Deck Tech: Rosie's Honeymoon 1.0

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Hey everyone,

Chris here with a bit of a silly deck, built around an unusual theme.

Life must have been pretty good for Sam Gamgee after effectively saving the world. Even coming home and having to kick Saruman out of the Shire couldn't take the shine off his accomplishments.

There's obviously only one proper way to end an adventure like this. So Sam reached out to the Elven Jewelers. They made him a beautiful, one of a kind, Magic Ring, so he could propose to his old sweetheart, Rosie Cotton.

She said yes, of course, and they got Hitched as Fast as they could. And then the happy couple was faced with an entirely new challenge! Just imagine how hard it is to find a bit of private time with your new spouse in the Shire! Everywhere you turn, Curious Brandybucks and Keen-eyed Tooks!

Elrond's Counsel was simple: "To the Sea, to the Sea! Sail West, toward The Evening Star (though maybe not all the way...). Spend some time on the water, out further than even the bravest Wandering Took has been."

And that's exactly what they did.

Strategy:

The goal of the deck is pretty simple. We use the ridiculous draw power of the Noldor heroes to get out our useful allies quickly. But I didn't want to use Arwen Undómiel again, so there isn't actually much resource acceleration.

To compensate for that, we've got To the Sea, to the Sea! and three copies of Errand-rider, so you can shuffle around the resources you do have. And two copies of A Good Harvest give you a bit more flexibility when you draw them.

To handle combat, the deck generally uses Erestor with Light of Valinor and Protector of Lórien for defense. Though I've found it's pretty easy to play out or discard all the cards in your hand, so you should be careful to save some if you expect to take a big attack.

Unfortunately, I took out Sword-thain for Rosie Cotton, which cost me a few jokes and the opportunity to actually play Magic Ring on her. Instead I'd recommend putting it on Círdan the Shipwright, because the deck is skewed toward spirit for some of its key cards.

And there's one last little trick I'd like everyone to know about. With Elrond's Counsel and Rosie, you can buff her willpower in the combat phase and then use that to boost Sam's attack or defense. (And if you had Sword-thain and Fast Hitch, Rosie could buff herself! Double questing? Yes!)

Video Thoughts:

I haven't actually recorded the second video for this week yet, so if you want to see Sam and Rosie succeed at a specific quest (or, more likely, horribly fail), let me know!

The first video is going up today, though, and you can check it out on youtube.

I'm pretty happy with how the quest went. It's nice to have a lot of early willpower from Sam and Cirdan. And my Errand-rider resource shuffling was surprisingly effective. I played a lot more cards than I thought I'd be able to.

Though I did defeat the Southron Captain twice! Once when I didn't even have to, and then again after he got shuffled back into the deck. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have seen him at all if I hadn't picked him out of the deck the first time. The OCTGN shuffler seems to trend towards irony for videos.

Thanks for watching!