Gondorian Nobles Bonded in Valour (BoF) 2.0

• Versions
• 2.0
• 1.0

A Bonds of Friendship Gondor Valour deck made for a Fellowship where the house rule is that every ally and hero has to have the Gondor trait (so no Gandalf, etc).

After playing this deck, I am pretty convinced that Bond of Friendship is the best of the contracts. Not only is it extremely effective, but having a more diverse deck with the interesting deckbuilding challenge of sticking to 10/10/10/10/10 is pretty interesting.

The idea behind this deck is that it starts already in Valour to immediately benefit from cards like The Red Arrow, Gondorian Soldier, Defender of Cair Andros, Honor Guard, Veteran of Osgiliath, and Valiant Sword (all of which can be played or put into play as early as the first round).

This is certainly far from the most optimized 1-Handed BoF Gondor deck (which probably includes heroes like Ld-Denethor and Damrod), but it is designed to play in a Fellowship with another player running other key Gondor cards like Denethor, Beregond, Visionary, Steward, and others.

This deck is surprisingly versatile though, able to quest big and fight well while bringing a modicum of Cancellation Control to the table.

Prince Imrahil and Lothiriel are an excellent combo, and bring a lot of pseduo resource-smoothing to the table since they can both put into play any Gondor allies without a resource match required. Lothiriel can filter the allies Imrahil wants to find back into the deck from your hand (such as Derufin, Defender of CA, Veteran of Osgiliath, Knight of the White Tower). They also allow multiple free uses of entering play effects, like from Envoys, Soldiers of Gondor, and Knights of Belfalas.

Threat is the biggest struggle for this deck, and when it's lost it's usually been to threating out against quests that are very harsh and involve cards/mechanics that pose large threat gains for players (starting at 41 is rough, but that's the life of a Gondorian staring into the East's shadow). To that end, Keen as Lances, Double Back, Favor of the Valour, and Derufin exist to give lots of option for threat-protection. In such quests, prioritizing Derufin and fishing him from the discard with Kinight of Belfalas to then feed back into the deck with Lothiriel can be invaluable, and in some quests I've discarded Derufin during combat 4 or 5 times.

It's a lot of fun, I think BoF can easily do similar things with just about every other faction them out there. Heck of a contract.