This Deck Breaks Road To Isengard 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

If you've played The Road To Isengard, you'll notice the very particular stage 1 of the Quest. You can take as many rounds to rouse the Ents as you need, sure you'll have to reveal later an extra encounter card for each round you take, but technically there's nothing stopping you from staying there forever if you wanted to for some reason. You might have even wondered if there was some way to exploit this, and how.

This deck is how.

You only have to draw Vilya in your opening hand, and you will win. After the initial draw (and mulligan if needed), chance has no place here. (If you don't draw Vilya in either, you won't have a good time, but that's the risk of doing shenanigans).

First, if you take a look at the quest card, Rouse The Ents, you'll see it forbids drawing cards or gaining resources. This is the main reason why usually you wouldn't be able to build up or do anything productive at this stage, and why you usually get a few ents as soon as possible and advance to stage 2 right after.

However, there's nothing stopping you from playing cards or putting them into play, other than the fact that you won't have any resources nor more than the 6 cards in your hand at the start. If you were to bypass both the cost and the need to draw cards by playing them directly from your deck with Vilya, you could keep playing cards one round after another until you played your entire deck, and then overpower everything the encounter deck throws at you. That will be this deck's strategy.

Problem #1: Vilya isn't free.

That's right, to play things with Vilya you have to play Vilya itself in the first place! It isn't a 0 cost attachment either, so you need to get these two resources from somewhere. Thankfully, there's a perfect hero for that: Denethor, who starts the game with two resources already*. Just enough to pay for the Ring we need. Very convenient.

*There's some ambiguity regarding these setup effects, but in the Rules Reference it explicitly puts the scenario setup instructions "before flipping the quest card", so since this is the same kind of effect, it seems logical that Denethor's two resources would also happen before the flipping and therefore before the no resources text on stage 1b becomes active. If you're playing in easy mode, you'd have the resources already, so feel free to switch Denethor for whoever you want.

Problem #2: Threat management

Another inconvenient: you can spend any number of rounds on stage 1, but while you won't reveal any encounter cards nor quest you will have to raise your threat in the Refresh phase. Here the answer is straightforward: Galadriel will join Elrond and Denethor as the third hero, and exhaust every round to keep the threat at 29 (30 after the refresh phase).

Now that these minor hurdles have been solved, it's time to play your entire deck! Each round will be more or less as follows:

• Galadriel makes your threat go back to 29
• Elrond and Vilya play the top card of your deck, putting it into play or (in the rare case that the top card is a duplicate of a card already in play) at the bottom of said deck.
• Denethor tries to put a resource on the Ent of Fangorn. Most of the time it won't work, but from time to time you'll hit a treachery so you'll probably get all the Ents before you run out of cards to play from your deck.
• Refresh phase, all your cards ready, threat rises to 30 again.

Continue until you've played all cards besides the duplicates. You'll probably have non-duplicate cards in your hand, but you can switch them with duplicates from your deck using Gildor Inglorion or Radagast plus Wizard Pipe.

After maybe around 50 rounds, you'll have recruited all the ents and played all your allies from the deck, so now it's time to advance. You'll add Saruman and Orthanc to the staging area, make the Gates of Isengard active location, and then reveal one encounter card for each resource, which at this point will be the entirety of the encounter deck. You'll end up with every single location and enemy into the staging area, and resolve every single treachery (thankfully this happens at the end of the round so you don't have to reshuffle when you inevitably run out of cards).

The treacheries all amount to doing nothing (Blast of Sorcery) or doing nothing then surging (everything else). If you're for some reason playing this deck in campaign mode (good luck against Helm's Deep, you'll need it), the burdens will add a Doomed 2 and maybe a Doomed 1 or two, but nothing more.

The locations and enemies are the real problem, but your super ally swarm should be more than enough to handle it at this point: use your trackers and outriders to explore the Ring-Walls and the Open Pits, and commit at least 59 to the quest (Faramir helps here) to put the 15 progress tokens on stage 3b. Travel to Orthanc, and let your many defenders (including the Ents of Fangorn) defend every single enemy, and then your many attackers overkill Saruman.

But what about the cards in your hand?

Yes, that's another thing, stage 3 requires you to have cards in your hand or you immediately lose. If you're (again, for some reason) playing Campaign Mode you'll also want to end with at least 4 cards in your hand, to get the Palantir and avoid the burden. Don't worry! Everything is under control.

After playing everything, you should have a total of 10 duplicate cards (all the uniques plus two Wizard Pipes), half in your hand and half in your deck, or 6 and 4 after advancing to stage 2 and the following resource phase. Snaga will make you discard 3 of them, the Ring-Wall of Isengard's Wizardry effect the other 3, and then stage 3a will have you draw the remaining 4. Since you'll win that same turn, the only things that could make you lose cards from your hand is the effect on Lieutenant of Orthanc and the shadow effect on Machines of Isengard, so take care of not losing your defenders. Thankfully the highest attack boosts from shadow effects are +1 (unless you've brought Shadow of Fear in campaign mode) so just keep that in mind, don't risk your defenders and you'll end the game with more than enough cards in your hand.