Taking the Hobbits to Rivendell

Concept

The basic idea behind this Fellowship is for Noldor Diplomacy to function as a questing/support deck while Terms of Engagement handles all combat. Terms of Engagement is focused on using Merry + Aragorn combo, engaging and killing practically every enemy in sight.

Terms of Engagement

Basically, what you want to do with Terms of Engagement is stack as many -boosting attachments (Dagger of Westernesse and Captain of Gondor) on Aragorn as possible while putting all your readying effects (Fast Hitch and Rohan Warhorse) on Merry. That way, whenever Merry and Aragorn attack and destroy an enemy together, you can immediately ready Aragorn with Merry's effect and ready Merry with any one of his readying attachments. Afterwards, you can use Aragorn's effect to engage another enemy (either from the staging area or one engaged with Noldor Diplomacy) and repeat this process until Merry runs out of readying effects or you've killed all enemies in play.

Pippin is there to boost Merry's to 2 and to provide some serious card draw each time you engage enemies with high engagement cost via Aragorn's effect. On top of that, this combination of heroes allows us to start out with only 24 threat and they let us play Take No Notice and In the Shadows for free, both of which fit in perfectly in this deck.

The allies of this deck are mainly meant to provide additional attacking and defensive power. Dúnedain Hunter, Boromir and Quickbeam all pack quite a punch while Honour Guard and Defender of Rammas will make sure you'll have no problem defending attacks from all the enemies you'll be engaging. The beauty of the deck, though, is that most of the time you'll only have to defend a single attack per turn. Our starting threat is so low that you won't have to forcefully engage a lot of enemies, so as long as you only engage a single enemy during the Encounter Phase and kill it with Aragorn, you can engage another enemy afterwards that won't be able to attack this turn because that step is already done. As long as you can keep killing enemies this way, you can potentially kill off 3-4 enemies in a single turn while only having to defend an attack from one of them.

Finalizing our ally lineup, Bofur and Henamarth Riversong can both provide some or additional in a pinch if necessary, but they're mostly there for the utility they provide. Bofur helps us search our deck for key Weapon attachments like Dagger of Westernesse, Rivendell Bow (which can make Aragorn ranged to attack any enemies that somehow ended up engaged with Noldor Diplomacy or it can make any of that deck's heroes ranged so they can help Terms of Engagement take down the really big enemies) and Spear of the Citadel (which will usually go on either Boromir or Defender of Rammus.

Not only are all these Weapon attachments really good in this deck, they also help make Foe-hammer live as fast as possible to get our card draw going. Between Foe-hammer, Pippin's effect and Daeron's Runes, this deck has plenty of draw power to quickly find all the cards you need to set up some huge combos and fancy plays this deck is capable of. Take Quick Strike for example: it's always been a very flexible card, but in this deck it becomes so much better thanks to Aragorn's engagement effect. If you're engaged with an enemy that can be finished off by a single attack from Aragorn, you can play Quick Strike after the staging step of the Quest Phase to kill off that enemy and immediately use Aragorn's effect to engage an enemy just revealed from the encounter deck before quest resolution. This can potentially decrease the against which you have to quest by quite a bit!

Noldor Diplomacy

As said in the introduction, Noldor Diplomacy is completely focused on questing and supporting Terms of Engagement. Try to mulligan for Nenya so that you can quest for 10 right out of the gate with just your heroes. That's huge! Even without considering her synergy with the rest of this deck and its partner deck, Arwen Undómiel is already of the best heroes in the game in my opinion. In this Fellowship however, she truly shines. With her ability you can give a resource to the other deck's Aragorn each turn, speeding up their ally development. On top of that, we also run Elven-light to provide the deck with easy discard fodder and card draw and Tale of Tinúviel for even more synergy with Terms of Engagement's Aragorn.

While Arwen herself makes a great target for Tale of Tinúviel, it's actually Galadriel who would provide Aragorn with the greatest stat boost. This is made even better by the fact that you generally want to stack your Unexpected Courage on her, making it incredibly easy to ready her on demand to meet Tale of Tinúviel's requirements. Once she has 2 Unexpected Courage and Nenya attached, you'll be able to use her to quest for 4, have either deck draw a card and reduce their and still have her readied to be used for Tale of Tinúviel!

Together with Galadriel's Handmaiden the deck is exceptionally good at keeping the of Terms of Engagement low enough to keep the effects of Pippin, Boromir and Daggers of Westernesse live. Reducing is hardly the only thing this deck can do for its partner deck though. Imladris Stargazer can be used to boost Terms of Engagement's consistency even further, making those combos even more likely. Also, by playing Ring of Barahir on Aragorn, this deck can give Terms of Engagement an additional hero with access to the resource and thus smooth out the deck's resources. On top of that, Ring of Barahir also gives Aragorn +1 for itself and each copy of Dagger of Westernesse underneath it, potentially increasing its to a total of 8!

That's not to say that all this deck does is only to the benefit of its partner deck though! With the help of Light of Valinor and A Burning Brand, Elrond can become a real force in his own right as well, being able to contribute 3 to the quest for free and defend an attack without having to worry about any nasty shadow effects afterwards. That means that if Aragorn manages to kill an enemy that turn, he can use his effect to draw that attacking enemy away from Noldor Diplomacy and probably kill it off with another attack right away, making the entire combat aspect of the game almost trivial. (Yet still so much fun!)

Since Noldor Diplomacy is quite dependant upon all these attachments, we also include Master of the Forge to find them as fast as possible. To quickly go over the rest of the deck's allies: Warden of Healing (who's always been a staple alongside Elrond). Ethir Swordsman and Northern Tracker help immensely with questing and location control. Galdor of the Havens synergizes really well with Arwen's discard effect and, while expensive, shouldn't be that hard to play once you have Nenya on Galadriel, giving her a resource icon. And finally, Envoy of Pelargir provides the deck with some more resource smoothing while at the same time giving it a cheap chump blocker that can still quest for 1 if necessary that same turn thanks to Galadriel's passive effect.

Conclusion

I hope I was able to demonstrate just how well these decks go together, both being able to cover the other's weaknesses while also being able to play key attachments on each other's characters. Not only is that incredibly fun, it's also very satisfying to see two decks work so well together like that. On top of all that, the decks make perfect thematic sense, which is always a nice extra.