May the Stars Shine 1.0

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• 1.0

This is a thematic deck built for an ongoing series on my blog, Darkling Door.

Theme: Noldor

Played Against: Nightmare Into the Pit

It is a clear, cold night. The moon casts his beams upon the face of the Lord of Imladris as he looks out across the Bruinen. The Misty Mountains sit proudly upon the Eastern horizon, their bulk dark against the starry sky. Elrond draws a deep breath of the winter air: refreshing, but with a bitter bite to it. "Middle Earth is truly a beautiful home," he thinks to himself, "but it cannot be home to the Elves much longer."

Strategy

The primary goal of the deck is to get the classic Vilya + Imladris Stargazer combo into play as quickly as possible. For the uninitiated, the combo works like this: Vilya allows me to exhaust Elrond and play the top card of my deck for free. Normally, using Vilya is a gamble—the top card of my deck might be a useless Event like A Test of Will, a second copy of a unique card, or some inexpensive card that I wouldn't really want to trade Elrond's beefy stats for.

Imladris Stargazer, however, takes the guesswork out of using Vilya because I can exhaust her to look at and rearrange the top 5 cards of my deck. I can always put the most useful card on top. If none of those cards are worth it, I simply save Elrond's action that round. No muss, no fuss, no risky gambles.

At the start of the game, I use Galdor of the Havens' selective mulligan ability to replace everything that isn't one of the combo pieces or Heed the Dream. If everything lines up perfectly, I can discard a card to Arwen Undómiel's ability in order to be able to play both Vilya and Imladris Stargazer down on turn 1.

Even if I don't find both cards by turn 1, though, there are plenty of other cards in the deck to help dig through and find the combo ASAP. Once both parts are in play, I can use the Stargazer to put an expensive Ally on top of the deck and then play it for free with Vilya. There are plenty of Allies in the deck to choose from, so I can decide on a turn-by-turn basis whether I'm looking for someone more questing-focused or combat-focused.

If I don't like what I see on top of the encounter deck, I can always use Master of the Forge to shuffle it up and try again!

► For more analysis, check out my blog post on this deck.