Saw Further and Deeper 1.0

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• 1.0

Saw Further and Deeper or "Damrod, Steward's Spymaster"

So the scrying cards in the game, and the encounter deck manipulation stuff in general has always been really interesting to me but I couldn't really pull a deck together to work how I wanted.

Then Intrrogation dropped in The Drowned Ruins pack, and something clicked. We now have a cheap event that lets us potentially see quite deep into the encounter deck. It does have a requirement to play that needs a little setup time (an enemy with a trap attached), but as we're playing the Draw sphere, and are packing plenty of other scrying, that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

As it's an event also, and only a 1 cost we can recur that much more easily with Scroll of Isildur than it's closest predecessor Risk Some Light which is considerably more expensive outside of a secrecy environment.

Opening Hand:

So the deck is fair-teeming with draw so seeing some in your opening hand shouldn't be a surprise. Ideally you should have enough draw in your starting hand to pull into a trap (ideally Entangling Nets as it will be free to play) and some way to look at the encounter deck. This should be enough to get the ball rolling.

At the Table:

Ok so the glaringly obvious problem is that for all the knowledge you can glean from the encounter deck, the deck on it's own, can do little about it. You have no strong defender to protect you from enemies, or ways to cancel the doom that approaches. So you'll have to rely on your friends to handle anything that makes it through your subtle manipulations of the encounter deck.

Despite this you are not completely powerless, you have some subtle tools to help you and your party deal precisely with what is coming.

Gildor's Counsel is a great card in multiplayer, even more so if you know ahead of time what the card is going to be, if you and your friends have no way of dealing with the enemy or treachery you'll reveal as the last card of staging, perhaps it's shadow effect, if any, is more palatable?

Denethor's own scrying ability is very powerful, again if you know you have no way to deal with the first card the encounter deck is going to throw at you, simply remove it from the equation by having Denethor move it to the bottom of the encounter deck.

Interrogation is one of the strongest weapons you have to manipulate the encounter deck, and the most obvious use would be to discard some horrible card ahead of time. However perhaps you see some location on the horizon with god forbid a beneficial Travel/Explore effect? Throwing it into the discard pile and bouncing it to the top of the encounter deck with Shadow of the Past should guarantee you get it when you need it. You'll still have the knowledge you gleaned from the Interrogation for the rest of the staging step as you don't shuffle or manipulate the order of the encounter deck following the interrogation.

Ravens of the Mountain is an odd include due to the fact that you shuffle the encounter deck prior to checking the top card, but sometimes you have no good choices, and perhaps resetting the encounter deck with a shuffle is the best option. And who knows you may net some progress out of it.

Palantir is a rightly, a double-edged sword, and should be used with caution. If your encounter manipulations are going well it's a strong source of card draw, if things have taken a turn for the worst and you've been starved for a look at the encounter deck in a turn or two then the Palantir can give you all the knowledge you can handle for a mighty chunk of threat. But who knows you may get lucky and net some cards too :P

Sideboard:

So in testing the deck EXCELS at manipulating the encounter deck, having 3-4 turns in a row in a 3 player game, knowing every encounter card/shadow that will turn up is incredibly powerful. But relying on your fellow players to handle everything else is a little rough. So I dropped some of the card draw for a few more location control centric cards.

Deep Knowledge and Heed the Dream were the first to leave the deck...you'll be gaining threat fast enough with the Palantir that the Doomed for Deep Knowledge is potentially too risky. Heed the Dream is amazing and you could either keep this and drop Mithrandir's Advice or vice versa. You have enough extra card draw that Heed is probably better in most cases, giving you exactly which card you need. So we added some The Evening Star and Thror's Map, to help us combat locations .