Mining The Mithril Mother Lode (#RCO) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

#RCO (Revised Content Only)

This deck is built using only the Revised Core, 3 Starter Decks (all except Gondor), the Fellowship Of The Ring Saga, and the Angmar Hero Expansion.

Overview

There's a large vein of mithril hidden somewhere in this deck. Finding it can net you 12-24 resources in a single round!

This is a powerful mining/delving deck that doesn’t rely on the typical dwarf swarm strategy. Instead, it uses the mining mechanic (i.e. discarding cards from the top of your deck) to generate ridiculous amounts of resources, and everything else in the deck is centered around maximizing the benefits of mining:

• Gandalf's passive ability lets you always see the top card of your deck, so you know what you're about to mine and can change it with his pipe or by simply drawing a card.
• Noldor and Dwarves have an interesting synergy here - Elven-lights want to be in the discard pile! Discarding an Elven Light is just as good as drawing it into your hand, so the faster you mine your deck the faster you can find them!
• Several cards let you fetch/play cards out of your discard pile: Erebor Hammersmith, Dwarven Tomb, Stand and Fight. Filling your discard pile makes all of these recursion effects more powerful, essentially letting you treat your discard pile as a second “hand” with lots of options to choose from!

The main goal of this deck is to setting up the ”mithril mother lode” combo, which is surprisingly consistent. I’ll explain it in detail below, but basically it involves getting 1-3 Hidden Caches to be the last cards in your deck (quite easy with Dwarf Pipes), and then mining them repeatedly with Zigil Miners and recurring them with Dwarf Pipes before playing Will of the West to do it all over again. I’ve usually hit the mother lode by Round 5 for a massive resource boost, hit it again a couple rounds later, and by round 9 I've been able to play every single ally and attachment in the entire deck.

This deck is complex to pilot, and strictly for solo play. It changes the feel of the game quite a bit, because you're not only managing your hand, but you also have quite a bit of control over your deck composition and some fun interactions with your discard pile. Setting up the mother lode combo does require some careful planning and using lots of tricks and action windows. Here we go!

Opening Hand

Here are the key cards you want to mulligan for, in order of importance:

1. Wizard Pipe (or Bilbo Baggins to fetch it)
2. Zigil Miner
3. Dwarf Pipe (or Bilbo to fetch it)

Strategy

Here's what you need to set up the mithril motherlode combo:

• Mine your deck as quickly as possible
• As you mine your deck, look for one Will of the West to draw into your hand. This is essential for making sure your deck doesn’t stall out; i usually go through my deck at least 2 times. Once you have one Will of the West in hand, you can freely mine your deck without worry. If you accidentally discard one, you could pull it back with Dwarf Pipe or Ered Nimrais Prospector, or put it into your hand using Dwarven Tomb.
• play as many Dwarf Pipes and Zigil Miners as possible. To maximize the mithril mother lode you’ll want 3x of each, but 2x of each is good too. Use Stand And Fight/Dwarven Tomb/Erebor Hammersmith to fetch or play these if they get discarded.
• Recycle as many Hidden Caches back in your deck as possible using Dwarf Pipes and Ered Nimrais Prospectors. Keeping all 3 in the deck is best, but 2 is perfectly fine.

Some other nice-to-have goals before you reach the bottom of your deck:

• Play Wizard Pipe ASAP so you gain supreme control over your deck and discards.
• Set up your card draw engine with Gandalf’s Staff, Gleowine, Galdor Of The Havens, and/or Protector of Lorien (for discarding Elven Lights.) Not only will you want to have tons of cards in hand to spend all the resources on, but drawing cards also changes the top card of your deck so you can sort of pick and choose which cards you want to draw and which cards you want to mine.

Most of the resources you gain should go onto Arwen to pay for Elven Lights and Stand And Fight, but depending on what’s in your hand you can adjust. Don’t forget Bifur’s ability to smooth out your resources, it often allows me to play that Lore ally one round sooner than usual!

How To Find Mithril

The true star of this deck is Dwarf Pipe. I had never actually used this card before building this deck, I thought it was sort of a useless effect since the card goes to the bottom of your deck, but then I realized two things:

• it’s extremely powerful when used with Hidden Cache. Even though it goes to the bottom of my deck, I can easily shuffle my deck using Ered Nimrais Prospector or A Very Good Tale to see it again sooner!
• As your deck shrinks from all of the mining/delving operations, you'll start finding your Hidden Caches faster and faster. Eventually there will reach a point where you should NOT shuffle your deck anymore, and leave all of the Hidden Caches at the bottom of your deck. That's the mithril mother lode: 1-3 Hidden Caches sitting on the bottom of your deck.

Once you reach the bottom of your deck, with only Hidden Caches left, you’ll use Zigil Miners and Dwarf Pipes to gain absurd amounts of resources. Here’s an example of the best case scenario:

Example of the combo

You have 2 Zigil Miners with 3 Dwarf Pipes, and 2 Hidden Caches as the ONLY cards left in your deck.

1. It's the resource phase, and you use your first Ziggy and name "0". Cards always get discarded one at a time (same with A Very Good Tale), so that you can interrupt each discard to use response abilities. You discard the first Hidden Cache, trigger its response ability to gain 2 resources on any hero (usually Arwen), then trigger your first Pipe response ability to put that Cache on the bottom of your deck. Then discard the second Cache from Ziggy’s ability, trigger both response abilities again to gain 2 more resources and put it back under your deck. Then finish Ziggy’s ability to gain 2 more resources, for a total of 6 resources. One Ziggy and 2 Pipes are now exhausted.
2. Exhaust the second Ziggy and the third Pipe to gain another 6 resources, for a total of 12. One Hidden Cache got discarded, so now the only thing left in your deck is one Cache.
3. Play out the rest of the round, do the FIRST part of the refresh phase to ready all of your cards and increase your threat, BUT before the end of the round, use the action window at the end of the refresh phase to mine again!
4. Use your first Ziggy (note: you are allowed to use his ability with only one card left in your deck). Gain 2 resources, exhaust first Pipe, then discard the second card from Ziggy’s ability (the same exact Hidden Cache), gain another 2 resources, exhaust the second Pipe, then finish Ziggy’s ability to gain 2 resources. We’re up to 18 resources.
5. Exhaust your second Ziggy and your third pipe, gain 6 more resources, now your deck is finally empty. 24 total resources gained
6. Finally, make sure you have 1-2 Elven Lights in your hand before using Will of the West to start over with a 25-30 card deck and setup the combo all over again. WIth this many resources, and Elven Lights that you can pitch to Arwen & Protector of Lorien, you should be able to draw as many cards as you need to be able to spend most/all of your resources. Play Beorn and/or Faramir using Stand and Fight or Gandalf's passive ability + Wizard Pipe.

Sideboard

This deck would benefit from a few more big unique allies to spend all of our resources on. As soon as the Dream-Chaser Hero Expansion gets released I’m going to instantly add Glorfindel and Narya to this deck. Lots of other options for tweaking the deck, I leave that up to you. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I had making it!