Summoning a Fellowship 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

My first time publishing a decklist since 2018, with that, I have to say this is a pretty exciting one to share.

There is nothing too fancy here, but the overall inspiration came from wanting to make a deck that utilizes the Fellowship contract with two of the most powerful heroes, Gandalf and Elrond. Éowyn rides along with our champions of inspiration for her low starting threat and boss annihilating ability. The deck utilizes one of the most powerful cards in Vilya but it never feels overpowered, but rather, appropriately powered. Thanks to Elrond's powerful ring, it allows us to stack the deck with some of the most powerful event cards in the game, which makes for some pretty fun swings in momentum in the mid-late game.

STARTING HAND Any deck that has Elrond+Vilya is going to want to mulligan for Vilya. So do that. Even though the deck also utilizes Gandalf and the Wizard Pipe, there are higher chances that you can grab the pipe rather quick, either by drawing it, or getting a copy of Bilbo Baggins in play.

EARLY GAME It's pretty straight forward in the early game, get your allies on the table. The on thing that I would note is that Elfhelm is not really intended to be played during the planning phase, but rather cheat him into play utilizing his ability and a resource from Éowyn. Vilya does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting the more expensive allies into play, but if you haven't grabbed it or your Wizard Pipe, A Good Harvest is included in the deck for resource smoothing. So, in the first couple of turns, the focus will be on getting allies into play rapidly to trigger the contract bonus from Fellowship

DECK TECHNIQUES One of the really neat things about Vilya, is that it allows you to put allies into play outside of the planning phase. This perfectly counteracts one of the drawbacks of the Fellowship contract, once an ally is in play, if you want to upgrade said ally, you would need to allow them to die, lose the contract bonus then hopefully re-trigger it the following round. However, say for example, you are good on and no longer need the services of Bilbo Baggins since he has already fetched you Gandalf's pipe. You could chump block with him, allow him to head to the discard pile, then Vilya in an ally who is much better suited for combat, like Beorn.

How should you use Gandalf's Staff? If you don't have Vilya or Wizard Pipe yet, draw cards. If you have allies in hand but have not flipped over the Fellowship contact yet, give Elrond resources. If you have Ioreth but not a lot of defensive options, you could discard a shadow card with the staff's ability and take undefended attacks, then heal them up later on down the road.

AFTER THE FELLOWSHIP IS FELLOWSHIPPING Once you have the contract fulfilled, save the Vilya ability for playing powerful events such as Grim Resolve, Hour of Wrath, and the The Galadhrim's Greeting (which also happens to be the only threat management within the deck, so if you see that one, I'd recommend playing it, just to be safe.

CONCLUSION The deck is really fun to play and it gets a lot of the most iconic characters from the LotR lore all playing in one deck. Also, the deck feels a little different each time you play it, depending on the order that the allies hit the table, which makes it fun. The one thing I will say is that I have struggled with the deck when I have not gotten Vilya on the table early. It is not a guaranteed loss, but it requires smart resource management and hopefully at least getting the Wizard pipe. If you try this deck, I can promise that you will have fun with it at the very least.

A quick note on the sideboard. If you want to play with another player who wants to run some of the same uniques in their deck, the Harad allies swap in really nice. I would recommend replacing them with some of the higher cost allies like Glorfindel or Gildor.