So, this is (hopefully) the start of a new series where I build a deck around a certain idea and run it through a gauntlet of test runs. I’ll upload videos of some of the playthroughs so that everybody involved can get a sense for how the deck is running, and we’ll tweak the deck – or sometimes even rework it from scratch – based on how it functions.
I’m frankly not sure how this is going to play out in the long run, or if there’s even interest in it to start with. But I think it’s worth a shot. If things go well, I’ll probably start asking for suggestions from the readers for ideas to play with.
Forth Eorlingas!
The first project that this series is going to tackle is something I’ve mentioned on the Discord server once or twice. For a long while, I’ve been enamored of Rohan decks – they just seem to have a great deal of variety and flexibility available to them. Rohan decks generally come in a couple of flavors – Rohan decks are most often built around either the “discard-from-play” mechanic, or staging area attack. There is a great deal of design space inside each of these broad themes, and there are – of course – other ways to build a Rohan deck. But those are the two most common approaches, in my experience.
I’ve been interested in staging area attack decks since I first realized how Dunhere’s ability worked back when I got my first core set. That’s why the new Leadership Eomer intrigued me, and why I spent so much time and effort trying to make the hero work.
In theory, this should be an excellent card. It covers for one of the weaknesses of staging area attack decks – you have to significantly boost up the hero’s attack power before you can do anything significant with it. Dunhere’s 3 attack on his own isn’t even going to crack the defense of many of the enemies in the modern card pool, and even 4 or 5 with a single weapon boost is iffy. This event allows you to declare all of your Rohan heroes as attackers, letting you combine attack strengths and have multiple heroes overcome the defenses of high-powered enemies.
In practice, however, the card is difficult to make work. First, you have to have a deck that isn’t planning on loading up a single hero to do most of the attack power – to make it worthwhile, you really need at least two heroes planning on attacking into the staging area. Second, it relies on heroes alone, meaning that you can’t supplement a hero’s attack with contributions from allies. Third, as an event, it’s not a consistent way to attack into the staging area. You can’t do it reliably, every round. Therefore, you have to build some sort of method of handling regular combat into your decks that seek to benefit off of it. And if you can handle regular combat just fine, why even bother with staging area attack?
So, of course, I want to build a deck – or more accurately, a fellowship – based around using this card to its maximum effect. It’s not a great card, and there are a bunch of other ways to do the whole staging area attack thing. But I really enjoy taking cards that have sunk to the bottom of the card pool and seeing if I can’t do something interesting with them. And the theme of this card just calls out to me. All around, the enemies of the Mark gather and encroach upon our lands, until in one great rush, the host of the Eorlingas rushes out to give battle and drive them off. The theme just feels beautiful there.
So, let’s see if we can do anything useful here. After all, there’s a reason we’re going to call this series Experimental Deckbuilding, right? So let’s see if we can’t take an underused and mostly dismissed card and make it shine.
A Thunder of Hooves
For Forth Eorlingas! to be an effective play, the most important thing we are going to need to do is be able to keep enemies in the staging area. For the short term, there are a variety of ways this can be accomplished – mostly through events like Fresh Tracks, Advance Warning, Noiseless Movement, and so on, which let you avoid making engagement checks against certain enemies (or against all enemies, in the case of Advance Warning). There are also a number of ways to return enemies to the staging area – Terrible to Behold, A Light in the Dark, or the response on Mablung, Guardian of Ithilien or Ithilien Archer. However, these are all short term solutions. With the exception of a deck specifically built around recurring Advance Warning, these won’t leave enemies in the staging area turn after turn. In addition, the vast majority of these effects are in the Lore sphere, and very few Rohan heroes or allies are from that sphere of influence.
So now we’ve got the core of an idea. Fastred to toss enemies back to the staging area, Forth Eorlingas! to kill them there, and Hama to recycle the event. Because Forth Eorlingas! only works with Rohan heroes, we’ll want to maximize the number of heroes in our fellowship that have the Rohan trait, and especially maximize the number who can take advantage of attacking into the staging area.
So first, let’s make a list of all of the Rohan heroes in the game, excluding Fastred and Hama:
- Eomer (Tactics)
- Theoden (Tactics)
- Eowyn (Tactics)
- Theoden (Spirit)
- Eowyn (Spirit)
- Dunhere (Spirit)
- Eomer (Leadership)
- Elfhelm (Leadership)
- Erkenbrand (Leadership)
- Theodred (Leadership)
- Grima (Lore)
We are going to want a heavy focus on Tactics heroes, for two reasons. First, we need enough resources to play Forth Eorlingas repeatedly. That means at least 2 Tactics heroes, but probably pushes us towards a mono-Tactics deck for at least one of our decks. That way, we can reasonably run Book of Eldacar as well, which will allow us to either recur Forth Eorlingas even more, or to free up Hama’s 3 times per game limit for other Tactics events like Feint or Foe-hammer.
Another point pushing towards more Tactics heroes is that – unlike almost all the other methods of attacking into the staging area – Forth Eorlingas! allows multiple attackers to join in on the attack. Since the effect is limited to heroes only, we want multiple heroes to take advantage of the opportunity. This means that each deck will want to have at least one good attacker, and ideally one of our decks will want to have at least two.
Of the available Tactics heroes, Eomer is a standout choice. Without any attachments, he’s already a potent attacker – able to reach 5 attack if a character has left play this round. With Rohan’s penchant for discarding allies from play, that shouldn’t be a difficult condition to trigger when needed.
For a third hero in our Mono-Tactics deck, we have the choice between Theoden and Eowyn. Tactics Theoden would be an interesting choice, but the willpower boost to Eomer and Hama is likely going to be less than effective, unless we find other ways to boost their willpower as well. In addition, Theoden would bring the starting threat of the deck to 31. Without repeatable threat reduction in the deck, that is much too high to be able to rely on keeping enemies in the staging area.
Eowyn, on the other hand, would give us a starting threat of 25, better starting willpower, and the ability to dish out a huge attack once per game. If needed, and if enough readying effects are available, she could potentially clear out the staging area single-handedly that round.
I don’t want to go building the rest of the deck until I know what shape the fellowship as a whole is going to take, but we can slot a few staples in as auto-includes. Foe-hammer, and a weapon to trigger it, are going to be essential; I’ll provisionally slot in Spear of the Mark. Dagger of Westernesse might be more broadly applicable, but the two weapons are roughly comparable, so I’m going to choose the more thematic option.
3 copies of a Rohan Warhorse will give us more attacks out of our heroes, which will be helpful since we are going to need their actions to clear out the staging area. Likewise, Firefoot will be an important inclusion in the deck, boosting Eomer to 5 attack natively and 7 with his temporary boost after chump-blocking or discarding an ally.
3 copies of Grimbold will be important as well, providing questing power and the ability to cancel an attack at need. One thing to notice is that we don’t have a decent defender in the Tactics deck, so we’ll want to remedy that deficiency.
Now, for the second deck of the fellowship. We know that one of the three heroes is Fastred, so we’ll be including some Spirit cards for certain. Since the Tactics deck is unlikely to give us much willpower, we’ll want to include a great deal of questing power in this deck. In addition, we’ll want defense boosts for Fastred, who is a little bit squishy as a defender without any special armor on him.
I’d actually like to include the hero version of Elfhelm as well, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that we want as many passive boosts to our heroes as we can get. Since we can’t rely on allies to help us take out enemies in the staging area, we need our heroes to have much higher attack to compensate. Elfhelm’s boosts help get us there. In addition, a lot of the mounts we want to include are exceptionally helpful for the decks we are building already – see Firefoot for Eomer and the Rohan Warhorse for Hama or Eomer (or both). Getting even more value from those mount attachments seems like a good idea. A third and final reason is theme – the idea of a bunch of Rohan heroes charging out to kill enemies in the staging area just gets cooler if all of them are mounted and being boosted by Elfhelm.
For a third hero, we are actually down to a limited list. Grima is almost certainly out – Doomed done that consistently will counteract our desire to stay at low threat to keep enemies in the staging area, not to mention that he does not synergize with Elfhelm at all, or that Rohan has so little support available from the Lore sphere. The leadership version of Eomer and the spirit version of Eowyn are also unavailable. This leaves us with Theodred, Erkenbrand, Dunhere, and one of the versions of Theoden to pick from.
Looking at what we have so far, I’m struck by our lack of willpower. We have just Eowyn and Elfhelm to meaningfully send to the quest, at the moment. Even if we assume that Hama can quest during the early game, that’s still only 7 willpower all told. But on the other hand, we kind of want a sentinel defender to protect the mono-tactics deck against enemies that do engage. Theoden kind of perfectly fits our bill here. That does bring the starting threat of the second deck up to 31, but unlike in the other circumstance, we have repeatable threat reduction in the form of Fastred to help bring it down quickly. In addition, between Theoden’s Noble trait and Elfhelm’s Scout trait, we qualify for the card Well-Warned, which will let us reduce threat even further.
Now we have to make the decision between the spirit version or the tactics version of Theoden. The spirit version will let us quickly and cheaply play Rohan allies onto the board, which would be especially useful if we use some of the discard-from-play allies. On the other hand, the Tactics version starts with +1 willpower, and would give Eowyn +1 willpower as well (along with Hama and Eomer, which means that questing with one of them in an early round is much more useful). In addition, using the Song of Travel to get access to Elfhelm’s boost on the questing heroes could give either Hama or Eomer 3 willpower, which is certainly worth an action to quest with.
I’m actually leaning towards the Tactics version here. Assuming we quest with all of our heroes but Fastred and Eomer, we will start out questing for 12 (2 from Elfhelm, 3 from Theoden, 5 from Eowyn, and 2 from Hama). That’s respectable, and would only be boosted by any questing allies we manage to play.
Looking back at our chosen hero lineup, let’s compare it to our original goals. The mono-Tactics deck has a starting threat of 25, which is low enough for our purposes, especially with the threat reduction we have available. We have two powerful attackers in Eomer and Hama, and even Eowyn can get involved on a particularly critical turn. However, even this low starting threat will require assistance to stay low enough to avoid engagement over the long run. Threat reduction will be critical.
Our second deck is a little more problematic. The starting threat of 31 is much high for keeping enemies in the staging area, but Fastred will be a great help in reducing it over time. Still, we will probably want a lot of threat reduction that can be played early for a larger drop that we can then use Fastred to maintain. Theoden is a good attacker, especially if we equip him with his sword, Herugrim. With some readying, or good enough questing support to leave him ready for combat, Elfhelm can support Theoden’s attacks into the staging area. And, if we haven’t engaged an enemy to defend against or if we have readying on Fastred, he can also attack along with Theoden into the staging area.
Our starting willpower is decent, but will need a great deal of support from allies or willpower boosts to heroes to be able to overcome the threat of enemies left in the staging area. In addition, we do not have any really strong defenders to start out with, so we will need allies to either defend for us, or buy us time to find defense boosts for either Theoden or Fastred. Finally, our deck will really rely on Mount attachments and sphere-granting Songs for Elfhelm’s boosts, and on defensive boosts for Fastred or Theoden. To ensure that these come out in a timely manner, card draw will be our final, critical element in the decks.
This post is already getting long, so I’ll spare you detailed discussions about the remainder of cards in the decks. The published fellowship can be found here. It’s still an early draft, and needs to be refined during testing, but I’ll go over a brief summary of how I tried to address the weaknesses that the hero lineups suggest. Detailed strategies and intended play will be in the descriptions of the decks.
The first and foremost of those concerns is getting enough willpower on the table to quest past all the enemies we are going to be leaving in the staging area. As you can see, most of the allies in the decks are there to aid in the quest phase. West Road Travellers, Stewards of Orthanc, Grimbold, Guthlaf, and Westfold Horse-breeders all add their contributions, while hero-based willpower boosts from Elfhelm’s ability turn our initial 12 into an ever-more formidable number. For the big quest pushes, Escorts from Edoras and Astonishing Speed can give us incredible numbers on key turns. Finally, Westfold Outriders can let us pull down high-threat enemies from the staging area before quest resolution, lowering the threat there and easing our burden.
The second concern was providing capable defenders that can handle threats to either deck. Deorwine in the mono-Tactics deck is excellent on his own. When you add Hauberk of Mail to him, he becomes a 4-defense/4 hit point wall that can cancel shadow effects. Hauberk of Mail also boosts Theoden and Fastred, so it’s a very flexible inclusion. Golden Shield could go on any defender, but is designed for Fastred, who will have 2 willpower with a Mount and an open restricted slot. In addition, Terrible to Behold cancels an attack and returns the enemy to the staging area, where we can potentially reduce our threat to avoid him the next round. Honour Guards can prevent damage from undefended attacks or attacks too high to safely defend against otherwise. And finally, Grimbold – in addition to being an excellent quester – also lets us avoid attacks in an emergency situation.
For threat reduction, the mono-Tactics deck runs 3 copies of Secret Vigil along with 3 copies of Galadhrim’s Greeting (paid for via Songs of Travel on Eowyn and Eomer). The Elfhelm deck runs 3 copies of Well-Warned, which can be played turn 1 without needing a resource, and can give a surprisingly large swing if a mid-to-high threat enemy is in the staging area. Sneak Attack and Gandalf provide more emergency insurance, along with a great deal of flexibility. This should be enough, I hope, to keep our threat low enough to do a credible job of keeping enemies in the staging area and to counteract the occasional Doomed from the Steward of Orthanc.
Finally, card draw. Ancient Mathoms, Valiant Sacrifice, and Prepare for Battle let us do selective card draw – passing the extra cards around with at least some control of where they end up. In addition, the mono-Tactics deck has Foe-Hammer (possibly recycled once or twice by Hama, if necessary) and Steward of Orthanc, while the Elfhelm deck has Sneak Attack and Gandalf for extra draw. I expect to use the first copy of Gandalf for threat reduction, and most of the later plays to be used to draw cards.
And that covers the ways in which the decks are meant to cover the weaknesses we identified from the hero lineup. There was more that went into building them, but – as noted above – this post has grown very long, so we’ll postpone further commentary.
Next time in this series, we will be developing a testing regimen for these decks, and doing our first performance report.
Take a look at these decks on RingsDB: Forth Eorlingas!