Special snowflakes 1.0

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• 1.0

Are you tired of anonymous Wardens healing your characters? Or random Swordsmen questing like crazy? Don't you want your entire fellowship, heroes and allies alike, to have names?

Well, regardless, here is a deck where every card that stays on the table, i.e., the allies and attachments (and heroes, of course), is unique. In order to minimize the possibility of blocking your own plays, almost all of these uniques are 1x's, the only exceptions being the uber-temporary core Gandalf and the really-want-it Steward meant for Loragorn.

Even if Steward doesn't come out early, and you can't draw/search into it with the multitude of available effects, there's always Arwen's ability, which can toss a resource to either herself or Loragorn. Once Steward is online, Leadenethor can usually safely shuttle his resource over to Loragorn, since there isn't much pressing need for resources. This becomes virtually risk-free if you can also get Sword that was Broken out. In the meantime, you can use the excess monies for Gandalf, Treebeard, or Saruman in a pinch.

A full set of Legacies of Númenor and Deep Knowledges mean to take advantage of Loragorn's unparalleled threat reduction ability. Don't forget you have Elrond's Counsels and Gandalf to drop your threat too.

By the nature of having a lot of 1x's, you are not going to have a terribly consistent draw. It's more of a toolbox build where you have to see whether you can make do with what you've got, or risk committing resources/threat into maybe drawing something better. Such a design will never be "top-tier", but I find the decision points it presents to be quite engaging.

Weaknesses include an absence of healing (Ioreth will be a good slot once she's released) and shadow mitigation. Nevertheless, even though I originally built this as a novelty, quest wins in true solo include a thrashing of Temple of the Deceived (during which I drew the entire deck despite never getting Galdor out), and, more impressively, a sweet win against Into Ithilien (including the Siege quest stage!). But, obviously, don't take this to a multiplayer game unless you want to annoy the hell out of all the non-Tactics players (and probably the Tactics guy/gal too, with all that Doomed).