Turbocharged Dale Honorifics 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

I devised this deck while trying to come up with a fun way to use ALeP's Aragorn hero. In essence this deck is a mash-up of a standard Dale deck built around Guardian of Esgaroth and new and old Aragorn-related attachments.

This deck was used to play through the Dream-chaser campaign mode as part of a two handed Fellowship and some deckbuilding decisions were made with that in mind.

Other heroes are Brand son of Bain to power the Dale cards in the deck, and Lanwyn who is both a Dale character and has synergy with the partner Woodman deck which uses Widfast and Gavin. Her Ranged ability is also very useful.

The origination of the deck was the realisation that Elessar could be used to make a Guardian of Esgaroth even more effective as a defender/combat solution. A similar effect is often acheived in other Dale decks with Círdan the Shipwright and Narya, but I like that Elessar lets you be a little more flexible in how it's used.

To do this Aragorn needs to share a trait with the Guardian, which is acheived with Estel and Elf-friend. Luckily Elf-friend is not a burden to include in the deck as it fits in with Dale's attachment strategy.

With a full combo, this deck can get a Guardian up to 10 , or allow several defences at 7+ . As it turns out, there are several times in the Dream-chaser campaign where the players may be faced with attacks of 7+ so this is exceptionally helpful.

Full combo:

• Guardian of Esgaroth (1 )
• Wild Stallion (+2 )
• Elf-friend (+1 )
• Hauberk of Mail (+2 )
• Arwen Undómiel (+1 )
• Aragorn + Elessar + Elendilmir (+3 )

With a Valiant Determination and Sword that was Broken the Guardians will also be questing for 7 without exhausting.

Having said all that, the Dale deck is very capable without any extra stat boosts and after playing the deck the biggest contribution from Aragorn ended up being the consistency provided by the combination of Estel and Elven-light. Even at the start of the game you can look at 3 cards with Estel twice per round, potentially rising to 5 cards three time per round which is an insane level of card selection.

The strategy for the deck is pretty simple, it wants to acheive 2 things - firstly setting up its resource/card engine with King of Dale, Steward of Gondor, and Elven-light. Any starting hand without at least one of these cards is a hard mulligan. Steward goes on Aragorn as he will be getting a icon from Elessar or Sword that was Broken (or potentially Thorongil). King of Dale was played on Lanwyn as she gets the +1 and her ability makes her a more natural quester than Brand.

Secondly, set up one or more Guardians of Esgaroth and power through the quest. It can take a few turns to set up, but there's not much that can stop a Dale deck running at full power. I would estimate that I got at least 1½ Guardians set up every quest, and more was not uncommon.

As for Thorongil, it came in handy in a few quests with a lot of threat pressure to get in Aragorn. Where that wasn't needed I sometimes grabbed Aragorn instead for some extra combat power.

If I were to make any changes now that I've played deck, I would drop some of the non-core cards in exchange for some fast resource generation to get the deck set up quicker. As an example:

• -1 Knight of Dale

• -1 Ranger of Cardolan

• -1 Andúril

• -1 Elendilmir

• +1 Rhovanion Outrider

• +3 Legacy of Númenor