Noldor Nerds - The Pen is Mightier (Multiplayer Support) 1.0

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• 1.0

"Master Elrond abode in Imladris, and he gathered there many elves, and other folk of wisdom... and the house of Elrond was ... a treasury of good counsel and wise lore"

-JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Intro

This is a weird deck. It uses Lore Bilbo. It has Elrond, but does not leverage Vilya. It sports the Fellowship contract, but contains just enough characters to flip it and doesn't really care if it flips or not.

What this deck does do is offers a super thematic "the pen is mightier" take on multiplayer support. Rivendell is described essentially as a university... a place where pursuers of knowledge and those who seek to preserve it gather and study, write, and compose songs of wisdom.

This deck tries to accomplish exactly that feel of Rivendell while supporting the other decks at the table in indirect ways very in spirit with mysterious Elven wisdom and power.

Heroes

Bilbo Baggins - What can we say about delightful old Bilbo, spending his twilight years living amidst the elves of Rivendell as he compiles his writings and sings merrily with the elves. Here, he provides some nice additional card draw for the table while also super-charging Drinking Song to allow this deck to cycle through all of its cards multiple times over the course of the game.

Elrond - He's here because it's his Last (or First) Homely House. He has some utility in super-charging Song of Healing, and he'll also bolster healing across the table which is surely appreciated. While Vilya is in the deck, it's basically just there because ... well why not? Once Gildor Inglorion is out you can use the Ring of Sapphire more reliably, but it's also nice that it provides an additional route to the Spirit sphere, in case the Song of Travels are being cagey.

Galdor of the Havens - This elf is as smart as he is dapper -- he knows you need to mulligan hard for your engine, and he allows just that (more on that below). His ability to reset your hand anew once per game can also bail you out of a bind.

What's This Deck Doing?

Basically, this deck is looking to use it's big brains to offer the wisest of advice to other players who are on noble quests to save Middle-Earth. On the table, this is abstracted by the deck playing a Gildor's Counsel nearly every turn (literally almost every single turn--I most recently played a 10-round quest and played Gildor's Counsel in 9 of those 10 rounds).* This makes Noldor Nerds perhaps the most polite deck in multplayer -- basically you're sitting at the table for free. Everything this deck does is pure gravy, because almost no cards are being staged for its presence. Generally, you'll want another deck to handle much of the combat, as you'll mostly quest (for quite a lot, once Fireside Song and/or Fellowship are online). In combat pinches, Elrond + Arwen Undómiel buff + healing are generally your best answers, and Glorfindel can always chump indefinitely as needed.

*In this sense, it's very similiar to my [Lullaby the Encounter Deck] hobbit deck (see Derived From], but I prefer this version for the Elvish Wisdoms and "protective magics from a distance" thematic appeal.

Other ways this deck supports:

Location Domination: this deck uses the very thematically appropriate The Evening Star for location control. You should always pitch this card to the discard whenever you have to pitch cards. As needed, you can use Scroll of Isildur to play an The Evening Star in the discard, meaning it's possible (I think) to have a single The Evening Star played via the Scroll to place (4x) 2 Progress.

Staging Area "Kills": as needed, this deck can rely on the Noiseless Movement + The Great Hunt combo to deal with particular pesky enemies. While the deck only features 2x of each card, because you'll have a massive hand and can play Lore events as needed from the Discard courtesy Scroll of Isildur, triggering this combo as needed is pretty easy to do.

Additional Multiplayer Support:

• Bilbo Baggins's card draw
• Elrond's healing augmentation
• Arwen Undómiel's defensive buff
• Gléowine's card draw
• Song of Eärendil's card draw (you can play it on other players--it'll still trigger your Love of Tales)
• Bartering your Scrolls to let another player play an atachment at -4 cost

A Treatise on Noldor Nerdery, or Play It Back Again... and Again... and Again

How does this deck work? We'll, you'll want to use Galdor and your card draw + Drinking Songs early to fish aggressively for Love of Tales, as this deck basically runs exclusively on a Love of Tales engine. Ideally, once this is set-up, you'll be collecting 6 Resources per turn (7 if Sword-thain is out). [editor's note on Sword-thain: if you can get it onto a ally, preferrably with Bartering, this will let your Scroll of Isildur's be free and your Mithrandir's Advices draw 4 cards.]

You're probably using 3-4 of those resources to invest in a Gildor's Counsel each turn, which means the extra resources can go toward more songs, Mithrandir's advice, or allies.

To the Sea, to the Sea! both powers up your Love of Tales engine while letting you play a 'free' Noldor ally (or perhaps enabling Galdor of the Havens's once-per-game redraw of 6 cards.

ALL of your songs that you can should be stuck onto Bilbo, and note that he can have all three copies of Song of Travel and Song of Eärendil, which can allow him to eventually get his up to a nice swol 9ish via Fireside Song.

Thanks to Scroll of Isildur and Will of the West, you'll be able to play many of your cards multiple times throughout the game because you'll keep recycling them (this can also be helpful to get discarded allies back). With so much card draw, it's pretty trivial to get back through your discard pile again once it's shuffled back into your deck.

Like everything this deck does, Fellowship is there as pure icing on the cake. This deck doesn't need to flip it to be effective, but it's kind of fun to go for it and assemble the entire House of Elrond.

Notes

This deck is going for theme over optimization (obviously), as otherwise you'd probably stick in more Fellowship-friendly allies (like Ioreth, Riversong, Quickbeam, Galion, etc.) or abandon Fellowship all together for some generics or a stronger Vilya-engine. But that's very much not the deck I set out to make (though you can certainly take these bones in that direction if you like!).