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Darkling Door 6446
This is a thematic deck built as part of my Thematic Nightmare series on my blog, Darkling Door.
The theme for this deck is "Aragorn's healing lore (featuring the elves of Mirkwood)" and it was built to defeat Nightmare A Journey to Rhosgobel.
Strategy
Legolas is responsible for placing the vast majority of progress on the quest—as such, I mulligan for Blade of Gondolin. In the early game, I typically quest with Aragorn and Wilyador until the Eagle has taken a little too much damage for comfort (since being exhausted makes him more vulnerable to several Treacheries in this quest). Later in the game I might have an Ally or two down to help quest, but generally I'm just treading water during the quest phase until Legolas finds something to shoot.
I can typically deal with the early game Eagle-hunter using either Goblin-cleaver or Hands Upon the Bow (combined with a little direct damage from Argalad) so that I never have to take an attack from it. Lembas goes on Aragorn in case he has to surprise defend a big attack, but most of the time I take attacks from smaller enemies undefended and try to heal the damage off, either with my many healing cards or by spreading it out among my Silvans and letting the Silvan Tracker do all the heavy lifting.
The trick is to quest through stage 1 as quickly as possible, unblocking my ability to travel to Rhosgobel so I can start using my healing cards on Wilyador. The deck has plenty of card draw, so I can usually outpace the damage on Wilyador once I'm allowed to start healing it off. If the damage is racking up too fast, I can always use The Evening Star to clear Rhosgobel while it's in the staging area.
It's not too hard for me to control the pace at which I make progress, especially since Legolas' response is optional. Thanks to Aragorn's ability, threat is almost never an issue. If I need to stall on stage 2, I can simply quest unsuccessfully until I'm sure I can get Wilyador down to zero damage.
This deck has two weaknesses:
- I don't really have a good answer to Ungoliant's Spawn. It's possible to kill her, but the cost to my action economy, card usage, and the damage I'll take in the process make her appearance perilous at best. I'm hoping to get through the (relatively thick) encounter deck without seeing her one copy, or to only see her as a shadow card.
- Due to my low output, I'm somewhat vulnerable to location lock. Legolas needs Enemies to make progress, so if all I'm getting are Locations I might be out of luck. The Evening Star helps to mitigate this, and there's plenty of card draw to help me dig for it when I need it, but it's something I need to watch out for.
I'm not sure I'm happy with how many 1x cards there are in the deck, since that usually indicates that the deck will be inconsistent. They're here because I have found each of them to be the difference between victory and defeat from time to time. The deck has a lot of card draw to help maintain consistency, and Heed the Dream digs for exactly what I need when I need it, so it all seems to work out fine in practice.
For more analysis, check out my blog post on this deck.