Experimental Deckbuilding: Hobbit-Sense

So, I may have gotten distracted from putting together the writeup for Hunt for Gollum. Sorry about that. In my defense, I got distracted by building a deck. And so, since I don’t have a write-up for you all today like I planned on, I’ll give you a new Experimental Deckbuilding article today! So, without any further ado, I give you the deck: Hobbit-Sense.

Spirit Pippin is widely considered to be the worst hero in the game. And I’m certainly not going to contest that. The restrictions on his ability lock him into an all-hobbit hero lineup, and raising threat runs counter to what a hobbit deck is trying to do – which is generally to stay beneath engagement costs and try to control when and how combat happens.

Of course, whenever I hear something like “worst hero in the game,” I start thinking that I want to see if I can find a use for him anyways. I guess I’m contrary like that – I hear it as a challenge to try to make a deck where he can work. Anyways, the Spirit sphere hobbits in general tend to treat threat as if it were a resource. Raise your threat to do ‘X.’ And the Spirit version of Merry lets you lower it repeatedly, defraying the cost of using your other heroes.

So if I’m really serious about trying to find a use for Pippin, mono-sphere spirit hobbits seems like the way to go. Between Merry and Pippin, I’ve got a start at a hero lineup. The next question is who the third hero should be. Our choice is between Frodo Baggins and Fatty Bolger. Fatty is a repeatable Radagast’s Cunning, which can be very valuable. But, as a mono-sphere Spirit deck, questing just isn’t going to be a huge issue for us, unless we really screw up deckbuilding. And Frodo gives us another emergency valve for combat.

Part of my reason for leaning towards Frodo is that, although Spirit Pippin means that we never have to engage an enemy if we don’t want to, a great many quests will require us to engage and kill at least one enemy, and a fair amount of those will include boss enemies who we will have to consistently defend while we kill them. Frodo gives us a way to handle that from the start, along with a way to handle other engagement emergencies.

Now, let’s get down to deckbuilding.

Before we do anything else, let’s start thinking of a core mechanic here. What do we want this deck to do? Pippin’s ability to make it so that we are almost never required to engage an enemy points towards building a deck designed to quest past all the enemies in the staging area and ideally win a game without ever killing an enemy. I don’t know why, but that just sounds awesome to me. Of course, we can’t avoid combat altogether, because some enemies will just have too low of an engagement cost, and others will engage us whether we want them to or not.

But hobbits aren’t typically good at combat, and the Spirit hobbits typify that particularly well. These are the hobbits that sneak past the Black Riders in the Shire, or follow Aragorn into the wild and attempt to evade their enemies, not the esquires of Gondor and the Mark or the mighty warrior Samwise becomes in the tower of Cirith Ungol. So, to supplement the lack of combat prowess of our heroes, we’ll want to include some higher-attack allies. Since Frodo had good relationships with the Elves, I think a few Noldor might be a decent inclusion – there are some high attack allies that can pick up the slack if we need them to. In addition, some Dunedain could also be thematically appropriate – and Northern Trackers specifically have the combat stats we’re looking for as well as being able to control locations if necessary.

So, we’ve got the shape of the deck. Lots of questing allies, with some Northern Trackers and a few beefy Noldor allies (especially Glorfindel) to help with combat as necessary. Other than Glorfindel and Arwen Undomiel, the only really useful combat Noldor allies are off-sphere. This might pose a problem, except that Spirit has access to the wonderful Stand and Fight event, which can pull off-sphere allies out of the discard pile. And with Glorfindel on the table, we even have a way to discard the cards.

So, let’s keep this vague and hazy impression in mind as we turn towards building the deck. The first thing we are going to need is to cover our basics – resource acceleration and card draw. Since we start out with a starting threat of only 19, it is worth thinking about secrecy cards. Secrecy is a form of resource acceleration all its own. It will be hard to stay in secrecy throughout an entire game, but we have at least 2 turns of it, assuming no threat increases happen right at the beginning.

In that case, Resourceful becomes exceptionally worth looking at. Another possibility – if we intend on running expensive events like Galadhrim’s Greeting or Stand and Fight on 5-cost allies – is A Good Meal. Both of them are on the table, if needed.

Card draw is a little trickier. 3 copies of Ancient Mathom are a certain include, of course. And Glorfindel will allow us to discard Elven-light and use that for card draw, if we have the extra resources. That still might not be enough, though. So let’s take a look at a thematically appropriate but often passed over option – the Hobbit Pipe.

The Hobbit Pipe is not an easy-to-use card. It’s difficult to include enough event-based threat reduction to make it worth the deckspace. But if any deck is going to need threat reduction, this deck is going to. So I don’t feel bad about packing the deck full of threat-reducing events, because they will both help me draw cards as well as keeping me below the engagement costs of enemies.

Now we have some core engines for the deck. Resourceful generates resources, hopefully along with a low cost curve for the rest of the deck. Hobbit-pipes and threat reduction events draw us cards, supplemented by Ancient Mathoms and Elven-light. Pippin keeps enemies away, Frodo takes the attacks that Pippin can’t avoid, and Merry keeps reducing our threat as he can while a host of questing allies carry us to victory, while Glorfindel and friends help us kill the few enemies that we just can’t avoid.

So, let’s see what that looks like. I want questing allies, and I want a lot of them. First, of course, is 3 copies of Bilbo Baggins. The ability to draw up a Hobbit Pipe will be essential for our card draw. Second, we’ll want Sam Gamgee. 1 resource for 2 willpower is incredible value, and his beefier hit points and his readying/stat boost ability is phenomenal. 2 copies should suffice – he’s not essential to the deck, and so we don’t want extra copies clogging up our hand. Also, 2 copies of Arwen, because extra defense is always good, and because she is probably the best ally in the game. That should cover our unique questing allies.

For the non-unique allies, the first place we want to look is the Dunedain Pathfinder. With the location control Northern Trackers offer us, we can afford to get extra locations into play, and 2 willpower for free is definitely valuable. Since we are looking to get as many cheap allies into play as we can, we are now looking at the various 2-cost-or-less for 2-willpower allies. Our options are West Road Traveller, Galadriel’s Handmaiden, Silvan Refugee, and Celduin traveller (if we count the secrecy discount). We could also potentially think about the Elven Jeweller, who could be put into play for free. And, when combined with ally Glorfindel, gives us a number of opportunities to discard Elven-light for extra card draw.

Let’s go for 3 copies of Galadriel’s Handmaiden, 2 copies of the Celduin Traveler, and 2 copies of the Jeweller. The Handmaiden kind of stretches our theme just a little bit, but it’s not beyond the pale, I think. Rivendell was home to both Noldor and Sindarin Elves, so including a few Silvans fits just fine. And although Galadriel’s personal handmaidens might be less inclined to make the journey to Rivendell, we can always think of them as former handmaidens of the Lady who moved to Rivendell in an earlier age.

So, let’s add 2 Northern Trackers and the full set of 3 copies of Glorfindel to the mix, and we’re up to 22 allies. We’ve only got the Northern Rangers and Glorfindel for combat though, and it might be good to get some other high-powered allies in the mix. The problem is that all of the Noldor ones are off-sphere. Of course, since we already have some discard effects currently, it might well be worth it to include Stand and Fight, in which case we can totally add, say, a copy each of Gildor Inglorion and Galdor of the Havens. If our card draw is effective, then the singleton copies shouldn’t be a problem.

24 allies, now, and that should be enough. For attachments, let’s add 2 copies of Resourceful, 3 copies of the Hobbit Pipe, and 3 copies of Ancient Mathom. In addition, 2 copies of Hobbit Pony will let us be efficient with Merry and Frodo’s actions, letting us decide whether or not to quest with them after we see the staging area.

And now we come to the most important bit – events. First, the staples and the cards that we locked ourselves into as the result of our choices above: 3xTest of Will, 3xStand and Fight, and 2xElven-light. We’re now up to 42 cards, and the remainder of the cards should be threat-reducing events, to give us things to trigger our Hobbit-pipes off of. 3xGaladhrim’s Greeting and 3xElrond’s Counsel give us a start. Of the remaining threat reduction events, we could include Free to Choose, Island Amid Perils, Elevenses, or Smoke Rings (Well-Warned is straight out, because of our lack of unique scout characters). I’m going to discard Island Amid Perils, because we only have 3 Silvan allies in our deck, and until at least one of them is in play, it would be a dead card in our hand. In addition, Elrond’s Counsel is already a card in our deck that can’t be played until one of the unique Noldor characters is in play, so we already have potential dead cards.

Along similar lines, Free to Choose is entirely reactive. We can only play the card if the encounter deck raises our threat, rather than lowering our threat as we see fit. While there are a few quests in which this becomes a very useful card, it is not going to be as useful for our purposes, which really want a more proactive approach. That leaves Elevenses and Smoke Rings. If we get all three Pipe cards in play, Smoke Rings will drop our threat by 3 and give us +3 willpower, which is not negligible. It is expensive for it’s effect, but as a late game card, we probably have the resources to afford it. Elevenses is a better card – in this deck we could potentially drop our threat by 5 by readying all 3 heroes, Sam, and Bilbo. We’d lose a fair amount of quest power, but we have willpower and to spare. In addition, this gives us the ability to control questing a little bit, removing characters from the quest if we are going to be advancing too fast. I’m going to go with 2 of each.

And finally, since – if we get our card draw engine really going – we can easily draw our whole decks, I’m going to include a single copy of Lords of the Eldar, which will allow us to boost the combat stats of our hefty Noldor allies in the late game. That brings us to 53 cards. As decks go, it’s a little oversized, but not overly so.

That’s it for today. Next week, hopefully I’ll be able to write up the Hunt for Gollum narrative, along with the first test result writeup for the Forth Eorlingas Fellowship in this series. This deck will be put on hold for a little bit while I catch up with the backlog on other projects. When we do return, we’ll put together a Hobbit-Dunedain side quest deck designed to complement this deck’s low-threat avoid-and-quest-past-enemies strategy, and then design a testing regimen to run the decks against.

Thanks for following along with this series, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far!