Kjeld's combo-Sméagol goes undercover

It is round 4 since i've infiltrated them, they still consider me as one of their own...

The combo

In the comments of keep an eye on sméagol, Kjeld made a pretty interesting suggestion for a combo using Sméagol

The idea is that when stinker gets revealed, Sméagol flips into gollum, which means if the Sméagol is playing him as The Grey Wanderer, that player now has 0 heroes but is still in the game, because Sméagol is not technically "dead" since it is not in his discard pile.

This opens up some potential exploits: that player having no heroes can treat all of his attacks as undefended, and since he has no heroes the damage from those attacks will go nowhere.

Therefore, if that player somehow manages to play The Hammer-stroke while Sméagol is flipped, he can engage all enemies in play and "disable" them indefinitely.

the table can now completely ignore those enemies since they will neither contribute nor deal damage. Killing those enemies eventually is a bonus.

How to make it work

Since for the combo to work we need stinker to have been revealed, Sméagol cannot cast The Hammer-stroke himself. In order to still have the effect applied to the right player, we need to use Desperate Alliance to give the Sméagol player control over a hero who can actually cast The Hammer-stroke during the encounter phase. At the end of the encounter phase, that hero returns to it's owner, and the Sméagol player controls no hero during the combat phase.

Since the main advantage of grey wanderer sméagol is it's ridiculously low threat, we can gain from having another grey wanderer as the other hero. For that reason, i chose Glorfindel, whose threat is nearly as low (and won't increase from his ability since he has Strider attached at all time). Having such a ridiculously low threat means engagment can almost completely be ignored, and we can let the enemies wait in staging until we are ready to engage them with the combo.

Glorfindel's natural lets him play Desperate Alliance, but in order to play The Hammer-stroke he will need a icon. For that purpose, we chose Song of Battle as The Grey Wanderer's attachment for him (since Sméagol cannot have attachments, both of our The Grey Wanderer attachments will go on Glorfindel: those are Strider and Song of Battle).

So now in order to pull off the combo we need Sméagol to draw The Hammer-stroke and Glorfindel to draw Desperate Alliance while having 2 resource. Being a grey wanderer with access to Resourceful, glorfindel has no issue holding 2 resource when necessary. We will mostly need card draw in order to find the pieces, for which we use Deep Knowledge, Ancient Mathom, and Gather Information.

The rest

The whole combo doesn't really require a lot of cards, so we have to choose what to play in each deck alongside it.

For Glorfindel i went with:

• a mix of a support package (A Test of Will+Dwarven Tomb for cancellation, Northern Tracker+Asfaloth to keep the staging area clear of locations, Elrond's Counsel+Double Back+Secret Vigil to keep threat low even longer)

• a package of weapons to make him into a ranged attacker, which will help with eventualy killing the enemies engaged by Sméagol to take back control of him.

For Sméagol:

• An ent package, prioritizing Treebeard who can be played naturally on round 2 or early with Elf-stone, Send for Aid or Timely Aid. That way even if Sméagol flips we can still develop at least slowly. The ents are pretty good combat units, both for taking back Sméagol when it is too early to combo, or to kill the engaged enemies once we have pulled of the combo.

• We also have a bit of encounter control with The Hidden Way, Firyal and Scout Ahead, to help us control the timing of stinker

I want to thank Kjeld for coming up with this idea. This is a pretty fun combo and it actually works! It's not a nightmare beater but it's good enough to be playable against the average scenario, and frankly it is just hilarious to picture a bunch of blood-thirsty orcs and trolls trying to find a hero to kill, while Sméagol is in the background whistling and playing along like "Uh... Yeah, that sucks... nope, havn't seen anything..."