Deck Tech: Even More Unlikely Friendship 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Hey all, welcome to week 40 of Deck Tech! Last week, the Steward of Gondor funded a new knife shop for Na'asiyah, and she absolutely slaughtered some enemies with them. Must be something to do with her secret Gondorian heritage.

This week we're building a nice, low threat swarm. Lots of dwarves, lots of ents, and a few other miscellaneous great allies.

Unfortunately, I have my doubts about Leadership and Lore's ability to reduce threat, or I'd have made this a secrecy deck.

The goal here is to pass all the resources to Bifur and use Narvi's Belt to help us play whatever allies are actually best each round.

Quest 1: Journey Along the Anduin

Any time I make a low threat deck, I want to take it to this quest. It's just so satisfying to build up and then completely crush a troll.

My start for this one is, of course, a Goblin Sniper and the Hill Troll. Fortunately, I've got a Sneak Attack and Gandalf in my opening hand, which I can use to clear it out and make enough progress to clear stage 1. Just have to kill the troll now.

I build up some decent allies over the next few rounds. A Wellinghall Preserver, Treebeard, and a Wandering Ent. And, I stumble upon my second troll.

And in round six, I play a Gandalf for draw power, allowing me to defend and destroy the first of two trolls. Then in round 7, I use Heed the Dream to get both of my remaining copies of Sneak Attack. So Gandalf can come back in the combat phase to damage the second troll and defend against its attack.

And then comes a series of just slightly sad rounds. I hold back some allies from questing and fall two progress short of clearing stage 2 in one round. And I wouldn't have faced any enemies in the ambush, either.

I do move on in round nine, revealing the second Goblin Sniper, a Wargs, and an Eastern Crows on the shore. I snipe out the Sniper with a Gandalf, hoping to avoid another round. But Wargs doesn't have a shadow effect, so I can't kill him yet.

Next round I just give up and destroy the Wargs with Gandalf during planning.

Final Score: 110. 9 full rounds, 31 threat, 0 damage on heroes, 11 vp.

Quest N: Others

I played a few more quests with this deck, and they all went pretty well.

Here's the weird part, though. I didn't play Unlikely Friendship once during all of these quests. I know they're in here, because I saw them with Heed the Dream. (Of course, spending a card and potentially multiple resources to draw a card and gain a resource is probably not worth it.)

Play Tips:

1. All of the ents are great in combat. Even Wellinghall Preserver has a respectable 2 attack to bring to bear. Use them when you need them.
2. Generally, I give Théodred's resource to himself and shuffle it to Bifur when I need more Lore resources. But once I have Narvi's Belt out, I just hand them directly to Bifur.
3. The only crucial ally is Treebeard, because his stats and readying are incredibly useful. Everybody else can be killed or discarded to Daeron's Runes without too much trouble.
4. Don't forget you can Sneak Attack a Faramir for a big questing boost if you need it.

Next week: Time to try out some of the side quest based cards from the Sands of Harad. Maybe I'll like them!

Blog: I'm still planning on doing a visual revamp of the blog, (and it has an RSS feed if that's your thing). Once that's done, I'll start sharing other players' decks again with the occasional spotlight.

Twitter: Follow @LOTRDeckTech to get notifications whenever I post a new deck, new blog post, or something random on the twitter feed!