Frodara and the Hobbit Necromancers 1.0

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• 1.0

Frodara and the Hobbit Necromancers or "Caldara Schmaldara!"

Nope it's not the name of Frodo Baggins' high school band, but instead it looks like our Hobbits are instead going through a goth phase and dabbling in some dark arts. This is a heavy combo-centric deck that's based around dumping a lot of high cost allies of any sphere into the discard pile and then 'resurrecting' through the auspices of Stand and Fight and maybe the sacrifice of a roast chicken dinner (Good Meal) to keep our overheads down.

Opening Hand:

It's a combo deck, so no getting away from it, we're looking for some very specific cards in our opening hand. Ideally we want one method of reliably getting cards into our discard pile, with Expert Treasure-hunter probably being the best target, although a Daeron's Runes can be just as good to start if you already have a high cost ally in hand you'll never be able to play. As Stand and Fight is the absolute key card to making the deck work, we probably want to see one of those too.

At the Table:

We need to bide our time a little to get our engine running, our engine being, get allies into the discard pile, play said allies with Stand and Fight, recycle Stand and Fight with Dwarven Tomb.

So step 1 is the tricky part, allies in the discard pile. If we got our Expert Treasure-hunter early then you should NEVER call ally. The precious few allies we can legitimately pay for we aren't really going to miss very much if they go. Plus even if we do REALLY need that Bilbo Baggins or Sam Gamgee then we can always Dwarven Tomb or Stand and Fight them. Depending on our need at the time you're probably better calling EVENT for the Treasure-hunter, as we'll need those Stand and Fight and Dwarven Tomb. Of course if you have both of those in hand already then call ATTACHMENT and get some cool Hobbit trinkets to play with.

Elven Jeweler can drop to of our beefy, off-sphere allies into the discard pile in any phase, useful if you need a chump blocker or that one extra smidge of attack. Also Protector of Lórien can help us getting our discard pile primed for the SUMMONING!

Step 2: Raising the Dead for Fun and Profit. So our Hobbits are meddling in matters beyond their ken and are going to have a stab at raising the dead. What better way to get ready for a hard nights summoning than a Good Meal. We should be putting thee on Frodo Baggins or Merry so we can get a discount on our Stand and Fight, we don't have much if any actual resource acceleration in the deck so this will be a huge help getting those high cost allies into play.

A few allies of particular note are Gildor Inglorion who can help[ use make sure our choices for Expert Treasure-hunter are perfect and Halbarad to help us with a little extra card draw from Pippin's ability. Once we have an ally or two on the table we shouldn't be afraid of engaging enemies and the card draw will be a huge boon. And worst case scenario Frodo Baggins can take an undefended attack or two at the cost of some threat.

We're packing a lot of the usual Hobbit threat reduction shenanigans to help us get some time to setup as well as offset Frodo's 'face-tanking' Although we probably want to quest with Merry early on to guarantee we get our Expert Treasure-hunter to fire.

You can use Good Meal to make our big threat reducers, like Smoke Rings and The Galadhrim's Greeting cheaper during the mid-game too, though getting some allies on the board should be the first priority. Everything other than the allies is free or so cheap that getting the Song of Travel on Pippin will be a huge help for paying for your 'resurrection'

You can tweak the ally list to suit your needs, arguments can be made for characters like Anborn, Déorwine et al depending on what you want the allies to do

Sideboard:

So maybe the band needs an ageing roadie instead of a 'fool of a took' you can try dropping Pippin and the Hobbit Pipe tech in order to add Gandalf into the mix with his suite of neutral toys like Gandalf's Staff and Wizard Pipe. Narya is also great for getting double duty out of big allies.

It probably makes the deck a little more resilient early, at the cost of some threat, but being as we really want those discard effects like Daeron's Runes and Expert Treasure-hunter you probably want to mulligan hard for Wizard Pipe or Bilbo Baggins so we can play them turn one from the top of the deck.

The Gandalf version is probably a little less consistent on the opening draw but more resilient through all parts of the game, and let's face it, it was probably the old grey codger that taught Frodo Baggins necromancy to begin with.