Synergy At Its Finest 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck is made to be highly synergistic and enjoyable at the same time. I believe that I have succeeded to a certain degree, and you can see the results of my effort here.

Théodred has great natural synergy with both Heir of Mardil and Steed of the Mark, as they can both allow a questing hero to ready after they gain resources from Théodred. Heir of Mardil is slightly more efficient, however, than the Steed because it lets the questing hero keep the resource it is given. The extra resource could be helpful to one of the two elven twins, but they have less willpower than a potentially more appealing second target: Glorfindel.

Not Spirit Glorfindel. LORE Glorfindel.

Seriously! The extra resource given by Theodred can help heal up characters on the board. Now, I thought, who is going to take damage on a consistent basis? Glóin likes taking damage, but he takes it in large quantities and is therefore not a good target for Glorfindel's healing. The same logic applies for Treebeard. Gimli might work, but at the point I thought of him I had found my dream hero: Erkenbrand. His ability is very strong, acting like A Burning Brand, but he has to take damage to activate it. But with the help of Glorfindel, he doesn't need to worry about getting high in damage- and he can deal with shadow effects as well.

After that, I focused on effects for Erkenbrand that would increase his or let him defend multiple times, so I slotted in Dúnedain Warning and Armored Destrier. I also threw in two copies of The Day's Rising for even more potential resource generation. Asfaloth also seemed like a natural fit because Glorfindel has an in-sphere match for it and it's just plain awesome on him. Not on Erkenbrand.

After putting in Deep Knowledge and Daeron's Runes for card draw, Errand-riders for resource transfer, Sneak Gandalf, and Galadriel and Master of the Forge to find Heir of Mardil, I had a good chunk of deck space for something. But what? The main problem with theme focused decks is that it can be hard to "splash" a bit of the archetype into your deck. You have to dedicate your deck to it and build around it. Except Silvans. You can easily put a bit of Silvan into a Leadership/Lore deck if you have ten cards for it, so when I counted and found I had seventeen open slots, I knew I could put a good Silvan focus into the deck without undermining the key aspects of it. So I put in the suite of cheap Silvans, O Lórien!, and the "bounce" events for some fairly decent Silvan synergy, which rounded out the deck quite nicely.

A few notes:

-Mulligan for Heir of Mardil. This is the card that sets everything in motion for the deck and the deck will stall without it.

-If Erkenbrand doesn't end up taking any damage, you essentially end up with a net gain of two resources, as you can save Glorfindel's resource and hopefully get another one with The Day's Rising.

-The deck can struggle a bit for attack power, as Glorfindel is your only real main attacker. Dúnedain Mark can help with this, and the Naith Guide can help with her one point of attack...yeah...having your buddy run Legolas is strongly encouraged. Or you can try to avoid engaging enemies and just use Erkenbrand as a Sentinel.

-Out of Gandalf's three abilities, the threat reduction is generally the most useful, but depending on how the game is going the cards or the damage can also be useful.

Enjoy the deck!