My Little Ufthak (Small Target Deck) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This deck is designed to play Journey Along the Anduin by taking Chieftain Ufthak as a pet and using him to kill other enemies by abusing Small Target.

https://youtu.be/Gpi45EuS_S4

I recently put out a tweet asking for card suggestions that I could use for a deckbuilding video. One of the suggestions I received was for Small Target, a card that I'd never played with before. I decided not to make a deckbuilding video with that card because it's so niche, but I wanted to see if I could do something fun and interesting with it anyway. This deck — which is really fun when played in context — is what I came up with.

Let's begin with some thoughts about Small Target. One of the problems with the card is it that it has a number of layered conditions that you need to fulfill for it to work successfully.

• First, you need a hobbit hero, and that hero needs to be defending. So there's already a risk involved from the moment we want to play it.
• Second, you need to have two enemies engaged with you for it do anything (or technically, at least one enemy engaged, and one attacking you from somewhere else).
• Third, you need to reveal the attacking enemy's shadow card, and that card needs have no shadow effect. This makes the card potentially unreliable as you could play the event and have it do nothing.

These conditions are almost certainly why the card sees little to no play. So how do we get around all this? My approach was as follows.

• First, the card seems a natural fit for use with Frodo Baggins, given the sphere match and the potential to use Frodo as a defender thanks to his damage-as-threat ability.
• Second, we need to deal with the blank shadow cards issue, otherwise we risk playing the event to no effect. Initially I considered Silver Lamp, but then I remembered an old core set card: Dark Knowledge. With this card, we can look at the shadow card as it's dealt to the enemy to see if it is worth playing Small Target. (Note that there is some strange wording on Dark Knowledge as it references an enemy "attacking" you; discussions on CardGameDB suggest that this is old wording that is essentially referring to shadow cards dealt to enemies engaged with you. The "attacking" language is there to cover attacks made from the staging area. This is how I interpet it too, otherwise this card seems absolutely useless!)
• Third, we need to consider the benefit of redirecting an enemy attack. Ideally, we would want that attack to not just damage the second enemy but actually destroy it, because then we would not need to defend it. This is why I think this card ended up being so niche: if one enemy can kill the other for you, it is effectively a double-Feint for one resource out of Spirit—that's amazing when you think about it. The trouble is that we now need a situation where there is a dangerous, high attack enemy that's capable of consistently wiping out other enemies. We also need a quest that has enemies of varying strengths: at least one big one to do the attacking for us, and a lot of smaller ones to keep feeding it. And then, we better have a failsafe in case that enemy gets out of control. How can we achieve all of these things?!

The answer I settled on is: Chieftan Ufthak in Journey Along the Anduin.

Chieftan Ufthak is the core set enemy who gets a +2 bonus every time he makes an attack. I thought it would be funny if we could take Ufthak as our pet and then use him to murder the other enemies by redirecting his attacks with Small Target. We use Dúnedain Hunter and Born Aloft to give ourselves opportunities to find Ufthak (remember, he's non unique!). Then we let his attack ramp up so that he can kill enemies for us thanks to Small Target. We can potentially do this 6 times in a game by recurring the event using Dwarven Tomb. If Dark Knowledge shows us Ufthak's shadow card has a shadow effect, meaning that we shouldn't use Small Target, we can use Feint, Grimbold or a chump blocker to mitigate his attack, or take his attack as threat through Frodo. Ufthak's killing spree is further supported through Aragorn's passive -1 defense debuff. Even the Hill Troll is not safe once Ufthak reaches double figures!

Overall this was a very fun deck to build and play. You need some luck for it to work; there's a danger of getting bogged down with too many locations in the staging area, and you can lose from an untimely Necromancer's Reach. But it's been really fun to get Small Target working, and hopefully you'll be able to see that in the video I made above.

Give it a try and have fun adopting your own Little Ufthak.