The White Council: Doom-Silvans (CotW Contract) 1.0

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• 1.0

“It appeared that Gandalf had been to a great council of the wise, masters of lore and good magic; and that they had at last driven the Necromancer from his dark hold in the south of Mirkwood.”

Intro

This is a Council of the Wise deck. More than any other contract, I have really struggled in the deckbuilding of this one. My idea was to create a functional deck that was both thematically and mechanically appropriate for this contract.

Saruman and Galadriel were both certainly members of the White Council, and I think it makes sense to asssume that Celeborn would be present also, even if just to lead the small escort of Silvans of the Golden Wood to protect and support the Council.

Mechanically, both the Silvan and Saruman-Doom archetypes bring a host of powerful events to the mix, which are excellent fodder for the CotW contract. Silvans have all of their powerful bounce events and Saruman readies from employing the Doom events. Furtermore, thanks to the contract's own threat reduction, Galadriel, and a bouncable Galadriel's Handmaiden, the frequent 1-point threat reductions work well with Saruman's innate restriction, and I frequently find this deck finishes well below its starting threat.

Heroes / Set-Up

These three heroes work pretty well together.

Galadriel provides important card-draw to help find key early pieces and to make sure you keep a steady stream of incoming events flowing into your hand. Her threat reduction also importantly lets you play a very slow early game as you build, which is helpful since I've found CotW means you're building your boardstate very slowly since your key elements are so leanly scattered through your deck. Nenya is here mostly to grant her Lore access, since this smooths out the costs of many of your allies. I find WP is often less important than card draw and threat stall, so I rarely use the Ring for her WP buff (but it's nice to have in your pocket when needed).

Saruman is a potent quester and attacker, and being able to ready him off of Doom events is very valuable, especially in the early game. He also provides access to Word of Command, which is wonderfully nice in a CotW deck because it searches all 50 cards and triggers the event bonus.

Celeborn, King of Lothlorien, almost didn't make the deck. Initially I had Thranduil, who I tend to prefer in Silvan decks for a variety of reasons. But I found this deck really wanted for WP, so Celeborn is useful here in bringing more innate WP and in boosting the stats of your pop-in Silvans. Celeborn is not as stout a defender, though, and he is the intended dedicated defender of this deck. Ideally, you want to get him built up with as many of the following as possible: Shining Shield, Armored Destrier, Dúnedain Warning, Cloak of Lórien, and Arwen Undómiel, as this can allow him to reach a respectable 6 DEF with a ready. When I use my search cards like Word of Command, Heed the Dream, and Gather Information I typically find myself searching for pieces of the defensive kit for Celeborn (of course, playing this deck in Multiplayer with a dedicated Sentinel defender across the table would hugely alleviate this demand, but I've only played this deck exclusively 1-Handed and it's worked well, even against Hill Trolls).

Key Pieces

In addition to Celeborn's Defensive kit above, you also want to see resource-generation/smoothing in the form of Steward of Gondor^1, O Lórien!, and Nenya. These, in conjunction with the contract's innate ability to add a resource to any of your three spheres, makes for a fairly flexible and dynamic economy. I find that the deck is frequently able to trigger all three contract benefits on many turns, though some turns you'll want to resist and hold events for future rounds where they may be more useful.

(1) Note about Steward: if you're playing multiplayer, you can easily drop Steward of Gondor out of this deck to allow another deck to have it. It's nice to have in 1-Handed, but the deck can get by without it and most games I've played the deck finishes with piles of extra resources.

The Elvenking is also incredibly valuable, as there are a variety of Silvan allies you might want to snag up and replay every round for their entering-play effects (especially the Galadhrim Minstrel who can fish more events out for you, but the threat reduction of the Galadriel's Handmaiden, the healing of the Galadhrim Healer, and the recursion of the Galadhrim Weaver can all be utilized well also).

One card that cannot be overappreciated is Rumour from the Earth, as this is a valuable event (seeing the top of the encounter deck means you can always be as economical as possible in the quest phase), plus it triggers the contract bonus, plus it can be pulled right back to your hand to reuse every single round. A very helpful card in the CotW context.

Play Experience

This deck is a lot of fun to play, but also kind of a brain-burn. There are a lot of decisions to make every single round... which event(s) should you play this round? Which contract bonus should you trigger first? Second? And, in general, I tend to think that in gaming having more interesting decisions generally makes for more interesting and more satisfying gameplay.

I would absolutely recommend making a custom reference sheet or some custom tokens to track which Contract Bonus you're using each round, because it quickly becomes impossible to remember which ones you've triggered and haven't yet triggered by the combat phase.

I've only played this deck a bit, but it's beaten (in 1-Handed) about a halfdozen quests from the Harad and Ered-Mithrin cycles, which have become my go-to test quests for many theme decks.

Notable Absences

This deck is missing some key cards that might seem like obvious inclusions, so I'll speak to them a little bit:

Saruman's Staff -- with so few Doom events in the deck, this one rarely felt worth its two resources. Fishing for them wasn't very successful and reducing the Doom value isn't very necessary since the Contract, Galadriel, and other cards are already doing that fairly frequently.

Light of Valinor -- it might seem like this should be on Celeborn, but I think it's more valuable to have a surefire way to exhaust him every round (questing) so that he can pick up a Silvan with The Elvenking every turn. With LoV, you'd lose the ability to use Elvenking on any round Celeborn isn't able to exhaust during combat, which can be a fair amount of them in 1-Handed.

Mirror of Galadriel -- this seems like it'd be really valuable for fishing key cards in a CotW deck, and it is, but I felt like this deck already tended to have sufficient card draw and card search, and I hated losing cards to the Mirror's discards (because whatever you lost was your only copy of that card).