Best 2P-Fellowship - One Original Core (MD - CSO Fellowship)
Mormegil 5732
Description
This fellowship is part of Mormegil’s Deckbox, an effort to create an extensive catalogue of decks for the different archetypes, themes and playing styles available to players. Click here to check out the whole project.
Preferred Player Count: 2-4
Rating:
Premise
You only have one original Core Set but still want to play with 2 players (or try the game playing two decks simultaneously? This might just be the 2P-Fellowship for you! Deck 1 will handle most of the questing and resource acceleration (through Éowyn, Théodred, Aragorn, your many allies and Steward of Gondor while Deck 2 keeps a lid on enemies with Denethor as a strong defensive option alongside the attacking prowess of Legolas and your many allies. It also runs Beravor as a great supporting option for whatever deck, ensuring that both decks see their center pieces as early as possible.
How To Play
The spirit-leadership deck likes to see Steward of Gondor as soon as possible, which is why I usually mulligan for it. There are other hands I am also inclined to keep (like having Sneak Attack and Gandalf both in your opening hand), but Steward is the card you need the most since Deck 1 is on the expensive side (which is hard to avoid with one Core Set). Deck 2 is not built around a single card as much, I do try to have a few strong allies in my opening with that deck since your heroes can struggle a bit with combat on their own.
Considerations
Because almost all of your cards are already in use, there are very few cards I would consider including from the sideboard. The only real changes I could see are including either Thalin or Gimli in Deck 2, the former if you are facing cards like Eastern Crows, the latter if you need big attacking numbers for a specific target. Aside from that, only Longbeard Orc Slayer is a halfway decent include together with Thalin in quests that run a high number of Ord enemies.