A Path Less Travelled: Siege of Gondor

I have decided to start a variant on the Saga Campaign. Personally, I felt the strict hero requirements for the majority of the official saga campaign to be more frustrating than fun. My main goal is to balance theme with overall fun for playing each of the quests in the saga all while using as many new cards and archetypes as possible.

This Eagles deck is too much fun. The variety of options for how to play each round makes the play so interesting. The deck requires two main cards to really run; Radagast's staff and at least one Eagles of the Misty Mountains. Mulligan for one or both of those cards (if one go with the staff). With the number of Eagles cards the Eagles are coming often gives you 3-5 card draw! Word of command to get staff if needed (after questing without exhausting when you play an eagle). Wolf and Grip can help you find an Eagle of the misty mountains as well. Once the engine is running you can get an Eagle of Misty Mountains up to 6 or more defense/attack fairly quick (and even ready with the staff to both attack and defend!).

Some of the most fun is the increased reliability of drawing the Eagle of the North Card. Shuffling Chieftains around to get boosts each turn with the crown is also fun. A well timed Breath of Arda is the best. I used it in the final round to finish with only 4 resources on the Corsair Fleet! I did this by spending only 2 resources to pull a descendent and meneldor back into my hand and replay. I did this AFTER traveling to the final ship which brought two enemies to the staging area. I was able to kill one enemy with the 4 damage from the descendent and put 4 progress on the main ship with Meneldor. I then defended the remaining enemy with Meneldor and when he died it cleared the ship!!! If you think about it you can use breath of arda with only 1 resource to add 6 progress on a location with meneldor OR do 4 direct damage with descendent in one round.

The other deck is typical Gondor swarm. Use extra Beregond resources to play the devoted ALeP cards and envoys for resource smoothing and keeping 1 resource in each hero's pool. You can absorb a lot of the damage from the ship each round with the raven winged helm and rammas sentries (the Eagles deck can absorb damage on cards that come in and out of play).

This eagles deck is probably my new favorite type of deck to play!

One question. Can you use breath of arda to bring an eagle of the north under your control in and out of play? Because this allows you to discard an enemy in staging area a second time!