Challenge Accepted #10: The Magical Orb

Play The Oath using a deck that features the Palantir.

Deck Summary

Secrecy Palantir! For this deck I was inspired to see how well the Palantir's threat raise can be offset by a modern card pool's threat reduction. Turns out, it can be completely negated! Between Merry, Galadriel, The Galadhrim's Greeting, Elrond's Counsel, and Galadriel's Handmaiden, I was able to end games below my starting threat. The Palantir goes on (MotK) Arwen Undómiel, at 5 starting threat she's one of the the least threatening nobles we've got. You'll lose out on the 2 , but you still get her ability. Primary target is Treebeard, with Northern Tracker as a backup. This deck starts at 20 threat, so Resourceful's in the opening hand are great but not necessary. That's because you should be able to remain in secrecy for quite awhile given all the threat reduction options, once you have additional on the board to take over for Merry / Nenya-Galadriel, that is. The Mirror of Galadriel should be top priority as it can pick out all the remaining cards, Silver Harp's are included to get the guaranteed card draw.

With the Mirror/Harp, search out the Palantir and Nenya. Nenya to give Galadriel access, in turn Far-sighted is going to give you the upper hand when using the Palantir. By seeing 5 cards out, and having such low threat, you can often plan your round in a way that'll set you up for a good 2/3 identical cardtype lineup for the Palantir on the following round. With all the card draw you'll have, you'll quickly draw into other copies of Far-sighted, allowing you to set up for multiple Palantir turns. The secrecy allies, Celduin Traveler and Ithilien Lookout are here to allow you to get a little scry ahead of using the Palantir in the cases you have no advance knowledge.

Quest Summary

I played The Oath twice. It's not a difficult quest, but that was perfect for this quirky take on the Palantir. The first playthrough actually still posed a significant challenge for the first few rounds by throwing a low engagement spider at me! Luckily an early Treebeard was able to save me after an undefended attack, after that I stabilized my with Mirror of Galadriel pulls, so that Merry and Galadriel could be used for threat reduction instead. I lucked into very early Nenya and Palantir, by the third round, I was consistently using the Palantir. I may have been lucky, but I was surprised at how consistent I was at getting 2 out of 3 correct on the Palantir and on the cases it was only 1, I was revealing an enemy which allowed Merry to negate at least half of the the threat raise. By mid-game I have all 3 Resourceful's on the table and I'm now windmill slamming allies onto the board every round. The following rounds continue in this trajectory, every time I get above 20 threat, Merry or a Galadhrim's Greeting brings me right back down. Far-sighted's give me the upper hand in Palantir-guessing and I draw through the entire deck before the game is done, without even using an Ancient Mathom! In the end it was a relatively easy victory after the spider trouble in the beginning, I even ended the game at a lower threat than I started!

The second game played out pretty similarly, thought it took until about mid-game before I even pulled the Palantir. But once at that point, it was constant scrying and ally swarming my way to victory.

I had fun revisiting a card that I think I may have only ever tried once or twice (the Palantir). I was happily surprised at it's effectiveness for card draw, how trivial the downside was to overcome, and I somehow forgot just how powerful that consistent 3-down scry really is. If this were to be taken against a harder scenario, it'll definitely struggle with combat until some combo of Treebeard / Quickbeam / Rhovanion Outrider / Northern Tracker is in play, but it would pair very well with a combat oriented deck. This deck definitely quests for a ton.