Ride in Disguise 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Concept

This deck was built out of a desire to create a strong, fun, original and at least somewhat thematic solo deck. I've wanted to build a deck around Éowyn for quite some time now but for some reason the end result always felt a bit underwhelming. Not in this case.

In general, it's important that a deck be able to cover some basic aspects of the game, like for example:

• Questing
• Attacking
• Defending
• Threat management
• Resource acceleration
• Card draw

Just to name a few. For solo decks all of this becomes even more important, as there's no one to compensate for your deck's weaknesses in one or more of these areas. While building this deck, I initially focused on just the first three aspects mentioned above. While the others are definitely important as well, I feel like the first three are absolutely essential for any solo deck. Without having covered those, you probably won't even make it through the first few turns. Ideally, we can cover most of these three aspects through our heroes alone, as that would mean that we have all of them covered to some extent right out of the gate.

Our heroes

I think this deck succeeds pretty well at that. Between Éowyn, Merry and Glorfindel you can quest for a solid 9 right off the bat which is usually enough to get through the first two or so turns. In terms of offense, Glorfindel can swing for some nice damage from the very start, but it's Éowyn who really comes up huge here. Her effect, if used wisely, allows her to attack for 10 twice in a single turn and thanks to Merry you can even attack a third time if you play your cards well.

On the defensive side, our heroes may not seem like they'll be any good at first. This is where Golden Shield comes in: when equipped to Éowyn, she can defend for a whopping 5 once a turn which is more than enough to stop even the most powerful enemies in the game (with the exception of Orc Vanguard...). Now admittedly, we're putting quite a lot of burdens on Éowyn's shoulders, which is why we make sure to run Snowmane so that she can both quest and either attack (using her effect) or defend (most of the time) each round. Even then though, this is not the most reliable source of defense as it depends completely on whether or not you manage to draw into both Snowmane and Golden Shield.

Allies to the rescue

This is where our allies come in to help our heroes out a bit. We've got Defender of Rammas, Boromir and Honour Guard who all provide excellent defensive support. Note that all of these allies share the Warrior trait and as such they are perfect targets for Raiment of War, one of my favourite cards to come out recently. It turns Defender of Rammas into a 2 5 3 supertank (on par with Beregond's defenses) and Boromir becomes an absolute monster at 4 4 6 while defending against certain enemies.

Given the defensive nature of almost all our allies I feel pretty safe running Silvan Refugee. Normally it's one of the most fragile allies out there, but losing allies in this deck happens so rarely that it's pretty much a non-issue. All of our allies (with the exception of Silvan Refugee herself and unboosted Defender of Rammas) have more than 1 so they aren't that vulnerable to treacheries that deal direct damage like Necromancer's Reach, and even then there is always Honour Guard to cancel damage in a pinch if you really need to. So if there was ever a deck where Silvan Refugee could be used to great effect, I feel like this is it.

About secrecy

Even with all that being said, defense may still prove rather tricky when playing a quest where you start off with a lot of enemies in the staging area. In those cases this deck can make use of its incredibly low starting threat of just 17! This allows it to avoid most enemies on the first few turns so you can freely pump out some allies while your heroes take care of questing before fully committing to combat.

While the deck does have such a low starting threat I decided to not focus on secrecy too much. I feel like there just isn't enough solid support yet to justify an entire strategy built around it and if you ever go above the 20 threat threshold the entire deck just falls apart. That being said, I do run two secrecy cards in Resourceful (more on this later) and Celduin Traveler.

Both Silvan Refugee and Celduin Traveler give you 2 for just 1 resource which is quite unheard of! On top of that, Celduin Traveler allows you to scry the encounter deck which is absolutely invaluable in solo play. Even if you play it out of secrecy for its full cost of 3 resources it's still worth the price in my opinion, given that in my experience this deck has an overabundance of resources in the late game anyway. Let me explain why that is next.

Resource acceleration

One additional advantage of our low starting threat is that it makes it so that the deck doesn't really have any problems with resources: it can stall quite effectively during the first turns by avoiding enemies and focusing solely on questing successfully each turn. This way you can basically get a few "free" turns in to gather the resources you need and play whatever you want from your hand before most enemies become a real threat.

On top of that, the deck runs three copies of Resourceful to help speed up this process even further. Given that the deck starts out with 17 threat you have 4 whole turns to play Resourceful while still benefitting from its secrecy discount (and even after that there is still Elrond's Counsel to stay in secrecy mode slightly longer).

What about card draw though?

Having covered most of the important bases I mentioned earlier, there is one that we haven't really discussed yet: card draw. There's not a whole lot of in-sphere card draw support for Tactics and Spirit, so I run pretty much all they have to offer in this area in the form of Legolas, Ancient Mathom and Foe-hammer. Since we run three copies of Dagger of Westernesse and two copies of Rivendell Blade we should have no problem triggering Foe-hammer. If we're desperate we can even attach Raiment of War to Glorfindel to trigger it.

Ancient Mathom is pretty straightforward. It's Legolas who's the real kicker in this department as he allows you to draw up to two cards each round thanks to Merry's flexible readying effect! Not to mention you can also attach a Raiment of War or Rivendell Blade to Legolas to make him even stronger and thus more likely to trigger his ability. Between these three cards, access to card draw becomes pretty much a non-issue as well.

The Gandalf factor

The last card I want to quickly highlight is Gandalf, as he is of great importance for the late-game potential of this deck. While the deck can quest extremely well out of the box, it doesn't scale as well as you would like. Without Gandalf, there's really nothing more to play in terms of once you've played your Silvan Refugee and Celduin Traveler. At that point you'll be questing for around 20 at the most and while this is often more than enough, sometimes it just doesn't cut it.

This is where Gandalf comes in: not only does he quest for free with his 4 each turn, he also adds a lot to both the offensive and defensive capabilities of this deck. And because our starting threat is so low you can keep him around for quite some time before being forced to let him leave. Just make sure you don't play him too early, because you want to finish setting up all your other main pieces first before letting your threat skyrocket.

Closing remarks

I think I said all I meant to say about this deck and how to play it. It's incredibly fun and very potent. I would recommend to mulligan for Light of Valinor and either Resourceful or some solid card draw in your opening hand, but other than that any hand should be playable.