One Night in a Tavern In Bree 1.0

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• 1.0

This is a thematic deck built for an ongoing series on my blog, Darkling Door.

Theme: The hobbits' fateful meeting with Strider

Played Against: Murder at the Prancing Pony

"Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved... 'Who is that?' Frodo asked, when he got a chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. 'I don't think you introduced him?'"

—At the Sign of the Prancing Pony, The Fellowship of the Ring

Strategy

This is a Pipe deck with a knack for laying low until it's time to pounce.

The pipes, the pipes are calling

The heart and soul of the deck are Hobbit Pipe and Dúnedain Pipe, both of which help draw cards or filter through the deck to find whatever I need. I'm looking for at least one Pipe in my opening hand—either one will do. I want to get Pipe Attachments on all 3 of my Heroes as quickly as possible so that the deck can start working at peak efficiency. Bilbo Baggins is a huge help at getting the deck set up quickly, and I often chump block with him just so that I can play another copy and fetch another Pipe.   Once my Heroes are happily puffing away, the extra Pipes go on the Allies. I like to put my third Hobbit Pipe on Rosie Cotton since I'm not likely to want to chump block with her. The extra Dúnedain Pipes go on the Weather Hills Watchman. I included him primarily as a Pipe holder, but it's also nice when he happens to fetch me a copy of Dúnedain Mark. Free cards are free cards, after all!

Just keep on smokin'

As soon as I have two Hobbit Pipes in play, I do my best to play one threat-reducing Event each round for maximum card draw. Elevenses does a lot of work here, allowing me to quest with all of my Hobbit characters, then pull precisely the right number of them back to control my questing tempo or protect myself in case an Enemy shows up. Then it reduces my threat, which triggers my Hobbit Pipes, drawing me more cards—all for the cost of 1 resource. And if I don't need to pull back any Hobbits? I just quested for a ton. Of course, it goes without saying that Smoke Rings is an outstanding late-game threat reduction card in this deck, too.

Paying for all that pipeweed

Once it gets going, this deck draws a ton of cards, so I always have options in hand to help me deal with the current board state. The biggest problem is paying for all of those cards. That's where Aragorn's color-fixing Attachments come in. In addition to being great for my output, Celebrían's Stone and Sword that was Broken add the and icons to Aragorn, making it much easier to pay for whatever I happen to need whenever I happen to need it. Because of this, I generally reserve my first A Good Harvest to help me get one of these two Attachments down as early as possible.

No duplicates needed

This deck runs a very tight ship. For the most part, I'm running the minimum possible quantity of each Attachment—usually a bad idea for consistency's sake. But between all the draw cards and the filtering abilities of multiple Dúnedain puffing on Pipes, I actually get through the whole deck pretty fast, ensuring I see all of my key Attachments before the end of the game. It's pretty common to have drawn through the whole deck by round 8 or 9, after which I use Will of the West to keep the momentum going.

I'm pretty into pipes now

I'm surprised at how hardy this deck is! It takes a nuanced touch to pilot the deck, with lots of interesting choices about which cards to play and when.

► For more analysis, check out my blog post on this deck.