Flight to the Ford Starter Deck

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AutumnRose 1263

Introducing a new starter deck

With the new release model, there are many essential cards that will never find their way into the hands of new players. "Revised-only" players can either:

  1. Be content with never getting all the player cards
  2. Scout Ebay for extremely high priced packs from the old release model
  3. Print alt-arts to fill out their pool

This new starter deck aims to help those in the third category, by providing 30 new alt-arts that can not only be printed through your favorite card-printing service, but also can be used without modification as a powerful new starter deck. None of the cards included in this starter deck are likely to ever be re-released under the new model, meaning that if you are a revised-only player, these will all be new cards.

How the deck works

This hero lineup is a classic lineup that hails back to the days of the Dwarrodelf Cycle, but this deck brings new twists on the old formula. The core idea is to use Frodo as your defender, raising your threat by significant chunks when needed, and then to lower your threat back down to your low starting level when needed with Aragorn's ability.

This deck brings even more threat-increasing cards to capitalize on this massive threat reduction by including The One Ring and an assortment of cards that interact with it. Use The One Ring to start the game with Inner Strength in your hand, letting you boost Frodo's defense up to 3 and cancel shadow effects. Use the Master-traited events to gain control over the encounter deck while you set up your board state.

Featured heavily as well are Pipes. Use Spare Pipes to boost Frodo's health and search for those Master-traited events, use Dunedain Pipes to cycle through your deck faster to find what you need, and get massive cost reductions on expensive cards using Smoke and Think.

This deck not only functions super well, but is also highly thematic, capturing the latter half of Frodo's journey to Rivendell.

How do I print the deck?

Links to printing the project via MakePlayingCards and MBPrint can be found on my page here.

9 comments

Jun 12, 2023 bhuster 785

This is a high-effort post, thanks for putting it together (especially the MPC and MBP links). Only thing missing might be a few of the Contracts -- which wouldn't make sense for the deck but would be super nice to have.

Jun 12, 2023 AutumnRose 1263

I agree! Contracts would be really good to have alt-arts of. A few factors made those not my first priority:

  1. They are the easiest cards to proxy
  2. There is no template for them on StrangeEons, so it's difficult to make alt-arts of them without access to the ALeP pipeline.

Thanks for checking out the deck!

Jun 13, 2023 pandom 5322

Phenomenal! I can't wait to try it out.

Sep 16, 2023 Fierce Waffle 25

Is there a hero you'd recommend for use with Thorongil?

Sep 16, 2023 AutumnRose 1263

Aragorn and Glorfindel are both great options because they both have alternate versions in the core set, and if you have the Angmar Awakened hero expansion, there's yet another Aragorn to choose from. If you have ALeP, using Thorongil on Glorfindel to get his tactics version is VERY good.

Apr 28, 2024 triton14 36

I printed this starter deck and just wanted to say a huge thank you for putting it together!! And thanks for preparing everything to making printing through MBPrint/Make Playing Cards easy! I also like hearing about how/why on the COTR podcast.

As a revised core player I'm so happy to have cards like Spirit Glorfindel, Loragorn, Light of Valinor, Fast Hitch, Arwen ally, and all the pipes! It's a real fun deck to play, and the alt-art versions of the cards are great; many I prefer to the actual versions! As a newer player who's really loving this game, thank you :)

Jun 14, 2024 Coshuda 1

@AutumnRose do you have plans, or have you made Alt-Arts for the Contracts?

I am getting a set of both decks you did made for everyone in my play group and the contracts are the ones I would really like to have nice copies of. :)

Jun 14, 2024 AutumnRose 1263

@Coshuda I have no current plans to do the contracts. I recommend you check out Waffle's excellent treatment of them: seafile.nieves.io

Jun 14, 2024 Fierce Waffle 25

@Coshuda @AutumnRose snowbourn.nieves.io has the latest links!