A Study in Contrasts

Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean...

Perhaps my favorite card in the game is Stand and Fight. The ability to use other players' discard pile as an extension of your deck (whether they want you to or not) is such a unique effect. While we have some allies that can get themselves into another player's play area (Wandering Took, Rider of the Mark, Blue Mountain Trader, Soldier of Isengard, and Ceorl), there are only two effects that can get ANY ally into another player's play area-- Reinforcements and Stand and Fight. (Any non-neutral ally in Stand and Fight's case.) Not coincidentally, these are my two favorite cards in the game.

Reinforcements' effect is only temporary (while Sword-thain can make it permanent, this is a trick that only works on unique allies and only works once), but Stand and Fight is permanent and unlimited by default, which enables some really interesting, one-of-a-kind shenanigans. Imagine a four-player fellowship that works to get twelve copies of Ethir Swordsman under one player's control-- giving each other copy a +12 willpower boost, resulting in 156 combined willpower for the entire stack. (Just watch out of Necromancer's Reach-- maybe include a couple Anfalas Herdsman while you're at it.)

But even beyond shenanigans, Stand and Fight is great. It gets around many play restrictions (those imposed by player cards themselves, such as on Misty Mountain Journeyman, and also those imposed by quests, such as the "one ally per round" limit in Escape from Dol Guldur). It lets you pay for any ally in the game using Spirit resources. Most fun, it lets you play allies at event speed. Sitting in the combat phase and finding yourself one defense or one point of attack short? As long as the solution is in any discard pile at the table, you're good to go.

The biggest issue is often getting allies into the discard pile in the first place. The Stand and Fight deck can build in plenty of solutions-- Arwen Undómiel, Glorfindel, Imladris Caregiver, To the Sea, to the Sea!, and the rest of the Noldor Discard package works wonderfully here. But for the best value, you want choices in all discard piles. But the best solution came packaged with Stand and Fight right in the core set-- Éowyn, another one of the few cards released during the game's life that anyone at the table can use. With Eowyn around, it's not just your partners' discard piles that are available to you, but their hands as well.

Because it can pull any ally from any discard pile, Stand and Fight gets more fun the more allies are in discard piles. I once built a deck that included every ally and three heroes capable of self-destructing in the opening planning phase. When paired with a Stand and Fight deck, it traded a slightly harder setup (as most-- but not all-- quests will reveal additional cards for each player in the game, though the immediate suicide means no additional reveals during staging) for unheard-of flexibility-- the ability to play any ally at any time.

Like all the truly degenerate ideas, that combo was killed a few months later by an official ruling that when a player was eliminated, his or her discard was removed from the game. But for the few months it was alive, it was glorious.

The ruling didn't entirely kill the dream of a super-saturated discard pile ripe for Standing and Fighting, though-- one can build a deck featuring Arwen, Elrond, Thurindir, and a complete suite of allies. Thurindir fetches Gather Information, once cleared it uses that to fetch a Longbeard Sentry which Elrond plays at the start of Round 2 (using resources passed from Arwen), and then that Sentry triggers its ability once per phase to discard the top two cards of its deck. With seven phases in a round, that's 14 allies dumped into the discard pile-- with just a small handful of rounds you can have hundreds of allies available for selection. (If you manage to get a second Sentry in your opening hand, or if a partner deck uses Message from Elrond to pass over one of its Stand and Fights to resurrect a discarded Sentry, this can go even faster.)

The two problems with this approach are:

1. Keeping the ally-dumping deck alive means dealing with an extra reveal every round. (Stand and Fight is good enough that this can still be worth it, especially if you have more than one Stand and Fight deck in the alliance and doubly-especially if you're exploiting the Outlands cheese.)
2. This deck is mind-numbingly boring to actually play.

As a result, I've mostly moved away from the "maximize the toolbox" genre of Stand and Fight deckbuilding. Instead, I've used it for specific, limited, high-value goals-- such as the aforementioned Outlands shenanigans or cheating around the "no allies" restriction in a three hunters deck. They're strong, they're still fun, and they're great in pickup multiplayer games because they work with whatever the other decks already have (or by convincing the other players to just slip a couple extra Ethir Swordsmen into their existing deck).

But it's a shame, because the "massive toolbox" Stand and Fight is the most fun Stand and Fight. So I wanted to do a fresh take on the old "any ally at any time" fellowship, but with a few new goals-- rather than optimizing everything for the player piloting the Stand and Fight deck at the expense of the "feeder" deck, I wanted both decks to be fun to play and capable of contributing roughly equally to the quest.

This is what I came up with.

These decks are deliberately a study in contrasts. I wanted the first deck to be perfectly consistent, but incapable of doing anything on its own. I wanted the second deck to be capable of doing everything on its own, but perfectly inconsistent. I knew RingsDB wouldn't let me publish any deck with fewer than 30 cards, and from experience, I knew that DragnCards started to get angry at me anytime I loaded anything with more than 400-500 or so cards. So these formed my targets-- one 30-card deck designed to get maximum plays out of Stand and Fight, one 400-card deck designed to give it as many targets as possible to choose from.

I'm also running Reforged, which is Stand and Fight (Attachments Version). In the recent re-releases, Reforged was given a stealth errata to only work on Items. I'm completely ignoring this errata-- thematically it makes sense (hence all the old jokes about people reforging their food and horses), but mechanically the card is much more fun when it's a full-on attachment-based analog to Stand and Fight-- any (non-neutral) attachment at any time.

As a result of my deliberate disregard for this stealth errata, this Fellowship is not legal for Tournament play-- but that's okay, it was already illegal for tournament play because one of the decks is under the 50-card minimum. Also, there are no Lord of the Rings tournaments.

Because of Erestor, the "fat" deck is guaranteed to seed at least four cards per round into its discard. Spirit Dáin boosts this to at least seven whenever there's an enemy to defend (and helps a lot with the "make the feeder deck playable and fun" goal). As the one consistent bit of tech, this deck also gets The One Ring, which typically goes on Dain and pulls Inner Strength to help sustain all those extra defenses (since it usually wants to keep one enemy engaged at all times so it can keep dumping its deck).

It doesn't just mindlessly discard its own deck, however. Unlike the Longbeard Sentry version, many of the cards can (and will) be played rather than passed-- Spirit, Lore, and Neutral cards comprise two-thirds of the deck; in any given set of four cards, there's a 95% chance at least one of them will be "in-sphere" and a 73% chance of landing two or more playable cards, which means there are actual decisions to be made! Arwen can help get resources where they're needed to ensure that as many of those "theoretically playable" cards as possible are also practically playable.

The "maximize the toolbox" ethos prefers one copy of lots of allies to several copies of fewer, higher-value allies, which makes Council of the Wise almost "free"-- its "drawback" is we have to do what we were inclined to do anyway. Including the contract helps us achieve our goals, since every event can either become an extra draw (and therefore an extra card in the discard) or an extra resource (helping us get cards into play). After a while, it can switch to repeatable threat reduction to buy the "fat" deck more time.

The "fat" deck never knows from one round to the next what it will be able to do, but it's usually able to do something, and with strong heroes on the table to start (and especially Dain to help preserve guard its board state against attrition), it usually has a motley assortment of options on the table by the end of the quest.

The "thin" deck, by contrast, can't do anything on its own except generate a ton of resources and recur a ton of Spirit events. With three copies of Resourceful, one of Steward of Gondor (which can be played by our errata-ignoring Reforges), and one of Sword-thain (which should be played on a unique spirit ally pulled from across the table), it gets nine spirit resources per round-- ten if Arwen sends one across the table rather than keeping it for herself. What can it do with nine (or ten) resources? Recursion!

With a fourth spirit hero (thanks to Sword-thain), the Map of Earnil plays for free. If there's a Dwarven Tomb in the discard, the Map of Earnil can be discarded to play the Tomb and as its target, the Tomb can choose the freshly-discarded Map of Earnil. This costs one resource and puts the Map back in hand (where it is again played for free) and puts the Dwarven Tomb at the bottom of the deck-- which, if the deck is empty, is also the top of the deck. We can draw it for free at the beginning of the next round, or else a second resource can be spent on Elven-light to draw the Tomb immediately (thanks to Protector of Lórien, we can discard the Elven-light up to 22 times per round-- we won't need anywhere near that many). Then one more resource (our second or third) can play the Tomb to recur any spirit card (usually Stand and Fight or Reforged, though we can also get unlimited plays of A Test of Will, Elrond's Counsel, or Hasty Stroke-- which I suddenly realize I forgot to include. I would drop one copy of Reforged and one copy of Test of Will to make room for two copies of Hasty Stroke.)

This gets us back to our starting state-- with this loop, we can recur one spirit card per round during our planning phase for two resources, plus additional cards for three more.

I've included the Forth, The Three Hunters! contract since we're already running without allies, so it's also "free", but note that the thin deck only includes a single Restricted attachment so it can't ever flip the contract on its own. This actually leads to some interesting decisions-- the "thin" deck can either reforge the attachments across the table onto Dain, who makes the best use of most of them, or it can hunt for enough restricted attachments to flip its contract for a big willpower boost.

Any Good Meal played on Merry can be discarded to reduce the cost of a Stand and Fight or Reforged by two. (We have a specific ruling confirming this works.) This is great for getting those crucial first few plays while you're trying to gain a foothold in the early rounds, though it can't be recurred, so you only get the discount three times.

As far as mulligans go, the "thin" deck loves to see an early Elven-light to help get set up quickly, though it'll get all its necessary pieces pretty quickly no matter what. The "fat" deck can't be picky, but given the importance of getting that fourth spirit hero, will typically want to mulligan for a unique spirit ally. (With an aggressive mulligan and a first-turn defense by Dain, it's almost exactly 50/50 to get one in the discard by the end of the first round.)

The sideboard on the "fat" deck mostly consists of cards I considered including but rejected-- mostly attachments that are quite good but lack a viable target and interesting allies that were cut to get to 400. The sideboard on the "thin" deck falls into two categories-- cards that take better advantage of the Three Hunters contract (the Golden Belts, Unexpected Courages, and the Herugrim / Golden Shield package to turn Eowyn into an all-around monster), and cards that work great if you ditch the Three Hunters contract (Nori and the Elf-friend / Elvenking / Galadhrim Weaver troika to give cheaper and easier ways to recur cards-- methods that don't cost a resource and work even on non-spirit cards.)

Either of the packages will make the "thin" deck better, but they'll also enable it to stand on its own legs, which defeats the purpose of the challenge. Again, the goal is to create a deck with no ability but maximum consistency and a second deck with maximum ability but no consistency. One deck can eat no fat, the other can eat no lean.

The hope is that between them both they can lick the platter clean.