I'm Convinced This Deck is Good 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

I just can't seem to pilot this deck well enough for it to live up to the potential I'm convinced it has.

I've taken it against my favorite testing quest, Escape From Umbar, probably close to a dozen times, and each time it gets away from me and ends in defeat. I'm hoping some of y'all have ideas for how to improve the deck's construction or tips on piloting this weird thing I made.

I will say, power/skill level aside, it is really fun to play with. There is a complex ecosystem of effects going on, many of which I'm sure I'm not capitalizing on properly. But I'll try to sketch out the main ideas.

The main, janky loop involves (MotK) Birna and Thengel (I'll get to that next) but the long term goal is to get Elendilmir on Thengel so he can muster off of 2 discarded allies per round instead of just 1. The rest of the deck is supposed to be powerful enough to handle a guarded attachment coming into play via conventional means, but again I have not been able to make it work in my own plays.

Ok so the point of The Last Alliance is to get (MotK) Birna and Thengel to play together. We're uniting the Beorning and Rohan traits to do so. And Éowyn helps facilitate.

Here's the loop:

1. Quest with Éowyn. Discard an ally from hand that you'll want to drop in sometime during the round with (MotK) Birna's ability. Your target for this discard should be an ally that you either can see you'll need (e.g., Giant Bear if you have a Hill Troll at setup), but more ideally you want to select an ally that has a built in "discard from play" effect.

2. During the round, exhaust (MotK) Birna and pay that 1 resource to put the ally into play that you discarded earlier. You can exhaust the contract if you want this to be a Rohan ally instead of Beorning.

3. Then, before (MotK) Birna shuffles the ally back into your deck, trigger that ally's "discard from play" ability. This allows Thengel to grab an ally that shares a trait with it from the top 5 of your deck, putting it into play exhausted. Remember that you have a few Beorning allies that have their own "discard from play" effects: Beorning Skin-changer, Beorning Guardian, and Beorning Beekeeper (of all people). Beorning Skin-changer is an excellent target for this, because his discard effect gets you 2 for 1: he puts a chonky Beorning ally into play and also triggers Thengel to muster another one from your deck. If you used (MotK) Birna to put him into play, you got all this value out of just 1 resource and an exhaust from (MotK) Birna.

All of which seems like it should be super powerful. And seems like it should overcome one of the things I find is one of the few weaknesses of a conventional Thengel deck--running out of allies in your deck. Because (MotK) Birna is able to shuffle stuff back into your deck at will.

If you ever get in control of the board, you're supposed to play Elendilmir and get it on Thengel. And put an Unexpected Courage on (MotK) Birna. This way you can have (MotK) Birna drop 2 allies per round into play from discard, and trigger Thengel twice per round off of those leaving play, to get you 2 allies from your deck into play exhausted. Plus whatever other shenanigans you have done to make marginal progress ahead of this normal loop (e.g., Squire of the Mark to keep a good Rohan ally in play, or Beorning Skin-changer to keep a big bear in play).

The one place I can diagnose as a weakness is you are far more likely to whiff with Thengel than a conventional Rohan Discard deck because of your ally traits being split. But I figured the tricksy loop with (MotK) Birna would make up for this.

Anyway, if anyone has ideas for how to make this deck sing, I would love some feedback! And/or some piloting tips if you feel like it should be working as is.