The Mirror's Gaze 1.0

• Versions
• 4.0
• 3.0
• 2.0
• 1.0

"What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, things that are and things that yet may be." - Galadriel, The Fellowship of the Ring

In multiplayer games, location control and treachery cancellation are things you often need in more abundance than in solo play. A Test of Will has thus been a popular target for recursion for some time, and Northern Tracker has remained a staple of decks that expect to run into a lot of locations. That's how I thought up this deck, in order to combine both of these elements into a mono-spirit questing deck ideal for multiplayer games.

The Heroes

For this sort of deck, high starting willpower is a good thing, so Arwen Undómiel and Éowyn lend their high willpower to the cause. The addition of an ally in the first round can easily bump it up to 9, which is fair to begin with until we add more. Both ladies have great discard abilities, which syncs with Elven-light for extra card draw.

It is also important to maintain low threat to more or less avoid enemies, since this deck is basically a pacifist and combat will be the job of those players who do have decks suited for it. Galadriel ensures that our threat will generally only go down, bar the doom keyword. Her card draw and her mirror are critical to this deck, getting the necessary tools from our deck is a must.

Playing the Deck

When playing this deck, we need to get either Mirror of Galadriel or Silver Harp as soon as we can get them, they are mulligan worthy. The Silver Harp accomplishes a few things, eliminating the random discard of the mirror and turning Arwen's ability into a straight up resource gain. I like to use the mirror to search for the harp if I don't have it yet or to get A Test of Will in my hand right away.

As time goes on we will be using our Hasty Strokes on other player's enemies and A Test of Will and they will end up in the discard pile. So we have recursion effects in the form of Galadhrim Weaver, Dwarven Tomb, and Map of Earnil. The weaver shuffles the target card back into the deck for us to repossess it with the mirror, and the map puts the recurred event on the bottom of the deck to eventually be fetched by the mirror, and the tomb essentially lets us replay whatever we want. There is also one Will of the West in case we need to get all of that back for more cancellation/recursion. It definitely works, there was a game where I played A Test of Will 4 times and Hasty Stroke 5 times. All of this costs resources though, it will require some skill/luck for you to decide whether you need to prepare for recursion or play other cards instead. If any of your partners at the table can give you resources, you're in good hands.

Aside from recursion, this deck has plenty of willpower to throw around, Ethir Swordsman, Anfalas Herdsman, Galadriel's Handmaiden, and Pelargir Shipwright provide their money's worth in willpower. However, locations still pile up, so we got Northern Tracker and Greyflood Wanderer who work well together to explore mass locations. Thrór's Key neutralizes a location that is too threatening otherwise. It can also help with those few locations that are resistant to having direct progress placed on them, and Secret Paths can be helpful in such situations as well. If most locations are unfazed by the tracker, Sulien would definitely be a more helpful alternative to the tracker.

Healing, threat reduction, and Gather Information round out the deck's other capabilities. Warden of Healing keeps the questing swarm alive, let alone others as needed. The Galadhrim's Greeting is fantastic and recurrable for yourself or other players to save them from the brink. Deck searching for everyone? Yeah, everyone wants that.

Concluding Thoughts

This deck has been such a helpful questing deck for me, it excels in its specialized role. I hope it captures the power of Galadriel's Mirror and how it can interact with other cards in strong ways. The Mirror shows many things as she said, will you see your comrade's fate and save them in time? Do you dare look into the Mirror?