Rangers of Ithilien Starter Pack 1.0

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• 1.0

“In this hour, I do not believe that any darkness will endure.” - Faramir

Faramir is one of the most complex and important characters in all of Tolkien's work. He showcases bravery and nobility in its purest form, and this Starter Pack is meant to highlight what he accomplished through hardship. He leads the group in this Starter Pack, protecting the borders of Gondor vigilantly, day and night.

The heroes' interactions with traps is the real focus of this list. Celador and Damrod provide highly efficient card-draw, readying, and threat reduction engines right out of the gate. Once all of your traps are synchronized and set up, Faramir can strike for a massive amount of damage.

This all sounds great, but understanding when you play certain traps is crucial to piloting the deck correctly and efficiently. Ithilien Pit is your signature early-game trap, allowing you to dodge high engagement-cost enemies and chip away at them in the staging area.

Ranger Spikes and Poisoned Stakes are your main ways of leaving enemies in the staging area forever, either rendering them useless or killing them without having to engage.

Ambush is simply too expensive without Damrod's discount, but with it only costing one it generally feels worth it. Use it to strike at and finish off enemies before they attack you, as defense isn't great in this deck.

Entangling Nets is great to leave in the staging area until a low engagement-cost enemy engages you. Use It Should Be Spared to stop it from going on enemies where it doesn't really matter. You can just leave enemies engaged with you if their attack goes to zero or even one and focus on more troublesome enemies.

Speaking of troublesome enemies, that's why Forest Snare is here. Even though it doesn't work with Celador, it's still a crucial part of the deck because it can deal with enemies that slip past your traps. It shuts them down and allows you to focus on other things.

You can recur all of these traps with the ever-valuable one-card engine Anborn, which I find to sometimes be even more valuable with three attack. Generally I find Faramir is enough to face any enemies that slip through the cracks.

The other allies in this deck are also great. Emyn Arnen Ranger is sometimes terrible and sometimes fantastic, though I usually lean towards the latter side. If you can get hooked up with a big enemy with Ranger Spikes attached, the Ranger can become a questing beast.

Ithilien Archer and Guardian of Ithilien both serve the same function of bouncing enemies back to the staging area so that more traps can be attached to them, which is highly useful, especially when Faramir is weak and you don't have any Forest Snares.

Mablung serves a similar purpose, but he is more for when you were one threat away from engaging an enemy last turn, but you need to evade them for one more turn. This sounds too situational, but 2 for two-cost and a quite good ability to engage enemies before you quest is very useful in this list. (He also has cool synergy with hobbits!)

Master of Lore and Seasoned Forager serve the same purpose here, which is accelerating your boardstate even more than normal. Trap decks are known for being quick to action, and these two cards assist even more.

There is a sub-theme in this deck of encounter deck management and scouting with Distant Stars, Interrogation, and Scout Ahead, which really allows you to control what you're seeing from the encounter deck, in terms of both enemies and locations.

General Tips:

• Celador's ability is usually a point of contention for me, because it's often difficult which option to choose. I lean towards the side of threat reduction, because it synergizes well with traps that intend to leave enemies in the staging area and Emyn Arnen Ranger.
• Stone of Elostirion is here because it's great to have for it's buff, but some might see it as not thematic. I do because it's a Palantir, which makes sense with Denethor, but if you prefer, you can swap it for additional copies of any card in the deck. I recommend another Ithilien Archer or Forest Snare.
• You should pace how you play the traps, because you don't want them all going on one enemy.
• Interrogation is an amazing card, but it does have unfortunate anti-synergy with Ranger Spikes, so you'll have to play around with that and see what works best.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy this list and its companion, which can be found here: https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/39917/themightofgondorstarterpack-1.0

Enjoy journeying through Ithilien with Faramir, and Happy Questing!