Dale the Whale 1.0

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• 1.0

This is my first take on a Dale deck. After much thought and poking around through ringsdb, I settled on Galadriel as the third hero. Her card draw helps set up your ally and attachment combos, and her threat reduction helps ensure you have time to do it before bringing down any of the big baddies. My initial impression of Dale decks is that they are slow, but the threat reduction helps mitigate that a little.

I think everyone is finding that an opening hand King of Dale is critical, and I agree with them. It's resource acceleration after a manner and smoothing, and you won't be able to play many of your allies out very quickly without it. Fortunately, if your mulligan comes up short, as long as you can get to a Mirror of Galadriel, you should be able to find it in relatively short order. Of course, one annoying thing is that if you play Mirror and find King the same turn, you can't play it until the following turn due to lack of Spirit resources - just try to get King in your opening hand.

On the attachment side, I'm fairly certain I'm going to end up cutting Magic Ring. I haven't seen Necklace of Girion used in many other decks yet, but I've actually found it to be quite powerful, as long as you can handle the risk of an enemy. The new Dale attachments like Bow of Yew and Hauberk of Mail are simply amazing. Something to notice is that the Hauberk is not restricted - which lets you double it up with a Raiment of War. Spare Hood and Cloak is amazing in this deck. The best target is an early North Realm Lookout, who can quest without exhausting, and then exhaust later in the round to pass and ready a defender or attacker. Long Lake Trader can help you get them back on your Lookouts for repeated use.

The new Dale allies are pretty amazing. The amount of stats you get for the low cost (with an early King of Dale) is nuts. A couple of notes on differences with other Dale decks I've seen - I really like Knight of Dale and have found him very effective. Once you get Brand son of Bain set up with King of Dale, or after you drop a Traffic from Dale or two, you'll have more Leadership resources than you'll really need, which lets you ready your Knights. Their willpower and attack is no joke, especially with the boost from Brand and whatever attachments you've given them. Keep in mind, once your threat gets high enough, I believe you can actually trigger the regular Action and the Valour Action each turn. One noticeable omission from this decklist is the Rhovanion Outrider. I keep toying around with the thought of including him, but he doesn't really have much synergy with the rest of the Dale attachment archetype at this point. His cost is a little high, and I'd rather run a full playset of knights, so I left him out. You could easily find room here for a couple of copies, though, especially if Magic Ring gets cut. In general, I feel like Dale might need at least one more attachment focused ally to truly make the archetype great, but we certainly have a very powerful and very fun set of cards already.

The events in this deck seem very good so far as well. Traffic from Dale scales well, which prevents it from being too broken. I've dropped one very early before just to get a single Spirit resource on Bard son of Brand out of the deal, to be able to play another attachment faster. I've also waited to play these until late game, where you're getting 4-5 resources out of it. Both are great. To Arms! is great as well, especially once you have big defenders and attackers. You might be able to cut one copy of this as well to squeeze in an Outrider, but these are very good late game.

Happy questing!