Decks for New Players: Minimum Purchase Outlands 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck is designed with newer players in mind, and is part of a series of decks that can be contructed using cards from only the Revised Core Set and one other purchase: The Steward's Fear.

Here we have a moderately low cost curve, about 3/4s of the deck costs 2 or fewer resources. Card draw may prove to be a bit slow until you get Gléowine out, but Lórien's Wealth will help counter that with bursts of additional cards. There are more resources demanded from the sphere, but once Steward of Gondor is played on Hirluin the Fair, you won’t find that to be a problem. He is also able to spend his resources on Outlands allies of any sphere, providing a measure of resource smoothing while we are at it.

The core mechanic of this deck is a very simple one: put Outlands allies into play. That’s it, that’s as far as it goes. You see, each core Outlands ally has a very simple ability that boosts the stats of all the Outlands characters on the table. Each Ethir Swordsman says ‘Each Outlands character you control gets +1 .’ This means when you have all three out, every Outlands character will get an extra three . When you consider this is not ‘every Ethir Swordsman’, but every single Outlands ally, you realise this will stack up very quickly and that with each new Outlands ally you put down, their value increases exponentially. Once the second Ethir Swordsman is played, you aren’t merely getting a second 2 ally, but now you have two 3 allies. Put down a Warrior of Lossarnach and now you have three 3 allies all with 2 each.Your board stat advances not by increments but exponentially with every new addition. Your Outlands hero Hirluin the Fair will also get boosted with each new addition, so don’t forget to make the most of his utility as well. By the time you have three of any single type of Outlands ally, each ally will have a 4 Strength stat in whichever attribute that may be.

As I said, it can take a turn or two for your deck to get up and running, and so we have built in a few countermeasures to keep you in the game until that happens. You are particularly vulnerable to treacheries, not having access to the sphere, but Denethor is able to look at the top card of the encounter deck with the potential to discard it if it is not a particularly palatable one. SImilarly for larger monsters, until your allies get their defences up and running there is a danger they will fall prey to even a smaller enemy. And so we’ve brought Gimli to help absorb those blows, with the help of Citadel Plate to keep him up and running even longer. We have put in Sneak Attack/Gandalf and /Beorn to give you a bit more flexibility depending on what you need at the time, and a couple of other cheap allies to through under the bus if you are unable to survive a big attack, like your Gondorian Spearman for instance.

For more decks that can be built with only the Revised Core Set and one additional purchase, check out this article on Vision of the Palantir here: https://visionofthepalantir.com/2023/01/13/ten-decks-for-new-players/