Blood in the Isen 5 - Fellowship 1.0

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• 1.0

This deck is one of five that I designed to tackle the ALeP quest Blood in the Isen. There is more information in the description for my Blood, Sweat & Tears in the Isen Fellowship, which covers general approaches to this quest and how this series of decks was conceived. Of note is that this deck was not designed to be played solo and was tested alongside another deck from that Fellowship.

This was the fifth and final deck that I designed, built, and tested for the quest (and unfortunately doesn't fit in the Fellowship with the other decks). The premise of the deck is simple - when you flip the Fellowship contract to Side B you get 27 points of bonus stats for free - free both in resources spent and, more importantly, in terms of the quest's Fords objective. This was the single biggest freebie I could think of so I was sure it would go a long way towards beating the quest.

In general though this is a pretty standard Fellowship contract deck. Flipping to Side B and staying there is what it wants to do and it wants to do so as fast as possible. Then it wants to get as much value as possible out of all the stat boosts available.

This goal lines up very well with the quest by trying to squeeze value out of limited resources. Of the nine allies in the deck, five of them cost 0 or 1 resources - the cost curve is quite unusual as the charts show, but this is ideal. You should have a full Fellowship ready costing 10 or fewer resources. Then you have Treebeard, Frodo Baggins, and Light of Valinor providing action advantage.

For heroes, Frodo's combination of action advantage and threat reduction is exactly what the deck needs. Steward of Gondor is also in the deck to pay for this ability and any spare resources can pay for Wilyador or a full Heed the Dream.

Next up is Glorfindel - his action advantage is practically built in and he has amazing stats for his threat, which only get better with the contract. Since the deck is so low on threat it can afford a couple of turns exhausting Glorfindel to quest without too much trouble. There is so much card draw that finding Light of Valinor shouldn't take long.

Lastly, the deck needed a hero so it could field both the cheap allies and the needed card draw. Pippin contributes his own extra card draw and pairs well with Frodo.

The rest of the deck is mostly filled out with card drawing and tutoring effects to get the contract online quickly, but I will just mention Stand and Fight. In some ways this represents extra copies of your suite of allies, but the real benefit is that it can be used in any action window to flip the contract in case an ally is lost at an inopportune time.

The deck was tested and defeated the quest using this configuration. The side board presented here shows cards that were tested or considered for testing. Arwen Undómiel would be included if not for a conflict with the eventual partner deck.

There are a couple of weaknesses to consider with the deck.

Fellowship contract decks in general can be vulnerable to losing characters and therefore losing the contract bonus. There is some attempt to combat that both with Stand and Fight and with a lot of redundancies built into the deck. Unfortunately a bad encounter draw might cause issues regardless.

The deck also has somewhat poor defensive options. Treebeard and Wilyador can both manage eventually, but the deck is reliant on the partner deck for some combat support, at least before the contract flips.