Outlands Prepare for Battle 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Definitely going to try this out sometime!

@toxiczammyThanks! I'm sure you'll like it. Sometimes it feels like a game within a game trying to get Prepare for Battle completed.

As a tool to gather a lot of allies in play I consider a very good tale way more efficient than timely aid (when you don't play secret, if you do both are great).

I can't play outland without lore sphere on my deck. Too much excellent cards (gleowine is not even close to the powerfull draw engine i build around) and even outland allies to play with make me alway play a lore hero. Play spirit can be nice too but if I was you I will play only Hirluin for the leadership hero.

@RouxxorUsing lore with Outlands definitely makes them faster, and is a very good way to advance your boardstate. But I have already played Outlands decks like that. So the very purpose of this deck is to be different than the norm. Spirit provides a way to trade speed for survivability with those events being solid countermeasures against the encounter deck. Anyways, I tend to get enough card draw as is, not too little and not too much. Prepare for Battle, Gandalf, and Timely Aid have consistently given me enough Outlands allies to dominate the several quests I tested this against.

I also like A Very Good Tale, but it comes with a risk that it might leave you with a net loss of action advantage and could discard away other important cards like A Test of Will. I see Timely Aid as a contender, even outside of secrecy. Unlike A Very Good Tale, it is always conservative of action advantage. Plus with Steward of Gondor and a deck of mostly cheap cards, I can spare the 4 resources to bring in an Outlands ally, and the stat buffs that ally brings can be well worth the price of 4.

I see things differently, but I still respect your view on things Rouxxor. After all, with so many players in this community, there are many different deck-building philosophies that develop.

Ok. I never told you that you must play lore, I just can't do that with my own deck. I would be frustrated not be able to draw billions cards. But why do you say that you must choose play lore or spirit? There is no evidence that playing 2 heroes leadership is good. In fact I prefer alway play 3 (to enjoy the mono leadership cards) or only one (to play several event in all sphere).

By looking again your deck I just realize that you don't play Hunter of Lamedon. With a very good tale it is efficient way to look after outlands on the top cards of your deck. If it fail it doesn't really make you loose cards until you finish your deck. You will just draw another cards, sometime better, sometime weaker. I doubt that you often come to the end of your deck without lore so it is an obvious average gain. You don't have to play them instead of timely aid. Some miruvor or desesperate defense can also give you slots.

I am also a big fan of envoy of pelargir. With great stats for a 1-cost ally you also can reorganize resources. Good deal. And work well with a very good tale (one-cost to play and 2 regard to a very good tale, give you additional resources when found on very good tale).

Personally, I am okay with having sufficient card draw rather then drawing a ton of cards and not playing all of them, so long as the deck is built to run on that. As far as playing two leadership heroes, I chose that because the leadership cards in my deck are the more expensive ones. It's not like I can always expect to open the game with Steward of Gondor, but at least on the same round I draw it I will have always generated enough resources to play it and not have to worry about having only one leadership hero that is short one resource. And then all l I need is one Spirit hero to play strong events that mono-leadership doesn't get access to. Mono-leadership ramps up the swarm pretty well, but aside from Men of the West it has few ways of preventing a bad treachery from inflicting variety of ruinous effects. I just built this deck not because I think it is outright superior to other Outlands builds, but because I wanted to change things up a bit and have an Outlands deck capable doing things that other Outlands decks typically don't.

Hunter of Lamedon could go in this deck, but I found the deck-space to be tight and he got squeezed out. He was in competition over slots with Outlands that actually produce stat boosts and cards that provide answers to the threats the quest presents. I have him in the sideboard as an option for switching him into the deck however.

Comparing A Very Good Tale with Timely Aid fairly requires math, so I investigated this further by running some calculations with the hypergeometric distribution formula. This lets me know the odds of either a specific card or a type of card showing up in a series of card draws. In the most ideal situation to play A Very Good Tale, it is the early game, I'll say round 2 when I have drawn a total of 8 cards from the deck leaving 42 cards left in the deck. I've got two allies in play by now, maybe one in my hand, meaning there are 21 of my 24 total allies still in the deck. A Very Good Tale discards the top five, and the chance of it discarding at least 2 allies is almost 83%. That is pretty good odds, but about 1 out every 5 times it will return only 1 or 0 allies. By adding 3 more allies to the deck, the success rate reaches 90%! That means it is a killer event to use in decks with nearly 30 allies. However, this particular deck also has 11 important cards for which indescriminate discarding would suck. These are the three copies of A Test of Will, Hasty Stroke, Desperate Defense, as well as Gather Information and Prepare for Battle. In the situation I described above, A Very Good Tale has an 80% chance of discarding at least one of these assuming we haven't drawn any them yet, and the loss of Prepare for Battle would be especially hard on this deck, but losing a copy of the other events significantly hinders the probability of drawing any one of them during the game. Actually having 3 Test of Will is better than only having 2. Timely Aid on the other hand does not discard anything precious. When Timely Aid is used in the same situation I described above, it will get an ally in play a whopping 97% of the time. That is highly consistent without any risk of key non-ally cards being discarded. Thus, I prefer Timely Aid for decks that should avoid discarding key cards and A Very Good Tale for decks that don't really care much about what gets discarded as long as they get allies in play.

• You don't necessary loose all the cards. The fifth cards can be out of reach (will you still draw 5 cards during the game?).
• you must do the math about how many times you will draw cards thanks to a very good tale. If test of will is the sixth cards on top of you deck you will draw it next turn. Without a very good tale you may never draw it.
• Put away 5 random cards in your deck increase or decrease you chance of drawing good cards? Sometime it increase, sometime it decrease but of course it is an average move.
• In fact the most important question is: will you draw all your deck. If the answer is yes you will loose somes draws and some cards. But it is in a long time so it can be not relevant. Sometime it is. If you don't usually draw your deck (and I think you don't in this deck) you can just imagine that the cards discarded by a very good tale are in the bottom of your deck. It is the same, except for the side quest, that can be shearched by Dúnedain Message

Alright, I did more play testing and calculations so I could answer these questions. First up, can A Very Good Tale help me draw the sixth card if it is a A Test of Will or something like that. The answer is yes it can, but only if that sixth card is A Test of Will. When drawing a card at the start of the resource phase, there is realistically an 8% chance of drawing 1 out of 3 copies of a specific card from our 42 card deck in the second round. A reduction of 5 cards doesn't change this by much, but of course Prepare for Battle increases the chances to about 13%. After the initial opening hand, hoping to draw any specific card will likely disappoint you. Yet more so than the number of cards in the deck, the number of copies of a card in the deck has greater influence on the draw % in the first half of the game. The chance of drawing that 6th card as A Test of Will from the 42 card deck decreases to 4.7% if one of the copies has been already been drawn or discarded. And with only one copy left in the deck, the chances are also abysmal. And given that I already demonstrated that A Very Good Tale will more often than not discard one of those safeguarding events, I think it's safe to say that it doesn't actually help me draw cards.

As far as whether or not I draw my whole deck, that depends on the quest. Some of them succumb easily to an Outlands swarm, others take time regardless. If I play The Foundations of Stone, I will probably at least come close to drawing the whole deck. And with treacheries like Lost and Alone and Sudden Pitfall, it is very nice to have those events. The loss of one those means I have one less potential answer to a threat from the encounter deck. And with this deck I'd rather have them on hand and not need them all than need them and not have them.