QotW: A (Mostly) Peaceful Deck

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Some Sort 3809

There's a neat ruling that if you don't have any heroes, any damage from undefended attacks just fizzles. The only problem is if all of your heroes are killed you're eliminated and it's tricky to have no heroes without them all being killed.

Typically the way to achieve this state is by getting down to your last hero and sending him or her away during combat via Desperate Alliance. Then you can take all the attacks undefended, watch the damage fizzle, then see your hero return at the end of the phase so you can do stuff again.

But then you have to figure out a way to recur Desperate Alliance indefinitely or else you eventually reach a point where you have to deal with those attacks again. Instead, the treachery Lost and Alone could shuffle one of your heroes into your deck to trigger the "no heroes, but they're not all killed" state... at least until the hero is drawn (and returns to play) or discarded (and counted as killed).

Of course, requiring Lost and Alone limits the number of scenarios you can use this trick against, and unless you have a way to avoid drawing or discarding that hero, it'll still turn off again eventually. (There is once again tech you can use-- Wizard Pipe or Gildor Inglorion can get the hero out of your deck and into your hand without drawing it and therefore returning it to play-- but it'll still only work against Foundations of Stone.)

That brings us to the third and, in many ways, best method-- "hero" Sméagol. If you play long enough against a quest you will eventually reach a point where Smeagol is not a hero but is also not killed. This state persists for as long as you want-- you must defeat Gollum to turn it off, but you can just choose not to do so. You'll have to deal with Gollum's attacks every round, but... well, see the bit above about all damage from undefended attacks fizzling.

So that's this deck's goal-- get Smeagol flipped, get the other heroes gone, never defend again.

With the goal defined, we're left with a question: what exactly can we do if we don't have any heroes? Not much-- it turns out heroes are relatively important! We can play 0-cost neutral cards and any cards we managed to get out before our heroes left will stick around, but there's not any way to continue building board state from there. Well, virtually not any way.

You see, Treebeard and Radagast are not heroes, but they both collect resources and can spend them (on Ents and Creatures, respectively). We even have a ruling that we can use their pool to pay for any card that requires us to spend sphereless resources. (The ruling was with respect to Wilyador, though outside of a few campaign cards, the only other card impacted by this is Hidden Cache.)

So we'll try to get out Treebeard and Radagast (and get Radagast his Staff) before Smeagol flips and from there we can just engage every enemy, ignore them, and quest over top of an empty staging area. If we luck into Beorn's Path for the final quest stage, we can go the entire quest without declaring a single attack or defense.

But more than that, it turns out there's a lot of things that start getting a bit weird if you don't have any heroes. Can't get your heroes Caught in a Web if you don't have heroes. Hummerhorns can't kill a hero if you don't have any heroes. You also... can't exhaust a hero to travel to Great Forest Web if you don't have any heroes. That one's a little bit of a bummer.

(For extra catharsis, repeatedly engage a Hummerhorns and then send it back to staging with Radagast's staff as you laugh and laugh and laugh.)

Passage has a few nasty shadow effects that punish undefended attacks (Ungoliant's Spawn causes you to raise your threat by 8, East Bight Patrol raises your threat by 3, Hummerhorns deals 2 damage to each of your characters), but since they're all on enemies, once you have every enemy engaged you're pretty much good to go.

One note: Ally Radagast is quite bad. When the developers designed Radagast's Staff, they deliberately did it in a way where it would work not just with the new hero, but also with the old ally to help make him more playable. Unfortunately, the staff had a design flaw that led to it not working as intended with the hero-- Radagast is meant to be able to pay for creatures of any sphere, but if the staff discounts a creature to zero, Radagast lacked the sphere match and therefore couldn't play it. (This issue was especially pronounced with the 1-cost out-of-sphere Messenger Raven releasing in the same pack.)

In the reprint, Hero Radagast was "fixed" so that he now had a sphere match for 0-cost creatures. But Ally Radagast suffered from the same problem and since he was never reprinted, he couldn't be similarly fixed. As a result, I treat Ally Radagast as if he was given a similar fix-- granting a resource match for 0-cost creatures of any sphere. This is not exactly street-legal, and you should know that if you play the same way, the card police will probably come and get you. I figure a few years in card prison is a small price to pay for a chance to see Ally Radagast not suck for once.

(To be honest, even with the staff and the fix he still kind of sucks.)

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