Gloin Damage Engine 2.0

• Versions
• 2.0
• 1.0

A fun and powerful deck that, once up and running, soaks up continuous attacks, draws a decent number of cards, and yields near-infinite resources.

Requires some care in setting up; shadows and/or a surprise undefended attack can be absolutely fatal to your board state.

The best setup is Gloin with an ent draught, citadel plate, a warden of healing, and some form of shadow cancellation in play. Dunedain Watcher is expensive and not repeatable, but is preferable over burning brand in some ways because it allows Gloin to safely take undefended attacks.

With a Warden and a Lore icon, Gloin can take infinite damage and use the resources from the current attack to refresh himself before the next attack; self-preservation allows him to keep the resources. The biggest decisions are often about whether to heal him all the way back up vs whether to use his resources to built your board state.

If you get a bunch of expensive cards / tactics cards in your opening hand, mulligan - those are cards you want to see later in the game.

The biggest weakness is threat - it obviously starts very high, and gandalf + sneak attack is pretty much the only avenue for threat reduction. If there is a uniqueness conflict, then you basically have to sub in a way to reliably get a fourth icon - I offer A Good harvest + galadrhim's greeting in the sideboard, but I haven't tested that.

Steward of gondor is included, and 3x might even make the deck more powerful, but I opted for 1, because it is not necessary / you can easily be swimming in 30+ resources by the end of the game.

Otherwise, has a decent mix of questing, and attack, and the other two heroes are sturdy enough to take a few hits while Gloin builds up - and synergize perfectly with him and the Warden.