TMV M: I - Infighting support 1.0

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• 1.0

(See here for the overarching reason for this deck's existence, designed to fight The Morgul Vale in a particularly insane way.)

Given the constraints I put on myself for the other deck -- heavily Lore to help find all those Infighting copies as quickly as possible, and the use of Haldir -- I mainly needed three things things out of this partner deck. 1. Questing, 2. Weapon access, 3. A Sentinel tank to buy time.

A more traditional approach might have used Beregond for the tank and two heroes for the questing, but I found that the various threat increases the quest throws at you to be overwhelming; indeed, they were my main loss condition in all of my failed attempts. Thus, I settled on Beregond to hand the other deck semi-consistent threat reduction, then went pretty hard on the Elrond's Counsels, Galadhrim's Greetings, and a Double Back.

Speaking of Double Back, side quests in general are excellent in The Morgul Vale, since you're not trying to put progress on the main quest cards at any point. Thus, a copy of Gather Information is here to shore up the heavily combo-oriented other deck.

Círdan as my other hero was mainly meant to filter through to those all-important Tests of Will. One of the major flaws in my whole approach to the quest is just how terrible an early Master's Malice can be: among other things, it auto-kills Amarthiúl! An Honour Guard can save him, but regardless, the badness of Master's Malice, and indeed all the scary treacheries, made me focus on getting the cancellation.

There are not that many questing allies here, so I made sure they were high-quality. I found the Silvan Refugees to be important, as consistently putting out 2-cost allies in a 2- hero deck leaves you nothing for A Test of Will or Hasty Stroke in the absence of resource acceleration. With Beregond tanking, characters left play far less often than you'd think, which shored up the Refugee's weakness. Plus, she made for a cheap chump-blocker (which the quest doesn't punish as harshly as many others; thus, the Vassals and Envoys as well).

This being the Against the Shadow cycle, the shadow effects are pretty horrid, so there is a suite of mitigators: Hasty Stroke, Sterner than Steel, Desperate Defense. Most importantly, there is Armored Destrier from the other deck -- its Dunedaín focus has it engaging a large portion of the enemies, so a Destrier on Beregond can go a ways towards long-term survival. Shadow discarding is particularly good against Lord Alcaron's attacks (as I made sure to ask Caleb).

The usual Silvan weapons show up to boost Haldir and Legolas, with the less standard inclusion of Elven Spear. This was to enable the janktastic Elven-light combo (draw for pretty much as many resources as you can muster); indeed, Elven Spear is the only way of consistently getting Elven-light into the discard pile in the first place! It's a fragile thing, to be sure, but I thanked my lucky stars when I could draw deeply in search of that last Test of Will late in the game.

The 1x Westfold Outrider is a silver bullet for an Orc Vanguard in the staging area, and can also help with those annoying 4 Morgul Trackers.

In retrospect, designing around Galadriel instead of Círdan may have made for a more consistent support deck. There's neither the use of Narya nor Noldor discard pile shenanigans to really justify using him. If it was out-of-the-gate questing I was looking for, Éowyn could be even better at a lower threat cost. And there's always Splorfindel. (I found ally Arwen's Sentinel-granting to be crucial, so her hero version was never really on the table, despite her one-stop-shopping solution to both draw and resources.) What can I say? I love Théoden too, so I guess I'm a sucker for a white beard.