The Hobbit-Stroke 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

That's right, an all Hobbit deck that runs 3x Hammer-stroke. Allow me to explain.

This deck ultimately revolves around two cards: Out of Sight and Hobbit-sense. By playing one of those every turn, you will never have to defend against enemies engaged with you. If you'll never have to defend against them, there isn't much point in killing them either. So now you can be engaged with 2, 5, or 10 enemies, which is the perfect situation for our Dunedain friends, Sarn Ford Sentry and Warden of Annúminas.

There are two bottlenecks that need to be overcome to get the deck running. First, you need enough resource generation and card draw to fuel playing Out of Sight or Hobbit-Sense every turn. Resourceful and Leaf Brooch give you resource advantage while Daeron's Runes, Peace, and Thought (with Fast Hitch), and Pippin give you card draw. Later on, Sarn Ford Sentry can provide ridiculous amounts of draw. Staying in secrecy is important for Resourceful, Leaf Brooch, and the discount on Out of Sight. Merry is the main source of threat reduction, but The Galadhrim's Greeting can be used if necessary.

The second bottleneck is becoming engaged with enough enemies. Since your threat is so low, you can only optionally engage one enemy at a time. When you only have one or two enemies, it's kind of an awkward situation where you generally can't attack/defend well and it's not worth playing the expensive events. This can work if other people have sentinel defenders that help you get over the gap. But, I've found it much more effective and enjoyable to use The Hammer-stroke! Once you have the resource engine in place, play A Good Harvest and drop the Hammer to kickstart everything into gear. You'll get an instant influx of card draw via Pippin, and all of the sudden your Warden of Annúminas is questing for absurd amounts.

This is the ultimate wombo combo deck that only works in certain situations. This deck will generally struggle in the following situations:

• 1-2 player games (not enough enemies to make it work efficiently)
• Quests with a lot of threat gain
• Enemies with nasty engagement effects
• Quests that return enemies to the staging area
• Enemies that make extra attacks outside of combat (Out of Sight and Hobbit-sense won't work)
• Quests that do a lot of non-combat damage and/or archery (Hobbits are fragile)

So there are some restrictions. But if you can get it to work, you get to basically lock down all of the enemies, quest for 20-30+ willpower, and clear all the locations in the staging area (via Northern Tracker). One side effect of keeping all the enemies engaged with you is that the encounter deck gets reshuffled very frequently because of all the shadow cards. And since you're keeping most of the enemies out, there will be a higher concentration of treacheries and locations. Out of the Wild is there to let you pull out those nasty treacheries like Sleeping Sentry to make sure you don't end up seeing them every round.

That's about it. Take it for a spin and let me know how it goes!