expensive cards of your choosing, and Song of Eärendil and A Test of Will as well. I just think those are particuliarly useful as they allow the other members of the fellowship to do their thing without worrying too much about location lock, threacheries and threat, and gandalf packs a solid punch.