Vigilant Palantir (V3)

Vigilant Palantir

This fellowship is cocreated with Doomguard, who's investment and suggestions have helped build the fellowship to it's current state.

This is my third attempt at building a fellowship that exploits Vigilant Dúnadan to the best of it's ability. i built this fellowship under the constraint of not including more than 3 copies of any card accross the fellowship, so that it would be easy to build by a single player.

strenghts

This fellowship is very consistent, can defend even the most massive waves of enemies, can handle location lock and dodge game-ending threacheries or shadows, handle a lot of threat, and quest for 60+ .

limitations

since we rely on side quests, lots of willpower, drawing a lot and threat reduction, this fellowship is meant for more "classic" quests, and is not a good choice against quests that start as battle/siege, prevent threat reduction, are adverse to side-quests or eliminate players by emptying their deck.

The concept

Vigilant Dúnadan needs 3 things to work: a side-quest in the victory display (duh), sentinel, and a high amount of . There are not that many ways to increase the of a non-unique dunedain ranger ally. Those include Wild Stallion, Round Shield, Keep Watch, Narya and most of all Arwen Undómiel, which means ways to exhaust her multiple times a round work as well, like 2 copies of Spare Hood and Cloak. However, by making her a hero we can use Palantir and a readying effect like Unexpected Courage for an extra defense, which matters a lot given the nature of Vigilant Dúnadan having unlimited actions but being severly impaired by every single point of damage going through.

So this fellowship is a mix of those 2 ideas: building an uber-defender with Vigilant Dúnadan and somehow using Palantir on Arwen Undómiel.

Making the Vigilant Dúnadan work

In order to make the vigilant work, we use Gather Information and a very high questing power to grab all the pieces we need. Next we need to play Vigilant Dúnadan on round 2, which Galadriel can do thanks to The Grey Wanderer. with key attachments being carefully distributed among the 4 decks, we have a high defense vigilant with sentinel on round 2. Boromir, The Wizards's Voice, Frodo Baggins's ability and an ally played by Galadriel (not exhausted because of her ability) will provide defense on the first round.

usual grabs for Gather Information: Vigilant Dúnadan, Hobbit Pipe, Keep Watch or sometimes The Wizards's Voice and whatever pieces of Light of Valinor/Narya/Palantir/Unexpected Courage are needed

Making the Palantir work

Playing with a Palantir has 2 implications:

• The deck using it will increase it's threat very rapidly. to conteract this effect, Arwen Undómiel plays Elrond's Counsel and will be the main target of Galadriel's action, and the fellowship includes a hobbit deck which plays Song of Eärendil to suck up the threat.

• The players as a group will know in advance the first 3 cards to be revealed each round, and can prepare accordingly. To derive as much utility as possible from this effect, the fellowship has plenty of guarded attachments, as well as 3 Dúnedain Hunter and Dunedain Pathfinder, which can get rid of nasty treacheries or surge cards being revealed by palantir, as well as some ennemies or locations in the case of Stone of Elostirion, Durin's Axe, Ithilien Lookout, Celduin Traveler, Dunedain Pathfinder and Dúnedain Hunter.

Details

willpower: Accounting for Power of Command the heroes themselves quest for 24 which is respectable. Galadriel will play on average 2 in one or two allies on the first round. And then we have the allies played by the Arwen Undómiel deck, and Faramir activating on that deck, and many times activating twice thanks to Cram, Miruvor, Wingfoot or Leather Boots.

I ran the maths considering all of the possible hands, assuming no mulligan (since we have more important cards to mulligan for) and not playing Dunedain Pathfinder, which came to an average of 38.5 on the first round.

after that, playing more allies in the galadriel and arwen decks including Dunedain Pathfinder, as well as Gandalf and the Northern Trackers on the hobbit side lets us ramp even more.

Defense on the first round: On the first round, we can defend the two biggest ennemies with Frodo Baggins's ability and the ally played by Galadriel since it didn't exhaust to quest. The next two smallest ennemies should be defended by Boromir who can use his ability to defend twice with 3 and sentinel thanks to Arwen Undómiel. The Master Ring, Cram or Miruvor on Boromir can also give him an extra action if needed and Feint can neutralize an extra attack.

If all of that is still not enough, the boromir deck can choose to grab The Wizards's Voice from Gather Information instead of Keep Watch to cancel even more attacks.

Defense after the first round: On the second round we should play Vigilant Dúnadan and gear him up to make a very solid defender. With Balin not needing to spend a single resource after the first round (and having some extra resource generation in Magic Ring etc), and Galadriel packing 3 Hasty Strokes, shadows should not be an issue.

Attack: All decks have some built-in attackers. Since we are mostly safe behind our Vigilant Dúnadan who doesn't care a lot about the number of ennemies we defend at once, we can take our time to build up attackers over the course of the game.

Galadriel has some attacking allies in the Vigilant Dúnadan himself, Glorfindel, Ithilien Lookout, Quickbeam, Thalion, Treebeard and Rider of Rohan.

Boromir turns into our primary attacker with Dúnedain Cache, Strength and Courage, a Golden Belt and a couple swords/axe, with his natural readying giving him multiple attacks a round. He also has help from Dúnedain Hunters and Wilyador. When Orcrist becomes available, playing it on Balin can help him build up more resource for shadow cancellation.

The hobbits should have Gandalf online by round 3, with a Shadowfax for ranged and extra attacks, and eventually Glamdring to reach 6 and draw some extra cards.

Thurindir should be the last attacker we build, with Leather Boots or Unexpected Courage to ready him after questing and some spare Legacy Blades.

Threat managment: Two of our decks start in secrecy, and our highest starting threat is 28, which should spare us some of the nastiest engagments early on. However, the Boromir deck has a lot of noticeable threat increase: Boromir's ability which we intend to use a lot, The One Ring being also used and lowering elimination threat, and the Palantir itself contributing a high amount of threat every turn. If left alone, this deck would threat out within a few rounds. However, we have at our disposal even more threat decreasing tools.

The hobbit deck is almost entirely dedicated to threat reduction, with The Shirefolk, Smoke Rings, Keen as Lances and The Galadhrim's Greeting, as well as Will of the West to repeat the process up to 4 times total (for a grand total of -36 threat per cycle for a total of -144 threat using all 3 Will of the West (using The Galadhrim's Greeting in -2 mode)!). Since the Hobbit deck is virtually an endless threat sink, we can make use of Song of Eärendil to transfer threat over from the other decks to the hobbits. on very Boromir readying, every refresh phase, every threat increasing encounter card, every Magic Ring, The One Ring or Palantir activation, the offender reduces his threat by 3, which should end up nullifying the threat increase entirely as long as the hobbit deck can take it.

Galadriel's ability, Elrond's Counsel and Double Back provides even more threat reduction, so the fellowship should normally be able to stabilize within a few rounds and eventually return to starting threat and stay there, even with a few doomed encounters.

Encounter managment: This is where Palantir shines. With all our guarded attachments, Ithilien Lookout, Celduin Traveler, Dúnedain Hunter and Dunedain Pathfinder, we can force the discard of cards reavealed by Palantir that we do not like. Minas Tirith Lampwright can also cancel the extra reveal from a surge card, with guaranteed success since we know the type of the next card being revealed. Even after all that, we can also cancel threacheries with Halfling Bounder and A Test of Will, and A Test of Will can be recurred almost endlessly thanks to Dwarven Tomb and Will of the West.

This gives us a massive power of veto on treacheries. Most ennemies are irrelevant because of our near infinite defense. Because the hobbit deck guarantees us 2 northern trackers by round 3 (4 max if it goes wrong) and we have an enourmous amount of willpower and can even deal with massive amounts of threat, we are safe from location lock.

Healing: We should not need much healing once Vigilant Dúnadan is installed, but some damage can still go through from big attacks or encounter card effects. We are mostly counting on Warden of Healing for healing, which galadriel can grab using her mirror, and which can be equipped with Leather Boots to save resource. However we are not defenseless without them, with Frodo Baggins's ability to cancel damage, Old Toby to heal the hobbits, The Grey Wanderer healing galadriel and Magic Rings available.

Attachments

In order to maximise the ability of the fellowship to grab the best possible cards from Gather Information depending on starting hands, many of the key attachments are dispersed accross the different decks. Here is a quick summary of what goes on who:

Vigilant Dúnadan:Wild Stallion, Round Shield, Spare Hood and Cloak, which combined with 2 Arwen Undómiel activations from Palantir and questing, as well as Keep Watch and Narya puts him at virtually 8 and 5 .

Galadriel: Nenya, Mirror of Galadriel, 2 Silver Harp (one for the mirror one for Glorfindel) and Resourceful, sometimes Magic Ring or Necklace of Girion, sometimes Steward of Gondor.

Arwen Undómiel:Palantir, Magic Ring or Unexpected Courage, Spare Hood and Cloak, The Arkenstone.

Balin: Magic Ring, Necklace of Girion or Steward of Gondor, Orcrist and spare copies of Legacy Blade

Boromir: The One Ring, Power of Command, Strength and Courage, Golden Belt, Dúnedain Cache, Unexpected Courage and whatever combination of Legacy Blade and Durin's Axe

Faramir:Wingfoot (or Leather Boots if it comes up first)

Círdan the Shipwright:Light of Valinor, Narya, Silver Harp, Stone of Elostirion and Expert Treasure-hunter

Thurindir:Leather Boots (other copies go on Warden of Healing or Master of the Forge),Dúnedain Pipe, Expert Treasure-hunter and spares of Legacy Blade.

The hobbits: pipes, Love of Tales on Pippin, Song of Eärendil on Frodo Baggins, third copy of Expert Treasure-hunter

Gandalf: Shadowfax, Gandalf's Staff and Glamdring

read the individual deck description for more detail on their working.

comments and suggestions are welcome!!