Deck Tech: You get a card! You get a card! 1.0

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Hey all, welcome to week 18 of Deck Tech! Last week I sent Amarthiul into battle on the back of two mighty steeds, representing his Dunedain heritage with the help of our favorite Steward Denethor.

This week was GenCon! Well, sort of "last week" by the time you'll read this. And it was awesome. I met so many awesome people from the Lord of the Rings community. (And got to heckle Brandon from COTR in person.)

So here's the deck I brought to primarily play for any four player LOTR games I got into. As you can probably guess, the deck is basically entirely a support deck.

So when you play, your goal is to smooth out every other player's draw and resource game, while providing a bit of location control and healing from your own deck.

I did make one change for this Deck Tech post that wasn't reflected in the GenCon list. I originally only had two Errand-rider, since I expected the little bit of progress and chump blocking from Snowbourn Scout would be more useful. But in one of the games at the con, the Errand-riders were so instrumental in playing cards from my deck and letting other people play cards from their deck that I had to go up to 3 copies.

So let's talk about the quests! And I'm sorry if you were hoping for dramatic play by play commentary this time. I wasn't really in a good spot to take notes.

(I also need to throw a shoutout to everyone I played with. Obviously this deck can only be as good as the decks it's working with. Dennison, TheChad, Mbogie55, IanTftC and a couple of other people whose internet/discord names I don't know, thanks!)

Quest 1: The Siege of Annuminas

I don't intend to spoil too much of this quest's mechanics, but I will say that A Test of Will did basically nothing here, thanks to an obnoxious location.

We were at the E/F stage, which starts with a ton of enemies in play, and continually spawns big boss level enemies in the second stage. Our deck mix was this deck, a questing deck, a Beregond/Ranged deck, and another Ranged deck. Which is basically perfect, because the other players were instrumental in defending and killing the enemies that had to engage me.

Our Beregond deck was a bit slow in drawing A Burning Brand, so I kept feeding him cards. Campfire Tales, Deep Knowledge, and the Beravor draws until he found it. Luckily, during all that digging, I managed to draw two Unexpected Courage and two Errand-rider's to help me pay for them. So I tossed both of those on Beregond.

After that we were basically in easy mode. Beregond's defense was 6-9 with Protector of Lorien, and he could defend four enemies a round with no need to worry about shadow effects. I didn't develop a lot of location control, but I did keep passing resources around so we could power up everyone's board, and play more Gandalfs than we otherwise would have been able to.

Unfortunately, in epic multiplayer mode all three groups have to be doing well to keep moving forward, and I couldn't pass my card and resource bonuses all the way down.

So the city fell, just as everyone expected. But at least Caleb was there to commiserate with us about our crushing defeat.

Quest 2: The Drowned Ruins

We did one new quest, right, so why not try another one? This time we had a hobbit questing deck, a direct damage deck with the new hero Argalad, and a defensive Leadership deck.

Threat was an issue this time, so I didn't use the Deep Knowledge many times, but I did play a few Campfire Tales, and Beravor was exhausting for card draw nearly every round. (Some rounds in this quest require power questing, so I committed her during those when I could.)

And this time I didn't draw the Errand-riders, which was disappointing. It would have been useful.

So instead, I got to develop more healing (which got destroyed by a treachery), and location control. The Rhovanion Outriders are awesome in this quest where the active location can require so many quest points. Ping it for one progress and gain a willpower is a lot like questing for three.

I also pulled off a clever trick with the way the Grotto locations get replaced here. After they're explored, you put the top location from the Grotto deck in play, and then shuffle the explored location back into the Grotto deck.

So on the final turn, I used two Northern Tracker to explore a Grotto in the staging area. But there weren't any in the pile, so it didn't immediately replace itself.

Those other decks were singing in this scenario, too. Argalad and Thalin were killing enemies left and right before they engaged, the defensive heroes tanked so many Throngs of Unfaithful, and the hobbits mustered up an impressive questing army. I was mostly doing silly things like passing cards around and using Heed the Dream on myself to pull out two copies of A Test of Will.

Of course, we won that scenario, and I really look forward to getting my hands on my own copy.

Play Tips

1. Theodred's resource goes on Lanwyn, if you don't desperately need it elsewhere. The deck just needs more spirit resources than any other type.
2. The leadership resources are mostly useless. Those are the ones you should be passing around with Errand-rider, unless you have something worthwhile to spend them on immediately.
3. If you don't have A Test of Will in your hand, it can be a good idea to aggressively draw from your own deck to find it. Obviously that depends on hte quest, but I would have liked to see them earlier against Drowned Ruins.
4. Don't play this deck without Sentinel and Ranged support. You'll be pretty hard pressed to deal with any enemies while you're giving all the cards and resources away.
5. I didn't see either side quest until the last round of one of the quests, so it's entirely reasonable to cut them and add in more draw or cheap, high impact cards.
6. Be smarter about Throngs of Unfaithful than I was. If you kill them and they pop back up on top of the deck the following round, that's a net plus one willpower. Put two back and you can break even on willpower and ready to use her attack. Or just go up two willpower.

Next week: I'll be building with Flame of the West, and I should have a couple good decks to bring out from those new player cards. Though I can't guarantee that any of them will actually feature Éowyn.

Blog: As always, you can follow the deck posts on the blog or via the RSS feed. The community deck spotlight is going to continue on Thursdays. You can find the last one here.

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