"For ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat." -Galadriel, The Fellowship of the Ring

I have been enjoying the Into the West contract immensely and really love that it perfectly captures the plight of the elves that Galadriel describes as "The Long Defeat." Of course here in this deck, Galadriel is just a minor part, but the diminishing of the elves can be felt--even in the men and women of Dale.

Beginning of the Game

Your goal for the early game is to try to find King of Dale as fast as possible. There are some tools to help you do this: Beravor's card draw, Brand son of Bain's card draw, Gather Information, Keen as Lances's card draw, and Galadriel. With all of these tools and the resource generation/smoothing from the contract, you should be able to get King of Dale into play in the first couple turns.

From there you are going to start churning out allies and attachments as fast as you can, as with any good Dale deck. Remember though: the contract prevents you from reducing the cost of any ally by more than 2, so you don't need to stack more than one additional attachment on the King of Dale.

Into the West

Playing this contract adds a lot of interesting decisions to each turn, such as who will pass into the West each turn. Although Dale is perhaps not the first choice you might think of to go with this contract, it is really powerful because of Bard son of Brand's ability to pull attachments back to hand when a character leaves play. Pairing this with Into the West naturally causing allies to leave play, and you can get a lot of mileage out of your attachments.

Let me illustrate an example of how powerful this can be:

• Start your turn with a North Realm Lookout in play with no attachments.
• Use either King of Dale or resources gained from Into the West to play a Descendant of Girion.
• Play a Spare Hood and Cloak onto your North Realm Lookout, drawing a card.
• Play any attachment on the Descendent of Girion. Remember that he gets a cost reduction on items. Let's just say we play a Hauberk of Mail on him. Draw another card.
• During the quest phase we commit both these characters to the quest for 6 willpower between them, and with the North Realm Lookout not exhausting to quest.
• Use the Spare Hood and Cloak and pass it over to the Descendent to ready him. He can now use his 3 defense to block for you this turn.
• At the end of refresh, the Descendent of Girion leaves the game. The attached Hauberk and Spare Hood and Cloak return to your hand via Bard's ability, you gain 4 resources for more allies, and you draw another card.

This can be done pretty much every turn with very little setup. Every time you bounce items back to your hand you can use them again for more card draw. You can even use the Long Lake Trader to move even more items to your Into the West ally for the turn, returning even more attachments to hand for more card draw.

With all this card draw, you will pretty soon have the entire deck in your hand and on the board, allowing you to make even more impressive planning phases.

Other Tips

Try not to play more than one of the "leaves play at the end of the round" allies per turn. If you play one, you always want it to be your Into the West target.

I always wait to play Wiglaf until I have an Ancestral Armor in hand so I can play it on him for free. With a Hauberk as well, he is a 3 willpower, 2 attack, 4 defense, 5 health powerhouse with 3 actions per turn.

You can use either Traffic from Dale or Legacy of Númenor to get King of Dale into play on the first turn. Watch for these jackpot opening hands.