Palantir control team (V3) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck is meant to be played in the "vigilant palantir" fellowship. That fellowship has Thurindir grabbing Gather Information as our first side quest, which combined with Bilbo Baggins lets us grab 2 Hobbit Pipe from the deck on the first round.

Palantir control team

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

With Song of Eärendil, this deck uses it's own threat reduction to absorb the threat increases of the rest of the fellowship, such as Boromir, The Grey Wanderer, Magic Rings, Power of Command, Legacy of Númenor and the main offender Palantir.

By drawing the whole deck very quickly, we can reliably provide A Test of Will and Spare Hood and Cloak in a timely manner.

By abusing Smoke and Think, we can play a very mighty Gandalf with his toys and 2 Northern Trackers to ensure location lock is reversible.

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.

With Bilbo Baggins and Gather Information both grabbing us a Hobbit Pipe, the deck very reliably reaches it's goals by round 3.

The result

we end up on round 3 with 3 hobbits with 2 pipes each and 3 Song of Eärendil, 2 Northern Trackers and Gandalf equipped with Shadowfax and Gandalf's Staff, as well as two Spare Hood and Cloak equipped on Vigilant Dúnadan and Arwen Undómiel for an extr arwen trigger.

. With each iteration of Will of the West (of which we have 2 in this deck plus a third in Galadriel's deck), we gain up to 5 A Test of Will (2 natural+3 Dwarven Tomb) and 54 threat reduction (18 from Smoke Rings, 24 from The Galadhrim's Greeting and 12 from The Shirefolk).