Controlled Discard 1.0

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Nice, looks like an intriguing Noldor deck! I bet it's fun to cheat all of those powerful allies into play for free.

How does it play? My partner and I have a few theoretical suggestions, but theorycrafting doesn't hold a candle to practical playtesting. :)

Just from looking at the decklist, there are two issues we think you might run into:

1. Consistency - Your deck seems to rely on getting a handful of important attachments in play (namely Vilya and To the Sea, to the Sea!) before it starts to work
2. Cards in hand - The biggest problem discard decks seem to have is running out of cards to discard to fuel their effects

The easiest fix for #1 is to slim your deck down to 50 cards, if possible. A few suggestions:

• Prince Imrahil, while fun, is an expensive fallback plan for something you're hoping won't happen anyway.
• My partner often finds Lords of the Eldar to be too expensive to play often. You might consider cutting at least 2 copies.
• Does your threat get high enough to need Double Back? We suspect in most games Elrond's Counsel would be enough, your mileage may vary.
• Do you find you get far enough through your deck to need Will of the West?

To address #2, you'll want some cards that increase the number of cards in hand. While Círdan the Shipwright and Daeron's Runes are great filters to help you find the cards you need, playing them doesn't increase the number of cards in your hand, and you'll definitely need extra cards if you're planning to discard them.

You have Elven-light and Galdor of the Havens, which are good, but can get expensive, and you'll definitely want all the help you can get with card draw. Some others to consider might be Master of the Forge or Rivendell Minstrel (both of which will also help you find your key attachments faster too).

If you're willing to change heroes, there are a few options that might help with both of these as well. Swapping Glorfindel for Arwen Undómiel could help you pay for a turn 1 Vilya + Imladris Stargazer. Alternatively, hero Galdor of the Havens could help you find your key combo pieces faster, and then you could add Mithrandir's Advice, which would actually net you cards when you play it.

Let us know how it goes! My partner says it sounds like an interesting deck and now she's considering trying something like this out herself!

So last night, prior to reading your suggestions, my brother and I took this deck and squared off against The Druadan Forest scenario. I played this deck (as listed above) and he played a Leadership/Lore Outlands deck of his own making. Before I go further, I have to comment that you sir, and your partner (wife? If so, EPIC!) are nearly prophets. I made the following observations during my play:

1) The deck limps along until Vilya or To the Sea, to the Sea! hits play, although once either attachment is equipped the fun times really begin. A more consistent method of getting them into play, i.e. Master of the Forge or Rivendell Minstrel is an excellent suggestion and one I plan to implement.

2) There's too many cards in the deck and not enough draw, plain and simple. My initial thought was that since the plan was to discard a lot of my deck to get a ton of benefits, and while that does indeed work, you do actually have to have cards in your hand to make it work. I'm going to look into more draw options to improve consistency and make it more plausible to actually pull off the strategy.

3) Going hand in hand with the above point, the cards I drew more than once and wished I'd had anything else were Prince Imrahil, Galdor of the Havens, and Lords of the Eldar. There's other cards to cut as well (I actually never got a chance to play Elf-stone so I can't make a judgment call on how important it is to keep) but those 3 in particular stuck out as ones I was always feeding into the discard pile.

As to your suggestion of a hero change, I am definitely open to this. From a thematic standpoint, which I'm sure you can appreciate, my goal was to create a deck utilizing the Elf Lords to their fullest potential. Glorfindel is the lone exception here because he was mainly included to balance my starting threat a little bit, even though he still thematically makes sense. I do think that Círdan the Shipwright and Elrond can coexist in the same deck, but I do now question if that deck would be more skewed towards a Strider style deck to keep your threat lower and focus on empowering the heroes themselves, rather than an army of Noldor at their backs. I may try exchanging Círdan the Shipwright and Glorfindel for Arwen Undómiel and Galdor of the Havens to see how it improves the deck and it's consistency.

Finally, I will say in my defense that it does not help that the Against the Shadow cycle seems to hate all things resources, which did not help us last night. We ended up going 1-4 against the scenario mainly because I just could not draw the pieces I needed, and the archery and resource stealing of the Wose prevented the Outlands from coming to my aid. We won the game in which my opening hand contained Vilya.

Thank you to you and your partner for providing me with the feedback. It's always really encouraging to see people who are very good deck builders approving of your ideas and choices. I am going to make some changes and then once I test them I'll link the updated deck in the description here along with how it fared. Again, thank you for the help, very appreciated!

@Authraw, ringsdb.com

@Authraw, scratch that, please see: ringsdb.com

I forgot to add 3x Master of the Forge, which I included in the deck's 3rd iteration. Please let me know what you think!