Date Night Redux 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Been a long time since I've published a decklist...also been a minute since I played LotR -- really since GenCon -- so I'm getting the lactic acid out of the deckbuilding and playing muscles. At any rate, I've been wanting to play an ally-less deck, and I wanted to build a theme deck around young Aragorn's time over at Grandma's house, where he meets Arwen. I stumbled across my friend's decklist (https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/4349/date-night-1.0) from a while ago and thought I could make that work.

Deckbuilding
Okay, as with some of my other theme decks, I have to head the initial criticism off at the pass...This deck is not ultra powerful, but it's great fun to get rolling and can take out some of the more mid-range quests if you get a good start.

However, despite that disclaimer, these three heroes are bonkers good, so throwing them together with a starting cost of 30 seemed like a good foundation if you could mulligan hard for Elrond's Counsel and keep cranking down with Galadriel.

Obviously, Aragorn handles combat and uses his unique ability to grab enemies out of the staging area before key questing turns in order to remove some , and once he's all powered up with toys (which, obviously, is the entire deck...), he can easily dispatch them. He can also contribute decent with minimal work and a bit of readying.

Arwen Undómiel is obviously the primary quester and fuels the deck with Elven-light, which siphons off excess resources to draw into combo pieces and to add resources to Aragorn if you're not able to find one of the six potential cards to get Steward of Gondor into play. Steed of Imladris is just another way to get Elven-light into the discard pile in a pinch, as well as provide some additional way to bust through locations. It was initially at 2x, but I cut it for a Song of Hope.

Galadriel makes every deck better...Nenya helps in the early game to keep pace with the staging area, and her mitigation + card draw make her the primary target for either Unexpected Courage or Magic Ring, whichever you find first. Mirror of Galadriel is crazy good, too, so yeah.

The rest of the deck is just goodstuff attachments to load up on Aragorn and goodstuff events to manage the rest of the game like A Test of Will and Feint.

I definitely think there's room to tweak this deck to be a bit more consistent, but as of right now, it's the most fun version I've found in that it has all the theme home-runs without sacrificing too much potential power.

Gameplay
The ideal start to the game is a way to get some readying and Nenya on Galadriel ASAP as well as some boosts for Aragorn just so you don't get too far behind on turn 1. After that, you're really prioritizing building the Tower of Aragorn and supplementing the card draw with Arwen's discard. Elrond's Counsel is also a key card to see early in that it should buy you at least one extra turn, even if you eat some threat gain by not questing successfully out the gate. Everything is cheap, so you shouldn't have too much of an issue playing cards; it's really just about ducking and weaving the early turns to generate enough search / draw to get Aragorn in full voltron mode.

I can't stress enough that this is a fun, theme-based deck and not a powerful one. If you have any suggestions on how to make it even better, without sacrificing the initial creative fence of no allies, I'm all-ears! Hope yall enjoy it.