Blood in the Isen 2 - Gondor Bounce 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck was designed to tackle the ALeP quest Blood in the Isen. There is more information in the description for the Blood, Sweat & Tears in the Isen Fellowship, which covers general approaches to this quest and how this series of decks was conceived.

This deck is based on the similar abilities of Lothíriel and Prince Imrahil which put allies into play temporarily for questing & combat respectively. They even work well together, since Lothíriel will keep the density of allies in the deck high.

For Blood in the Isen, these abilities are excellent because they don't interact with the Fords objective so the allies can be used for "Free".

Both of these heroes allow you to get off to a quick start, but there can be issues with maintaining a solid board state. This will partially be offset by a second deck but a self made solution is also needed - that's where Ingold comes in. His ability will keep our hand full for Lothíriel's ability and for playing cards in the planning phase.

Ingold can trigger his ability up to three times per round, but you don't want to raise threat unnecessarily so there's plenty of resource generation to fuel this ability and Imrahil's as well.

There are also several cards in the deck with Valour or 40+ threat abilities. You would expect to spend a good chunk of the quest at this level, and it allows the deck to get extra value out of its cards.

For combat Prince Imrahil's ability will be very useful, but there can still be issues with defence. Again, the second deck can help somewhat, but Imrahil can defend in an emergency and the deck is pretty good at chump blocking, with Knight of Belfalas able to bounce in and out to return allies to hand.

There will usually be some choice on how to use Lothíriel's ability. In general I would favour using the larger combat allies like Boromir as you likely can't afford to play them normally and this puts them back in the deck where they are needed to be used with Imrahil. Smaller allies like Angbor the Fearless are better off being played normally.

The deck includes Dúnedain Hunter, who can be a risky play. However, due to his 0 cost he is an extremenly valuable ally for this quest. If you can deal with the enemy he brings he is essentially a "Free" ally after that. His high attack is particularly useful for taking down Ealdwulf in short order.

Finally the deck features side quests since they are quite easy to do in this quest. Keep Watch is especially valuable and can go a long way to easing combat pressure for this deck. Gather Information can help ensure the right allies are in hand.

Overall the strategy is to build up the board slowly, making up for the cost limitation imposed by the objective through Imrahil and Lothíriel's abilities. 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.