Caldara Conquers Ash Mountain 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck brings together two strategies for handling the challenging Under the Ash Mountains scenario:

(1) Get a fast start with a souped up Caldara

This quest does not limit your deck size, but it does make you discard down to 40 cards in setup. We can use this to our advantage. By using an over-sized deck, I know I'm going to start the game with 17 cards in my discard. In addition to a decent chance of getting bonuses from Hidden Cache and Ered Luin Miner, this makes it highly likely that you'll have a suite of fantastic targets for Caldara right from turn one.

In addition, Lothíriel and Prince Imrahil form a nice combination in order to further strengthen Caldara's effect. If you use Lothiriel's ability, you can get Imrahil in for free on turn 1. After quest resolution, you trigger Caldara's effect. She first goes into the discard pile, which makes Imrahil a hero. At this point, you have 3 spirit heroes, and so can get put three allies into play with Caldara. Further, because Imrahil is a hero, you no longer have to shuffle him back into your deck due to Lothiriel's ability (which states that if the ally is in play at the end of the phase, you shuffle it back into your deck). At the end of quest resolution on turn one, you can have three heroes and three strong questers.

Of course, that's an ideal start where you have Imrahil in your opening hand (and I mulligan for him regardless of what other cards I draw). If you don't have him, there is still a decent chance one got discarded in setup. In this case, you can still use Caldara on turn 1. It's much less effective (you replace Caldara with a new hero and get one additional ally), but waiting around for Imrahil otherwise puts you too far behind this quest. This quest punishes card draw, so we don't want to draw too many cards looking for him either.

In almost every test game, I was able to either hit the ideal scenario (Imrahil in my opening hand) or the sub-optimal strategy (grab Imrahil from the discard), and while the former were easier, both strategies typically led to victory.

(2) Use Beregond to engage the Torech Gorgor Patrol as early as possible

Beregond starts with The One Ring, which I use to grab Inner Strength and play on him on turn 1. With this attachment, you can block the patrol indefinitely. You do need to take an extra attack from the Patrol when it engages. The best way to handle it is to get Unexpected Courage on early and block both with Beregond, but I've also had success chumping with an Ered Luin Miner I got from the opening flop, or some other cheap ally, if needed.

You want to engage the Patrol as early as possible so as to remove the limitation on being able to put 5 threat on the main quest. In most games, I engage it in turn 1 (provided I can handle the two attacks), though since you'll often be targeting a side quest in turn 2, you can put off engaging the Patrol until that side quest is cleared if needed.

With these two parts in place, this deck is all about racing to the finish. Rather than trying to creatively stall, this deck is all about huge and fast willpower. If you can load the board up fast, and keep the Patrol engaged with you, you can pretty reliably blast through the quest stages before the discard effect defeats you.

The deck is mostly high-willpower allies. The other cards in the deck are fairly straightforward; a few of note:

• Faramir is the target for Stand and Fight every time. Once again the initial discard helps you out, as there is a pretty decent chance he'll be in the discard from the beginning, and if not, discarded somewhere along the way. The Map of Earnil is largely here just to play Stand and Fight out of the discard.
• Reforged mostly targets Unexpected Courage, just to help make sure Beregond can handle any additional enemies that come your way, or Steward of Gondor.
• I usually hang on to A Test of Will for the treachery that makes you discard X cards, where X is the number of characters you control.