A zero-cost attachment is always nice. However, the benefit of the discounted cost is reliant upon the condition that triggers the attack boost. In this case, the condition is discarding a card from hand for +1 attack per card, with a limit of three times per phase. Additionally, Elven Spear can only be attached to a Silvan or Noldor hero. Based on this, we know that the card is designed primarily for a Noldor deck.

Considering the card in this light, two things immediately stand out to me. The first is that there is a severe lack of Tactics heroes with the Noldor or Silvan trait. In fact, there is just one for each with Elladan and Legolas. Neither hero typically sees play in the traditional Noldor deck that seeks to discard a lot of cards. And to make Elven Spear useful, the deck will need to be designed to do just that. The beauty of the Elven Spear is not that it can get you +1 or +2 attack, it's that it can get you +3 with a single attachment costing no resources, something few other cards can do. This improves the situational usefulness of the card tremendously. The kicker is that you need to be prepared to consistently discard three cards per turn. The fact that the two primary targets do not synergize with the types of decks that can consistently pull this off is a bit problematic.

Luckily, there is a particular card that solves this issue. Namely, Elf-friend. This allows us to get any tactic hero we want with the Noldor and Silvan traits, opening up the deckbuilding options significantly. Unluckily, we are still hard pressed to find a tactics hero which we want to put into a Noldor deck anyway. That being said, I have had great success pairing Elf-friend and Elven Spear with Aragorn in a variety of Noldor decks. Additionally, adding Elf-friend to such a deck will allow your off-trait hero to interact with the rest of the Noldor cards in the deck. In this light, I think that Elven Spear is niche card, but not a bad one. If your deck can handle the steep discard price, and if you can find a desirable target for it, you'll see a pretty significant return on investment.

Recursion is one of the strongest and most potentially game-breaking effects in the game (outside of its straightforward use-case of defending against specific times of "hate" from the encounter deck). Often, the power of cards is limited by the number of times you can play them-- most of the time, only three times per quest. Recursion lets you turn effects that would ordinarily be powerful escape hatches into reliable, repeatable tools.

What kind of attachments might be worth recurring with Second Breakfast? Many have noted the single-use (often free) attachments like Cram, Miruvor, or my favorite, Good Meal (all of which are a thematic home run with Second Breakfast). The payoff on these is lower, but they're quick, easy to set up, reliable, and cheap. Otherwise, player attachments typically stick on the character they're attached to (barring attachment hate from the quest), but anything that goes on encounter cards typically winds up discarded at some point-- Elf-stone, Ancient Mathom, Ranger Provisions, Thror's Map and Key, and many traps (such as Secret Vigil). And then there are the "single-use" framework-breakers-- Path of Need, Favor of the Valar, etc. If Second Breakfast is giving you an extra round without any heroes exhausting or an extra chance to survive threating out, it can easily be a game-saver.

But the most interesting attachments to recur with Second Breakfast, in my opinion, are the record attachments-- Scroll of Isildur, Map of Earnil, Book of Eldacar, and Tome of Atanatar. In this way, Second Breakfast can recur not just attachments, but also events (which are by their nature single-use and therefore better targets for recursion). And because of the way the record attachments work (recurring the event and then putting it back into your deck), each copy of Second Breakfast potentially gets you two extra plays.

In fact, because it is itself an event, it can be paired with Tome of Atanatar for infinite recursion. You blow up the Tome of Atanatar to recur the event of your choice, then play Second Breakfast to return the Tome of Atanatar to your hand. You blow up the Tome of Atanatar a second time to recur Second Breakfast, and for its target you choose the Tome of Atanatar you just discarded. Then you play the Tome of Atanatar again. It is now free to recur your preferred Leadership event again, and Second Breakfast is in your deck to repeat the loop once you dig it back out. (Easily done if your deck was empty when you started.)

This is an expensive way to recur an event-- with three Leadership heroes, it adds four extra resources for each time you loop your preferred event (though if you add a fourth leadership hero via Sword-thain, this falls to just two extra resource per loop). Each loop gets you two extra plays (once from the Tome, once from drawing it back out of your deck), so this amounts to two extra resources per play (one with Sword-thain).

But Leadership has plenty of events that fully justify the extra cost-- in multiplayer games, Grim Resolve, Strength of Arms, or Lure of Moria could easily ready 20+ characters at a time. (If you're using the pre-errata version of We Are Not Idle, looping that plus Lure of Moria could generate infinite resources, even accounting for the extra cost of playing each.) Sneak Attack + Gandalf is a bargain even at three resources per play since it preserves your Gandalf for future use. By the same token, Reinforcements is well worth the boosted cost if you have enough high-value allies in hand. (Though if you want to recur Reinforcements, there are easier ways to do so.)

The granddaddy of all game-breaking effects, though, is Doom Hangs Still, which completely shuts down staging for a round, albeit at a very high cost. But is any cost too high to justify the ability to prevent the encounter deck from revealing another card for the rest of the game?

So Second Breakfast really has three main use-cases: protecting against attachment hate, getting extra mileage out of single-use attachments, and insane recursion shenanigans. Any of those three can be enough to justify its presence in a deck. But my favorite part is how, once you're running it, everyone else at the table also benefits. Against quests with attachment hate, one player with Second Breakfast covers the whole table. If you're trying to recur Cram or Good Meal, everyone else gets to recur any single-use attachments they might have-- and even if they don't have any, they get a "free" discard to something like Daeron's Runes or forced discard treacheries, pitching an attachment (even one they want) knowing it'll soon be back in hand.

And finally, if you're using Second Breakfast for some game-breaking shenanigans, every other deck at the table is also free to get up to shenanigans of their own. The Tome of Atanatar + Second Breakfast combo only gives you infinite recursion for Leadership events. But once you're infinitely recurring a Leadership event, partner decks are free to run one of the other record attachments to infinitely recur events from different spheres, too-- say The Hammer-stroke and Thicket of Spears so enemies never attack for the rest of the game, or Advance Warning so enemies never engage for the rest of the game (ideally paired with Haldir of Lórien, Arrows from the Trees, or The Great Hunt to clear out the staging area), or The Galadhrim's Greeting so everyone's threat dial rolls backwards every round or Shadows Give Way so you never see another shadow card again. Because every sphere has a couple cards that just completely break the normal framework of the game, the potential for coordinated fellowships to just "turn off" whatever part of the game is giving them trouble is off the charts.

There's a reason why recursion effects are so rare, so limited, and so likely to eventually see an errata (see: Will of the West, Háma). There are few ways to more reliably break the game than getting extra plays out of cards that were balanced in part by the limited number of times one could play them.

3769
Nice write up. I am shocked it took the community until 2024 to write about how good this card is in various scenarios. —
I wouldn't say it took this long for people to notice how good it could be. I think it's more that a lot of cards don't get many reviews on RingsDB. —

Love this guy does well gimli or gloin or beorn and his fellow bree barliman. Stat wise he is 8 cost l ant isn't too bad can quest or attack. Can even take an undefended hit also. Really good if you need him to take undefended hits early on

51

When playing Progression style, Denethor is always in our hero pool (wielding A Burning Brand as soon as it unlocks in quest five) at least until Elrond shows up near the end of the second cycle. (After that Beravor and Elrond+Vilya tend to get picked first.) Matrosh already noted that stacking Unexpected Courage on Denethor is great (I agree), but something to consider is not to only bury scary cards. Instead, let Henamarth Riversong (activated after you've used all your Denethor actions for the round) cover your early game spying needs while Denethor studies the enemy's long term plans! Have Denethor bury every card that isn't a victory or critical quest card (and leave each buried one face up since it's now a known card unless the deck gets shuffled) until you eventually know every remaining encounter card and can strategically pick which ones come when. Obviously you don't want to do this on quests where the encounter deck can reshuffle itself early or unexpectedly, and you also don't want to do it when you or your team are using something like Mariner's Compass.

Overall, Denethor is top notch when you only have the Core set. Once you get past the first few cycles and unlock more choices, he's still a viable choice depending on your deck build.

40

I wish they had made this more like Secret Vigil so it scaled with player count. As is, I frequently end up with this card in my sideboard having not quite made the cut down to 50 cards. Elrond's Counsel is superior as long as you meet the Noldor and color requirements. For solo play without access to blue or red I suppose this might make the cut. (I don't know that I'd ever play purple/green as a solo deck, though.)

40