Experimental Deckbuilding – Scions of Arnor

So, Grant Thomson of the excellent podcast Card Talk has given us a request for the theme for our next Experimental Deckbuilding post. So, today, we will be building a fellowship oriented around the Dunedain of the North.

The Dunedain are an interesting faction in the game. They’ve been developed in a couple of different ways – cards like Idraen, the Northern Tracker, and the Greyflood Wanderer lend themselves towards a location control deck, while Thurindir, the Vigilant Dunadan, and other cards orient themselves in the direction of a side-quest deck.

Of course, the most prominent development of the Dunedain trait came in the Angmar Awakens cycle. The heroes and allies from that cycle were developed in a direction that I find at once one of the most intriguing and difficult-to-master playstyles in the modern game – the art of keeping enemies engaged with you. This is what most people think of when they think of a Dunedain deck, and with good reason.

So, our first question that we have to answer is: which of these directions do we want to explore?

Today, I think that the answer is all of them. More specifically, I think I want to explore a little bit of synergy between these options, and see if we can come up with a coherent and synergistic whole. The most challenging part of the engage-all-the-enemies playstyle is consistently defending against enough enemy attacks to make the benefits we gain worthwhile. There are a number of ways of mitigating that, but the one I want to focus on in this fellowship hits right on the border between the Dunedain side-quest archetype, and the more traditional engagement archetype. That is, of course, Vigilant Dunadan.

After we clear a single side quest, we can use the Dunadan to defend against any number of our weaker enemies, while our more powerful defenders handle any big enemies that are in play. In addition, his 3 attack during the combat phase will be particularly helpful at removing enemies that are too dangerous to keep around. This will immediately help us address one of the most prominent weaknesses of the Dunedain archetype – the tendency to overreach with our combat strategy and engage too many enemies. For the Vigilant Dunadan, there is almost no such thing as too many enemies, assuming that we can boost his defense sufficiently to handle the attacks. My general threshold for this card is being able to consistently defend against attack values of at least 4.

So that kind of gives us the shape of our fellowship: one deck engages all of the enemies, and uses the side quest synergy with Vigilant Dunadan to power the traditional Dunedain style, while the second deck quests and deals with location control. There are enough location-control oriented cards that trying to pack it all into a single deck would be bloated and inefficient.

Let’s go ahead and start looking at the location control deck first, starting with the core of the deck: Idraen.

Hunters of Eriador

Idraen is a fascinating hero, which I have only very seldom used. Her ability is potentially very powerful – readying after every location is explored, only limited by the number of locations you can explore in a single round. On the other hand, making good use of that ability can be difficult.

The hard part is that Idraen is a high-threat cost combat hero with an ability that lends itself towards a questing deck. While we can just create a questing deck, and have Idraen offer just a little bit of combat power in an emergency, it seems more than a little bit inefficient to spend 11 threat on a hero who will only ever be questing for 2 unless we find ourselves in a real emergency situation.

So, instead, let’s build ourselves a location control deck that can take care of itself in combat if it needs to. That way, we can engage an enemy here and there to take pressure off of the primary combat deck, strategically controlling the number of enemies that deck finds itself engaged with. With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to what other heroes we might want to pair with her.

For a location control deck, Spirit and Lore make a good combination. In-trait, we have a couple of options. The Lore version of Aragorn is always a good hero, although his threat cost is very high, and we already have Idraen as a high-cost hero. Pairing the two of them together would bring the total threat up to 23 already, without even adding in a third hero. If we’re thinking of pairing this deck with a separate deck that wants to engage all of the enemies, we’ll want to keep our threat down. That leaves us with the options of either Beravor or Thurindir for our Lore hero, and both have compelling reasons to include them.

Knowing that the other deck is going to want to engage most of the enemies, we can put together a hero lineup for it, so that we can decide which of our two options would fit better here. Amarthiul is nearly an auto-include in any deck that is going to try to play to the Dunedain mechanic, and Halbarad plays into that as well, giving us more control over engagements. Looking ahead a little bit, there are several Trap cards in Lore that would be extremely helpful to managing enemies and their engagements, and those could easily crowd out some of the location control cards if we try to put all of the Lore cards we need into a single deck.

So, I think that we should slot Beravor into the deck with Idraen, and Thurindir into the other deck. That will give the combat deck a starting threat of 28, which is a nice and comfortable opening.

That leaves us with the question of a third hero. Since most of the Dunedain location control allies are from the Spirit sphere, and are expensive besides, we are going to want a second Spirit hero to help pay for them. Unfortunately, there are no Dunedain heroes besides Idraen in the Spirit sphere, which means that we are going to have to cast our net a little wider.

The Dunedain of the North are closely connected with the Elves of Rivendell, and so it is to the Noldor that we will turn to find our third hero. I originally tried to make this deck work with Arwen Undomiel, but in a deck that uses Vigilant Dunadan, her ally version is too crucial to pass up. So I replaced her with the spirit version of Glorfindel, which helped reinforce a number of weak points of the deck. Glorfindel gives us extra combat punch – between him and Idraen, we can have 2 heroes ready to attack back during the combat phase with a total of 6 attack, which is enough to kill many enemies in a single strike.

In addition, he makes Asfaloth into an incredibly powerful location control option. I had been going to use Asfaloth even with the hero version of Arwen, in part because I feel that that card is useful and effective even without the added benefit of using it with Glorfindel, and I wanted to demonstrate that in a deck. But, since we ended up using his true master instead, the great horse will be utilized to his full potential.

So, now that we’ve got our heroes chosen, let’s take a look at the allies we have that can further our cause. We’ve already committed to 3 copies of Arwen Undomiel, of course. Increasing the defense on the Vigilant Dunadan from 2 to 3 is important for keeping the ally alive to defend against multiple attacks. In addition, we’ll definitely want 3 copies of the Northern Tracker, for mass location control. Because this deck will be so focused on clearing locations, we can feel exceptionally safe including 3 copies of the Dunedain Pathfinder, because we should be easily able to clear the locations dredged up by its forced effect, and 2 willpower is very useful to us.

The next card to consider is the Greyflood Wanderer. For 3 cost, he brings 2 more willpower to the table, which is very good for the Dunedain trait, and his optional Doomed trigger is a nice synergy with our other location control. On the other hand, he’s much harder to play than something like a Northern Tracker, because you tend to want to keep him in your hand – in reserve against a large number of locations coming out of the staging area. Because of that, we’ll probably just include 2 copies in our deck. Finally, from the Spirit sphere, we’ll include a single copy of the ally Sulien.

Sulien is a very intriguing card – 3 willpower for 4 cost is a little bit more expensive than you want to see in the spirit sphere, but her 2 defense and 2 hit points more than make up for it. 3 willpower is very good for an ally, and if we don’t need her to quest, we can instead use her as a possible defender in an emergency (although her 2 hit points make her feel very squishy, that can be remedied via a few options). Her activated ability is not that impressive in a 2-player game, although she becomes much better at higher player counts. But even in a 2-player game, there are some quests where she will be exceptional – most notably To Catch an Orc or the Steward’s Fear, both of which feature treacheries that add one location per player to the staging area.

From the Lore sphere, we are notably low on Dunedain allies, but there are still some useful ones available. We’ll take 3 copies of the Dunedain Lookout, but pass on both the East Road Ranger and the Sarn Ford Sentry. The Sentry will work best with the companion deck, which will be consistently engaged with enemies, while this deck will only occasionally engage one. The East Road Ranger would be much more useful if we were dedicating ourselves to side quests, rather than just including Thurindir and a single side quest to activate the Vigilant Dunadan. Even without that, a case could be made to include it for the 2 attack except that our heroes are already offering significant combat stats to leverage, and our resources will be better spent on allies that can support our main objective. The Lookout, on the other hand, is a cheap and versatile ally. He gives a little bit of extra willpower to the quest, has an extra hit point to soak Archery damage, and can be a cheap chump blocker in a pinch, but his ability is what is really attractive. Not all quests feature enemies with When Revealed effects, but the ones that do can be potentially game ending. Being able to cancel one of those for the low cost of a single ally is more than worth it. And if the quest doesn’t feature those effects, then we have an extra body on the table whose stats are definitely worth the cost.

That exhausts the Dunedain allies from the Lore sphere, but we are only at 15 allies in the deck. That feels more than a little bit low. So, like we did with our heroes, let’s take a look at the Noldor trait, and see what seems useful. 2 copies of the Imladris Caregiver can give us a little bit of healing – something to be well aware of if we are going to plan on defending multiple attacks over multiple turns.

Another character who would be very interesting to include would be Gildor Inglorion. At 5 cost, it will be very difficult to get him into play with our already stressed Lore resources, and we already have a number of high-cost allies in the deck. But, with 3 defense and 3 hit points, he is a reliable defender – something we lack in this deck so far – and he can contribute significantly to the quest phase if we don’t need him for defensive duties. As a result, we are also going to include 3 copies of the attachment Elf-stone. That extra quest point on the location will be hardly noticeable to this deck, and our expensive allies of either sphere can be brought into play at a steep discount.

That brings us to 19 allies, which will be enough for now. We have a number of attachments that will be automatic includes, of course. 3 copies of Elf-stone, as noted above. 2 copies of Asfaloth and 3 of Light of Valinor, to kit out Glorfindel for our needs. 2 copies of Thror’s Map will let us get around any really nasty travel effects, while 3 copies of Ancient Mathom will let us have targeted card draw when combined with our location control effects. 3 copies of the Dunedain Pipe will give us card filtering for both decks, to more quickly get to the most important cards in the deck. The final inclusion will be 2 copies of Self-Preservation. The most vulnerable point of our Vigilant Dunadan combo is his sort of squishy hit points. 3 is a good value for an ally, but if we start taking damage, we are going to lose our expensive ally in a hurry. Being able to heal off 2 points of that damage could be invaluable.

Now we’ll turn our attention to the events, where things get really interesting. First, the staples, of course. 3 copies of A Test of Will are necessary for any almost any Spirit deck. Threat reduction will be covered by 3 copies of Elrond’s Counsel and 3 copies of Well-Warned, since Idraen and Glorfindel give us access to the needed traits from the start of the game. For shadow control, we’ll add in 2 copies of Hasty Stroke for emergencies – shadow effects are the most dangerous part of the game for a Dunedain deck, since defending multiple times means that we will see a lot of them. We could include a full set of 3 copies, but we will be including a number of ways to deal with shadow effects in the other deck as well, so these 2 copies will be more of an insurance policy than anything else. Finally, 3 copies of Daeron’s Runes will thin our deck, and we should have more than enough duplicate uniques or not-immediately-useful cards to discard one.

Now that we’ve covered that, we can start exploring other spaces with our last few events. We’re at 51 cards in our deck now, but between Beravor and Daeron’s Runes, we can probably get away with a larger deck than normal. One of the most intriguing things about Idraen is that she will almost certainly be ready after questing, and can easily be made ready during any phase of the game. Since she has the Scout trait, her actions can be useful for a wide array of effects beyond just questing or combat. There are a number of cards that require exhausting a Ranger or a Scout character to get some sort of effect, and Idraen is tailor-made for those.

The first we will look at is Distant Stars. Being able to straight-up discard an active location can be very useful in a wide variety of circumstances. First, many locations have awful effects while they are the active location, and this lets us travel to one and immediately ignore its effects. Alternatively, we can make one of those the active location immediately before we put progress on the quest, and clear it before it has a chance to do anything to us. In quests that feature locations with the Surge keyword, we can use this card to pull one of them out of the encounter deck to avoid an extra encounter card reveal. In quests that have important locations that help advance the objective of the quest, we can recur them in order to more quickly progress through the quest. But the most important use of this card will be to neuter the most obnoxious combination of effects that a location can have: immune to player card effects and a Travel cost. These locations cannot be dealt with using Thror’s Map or progress in the staging area, but their card text is not active while they are in the encounter deck or discard pile, and this card lets us get them out of the encounter deck instead of having to face the Travel cost.

The other event to discuss is Quick Ears. This is a widely underused card, but I think it slots in perfectly here. One of the most worrisome prospects for a Dunedain deck – especially in the early game – is to get overwhelmed with more enemies than we can handle. More than most, Dunedain decks are vulnerable to the “just one enemy too many” phenomenon. This card is insurance against just that occasion. It has the added benefit of cancelling when-revealed effects, Doomed, and Surge, and can also be used to just block an enemy that we are just not set up to deal with from coming off of the encounter deck. Again, a flexible and versatile card. And with Idraen, as long as we can clear a location in the staging area between committing her to the quest and staging, we will always have the action available to use. Even better, we can use it and still have Idraen ready for combat if we are consistently traveling to a location and clearing it during the quest phase.

That brings us to 56 cards – but with all of our draw, I think that we are going to be just fine for seeing the cards we need. And if not, well, that’s what deck testing is for, isn’t it?

Defenders of the North

Now, let’s turn our attention to the combat deck.

Amarthiul is going to be the core of the deck. He’ll be our primary defender, and the central focus of any return attacks. To get his abilities really activated, we need to keep 2 enemies engaged with us on a consistent basis. To aid in doing so as soon as possible, Halbarad allows us to optionally engage 2 enemies per round, which keeps threat out of the staging area and boosts the various effects that will increase based on the number of enemies engaged with us.

The final piece to the hero puzzle is Thurindir, who will give us a side quest at setup, which – when we clear it – will immediately enable the ability on the Vigilant Dunadan.

Now the interesting question: what side quest do we want Thurindir to include? There are decent arguments for a number of them. Prepare for Battle boosts our card draw – and, as I’ve found out through this series, it’s hard to put a price on good card draw. Send for Aid would allow us to put an expensive ally into play for free, and most of the good Dunedain allies are quite expensive. None of the Lore side quests seem to lend themselves to this deck, although a case could potentially be made for Scout Ahead – setting up 2 softball turns while we get ourselves established is an incredible value. Gather Information would let us grab a key combo piece on the first turn, saving us deck space. But, at the end of the day, another problem that plagues Dunedain decks is sphere balance. The best Dunedain allies are found in multiple spheres, and it can be taxing trying to find ways to get the sphere access to pay for them. And even if you have found the sphere access, you very often only have one hero generating resources of the appropriate sphere, so you find your pace hobbled as you try to gather enough resources.

The Storm Comes is the answer to the problem. The first ally played from our hand each round will not require a resource match, which means that we will often be able to play 2 expensive Dunedain allies per round – one with this effect, and then one via Heir of Valandil. This card will also help smooth out the highly-stressed Lore resources in our companion deck, letting us spend the Spirit resources to bring in Lore allies and saving Lore resources to play the crucial attachments.

The final side quest on the list would be Keep Watch. It is more expensive, and requires more progress to complete, but reducing the attack of every non-unique enemy engaged with a player is just amazing, especially for a deck like this one that intends to keep as many enemies around as it can. This is also incredible tech for the Vigilant Dunadan – between this effect and Arwen, he can tank attacks of up to 4 on either side of the board without taking damage. Unfortunately, this side quest requires a Tactics resource to play, which means that we can’t even play it on the first round of the game. So, we won’t include it as Thurindir’s setup quest. However, since it’s effect is just so powerful, we can probably get away with adding a copy into our deck. We have Beravor to dig for it, and we will be including a number of other really powerful draw effects, so even the single copy shouldn’t be too inconsistent.

Now to the allies. 3 copies of Vigilant Dunadan are a must, of course. Even if we don’t plan on playing more than one copy, we want to be able to consistently find it in the deck. And having extra copies in case our defender dies to an unexpected shadow effect is a good insurance policy.

We want to be able to defend against high-attack enemies as well as swarms of lower attack ones. Amarthiul will be able to help with that, but I’d like to have multiple options for that. Sometimes, I’m willing to rely on a single powerful defender, but in a Dunedain deck, I want redundancy. So, 3 copies of the Guardian of Arnor will likewise be essential. 3 copies of the Dunedain Hunter directly helps power the archetype, and 3 attack for free is not to be sneered at. We’ll also need his help when it comes time to kill things – as so many quests end up requiring at at least one time or another.

Those are the staple, auto-includes. Now we have to get a little bit more thoughtful. 3 copies of Sarn Ford Sentry can potentially offer incredible card draw. Even if we only have 3 or 4 enemies engaged, it’s a worthwhile play, and with the defensive potential we already have, we could draw even more. The last of the Dunedain allies to key off of engaged enemies – the Warden of Annuminas – is an intriguing puzzle to me. If you get him out early, he won’t have a lot of willpower to contribute, while he can often be a little superfluous in the late game. I think the best place for him is as a powerful finisher for the quest phase. And perhaps this fellowship is a good place for something like that – we are good at keeping threat out of the staging area by engaging all the enemies and clearing the locations quickly, but we don’t have amazing raw willpower stats to throw at it, and this ally can fill that gap. His combat stats are also a welcome addition – he can block at need, and even more importantly, he can add 2 attack for killing those big boss enemies. So, we’ll add 2 copies to the roster.

The biggest threat we will face is suddenly revealing too many enemies to consistently face. In order to make sure that we can handle all of the attacks we face, we’ll include 2 copies of the Ranger of Cardolan. In addition to being a generally solid ally, his response lets us put him into play in an emergency situation to take an attack or help to kill an enemy. Another interesting side effect of using the ability is that he reshuffles our deck, which can be useful if we’ve used the Dunedain Pipe to send cards to the bottom of our deck that we might want to see later.

In addition, 3 copies of Andrath Guardsman will let us cancel attacks – either from enemies that are too powerful for us to tank the hit, or to leave one or more characters ready for attacking back to reduce the number of enemies we have to defend each round.

The next portion of combat that we need to take care of  is shadow control. An ill-timed reveal of a nasty card can upend all of our carefully laid plans, forcing extra attacks, lost allies, or even worse fates. Any deck that intends to face four or more attacks every round should have a plan to deal with those shadows. The Idraen deck does include a couple of copies of Hasty Stroke for straight up cancellation, but we’ll need more than that for a concerted, long-term plan. The Dunedain trait has a couple of interesting options there. The first is the Dunedain Watcher. As an ally, she’s just not that interesting. 3 cost for a single stat point is more than a little bit overcosted. But her ability can be clutch. With Heir of Valandil, we can get her into play for free, and cancelling a game-ending shadow effect is more than worth the cost.

The second really interesting ally for this option is Eldahir. Spending a resource to look at a shadow card can be very useful in the right circumstances. Taking some of the randomness out of the combat phase can really boost the ability of a deck to reliably tank enemies, so it can be worth it for that reason alone. And the chance to increase his defense to 4, backed up by his 3 hit points, is definitely useful.

To supplement Eldahir’s ability, we can add 2 copies of a long-forgotten Core Set card, Dark Knowledge. The -1 willpower penalty is something that we can most definitely handle – Amarthiul wasn’t planning on questing anyways. And this will give us additional foreknowledge so that we can plan our attacks out accordingly.

Still, knowing the upcoming shadow effect is nowhere near as good as cancelling it altogether. So the final piece of our shadow control suite will be 3 copies of Armored Destrier. This mount is exceptionally useful for a wide variety of circumstances – the readying and shadow control is just incredible for any defender. But when combined with effects that let us know for sure what card is going to be revealed, it is among the most effective forms of shadow control in the game. Even better, it is repeatable. And the best part of our shadow control suite is that every single card in it provides value on its own, even if we never get any of the other pieces into play.

Now that we’ve started looking at attachments, let’s see what else we can add to support our central goals here. 3 copies of Heir of Valandil is absolutely essential to this deck, and 3 copies of Dunedain Warning will be needed to turn Amarthiul into a really strong defender. 2 copies of Forest Snare will help keep enemies engaged without needing to keep defending them turn after turn, and 3 copies of Entangling Nets will help reduce the threat posed by more dangerous enemies, potentially bringing them down into the range that can be safely defended by the Vigilant Dunadan. 3 copies of Secret Vigil for a little more threat reduction, and 3 copies of Ranger Provisions. With the location control available from the Idraen deck, we can trigger the resource acceleration on whichever deck needs it most. This will be most useful in making sure that we have enough Lore resources to pay for the expensive attachments in both decks.

One of the main difficulties in getting the Vigilant Dunadan to work really well is the lack of attachments that are compatible with his traits. Staples of ally defense like Raiment of War and Hauberk of Mail are unavailable because he isn’t a warrior, while the remaining defensive attachments are restricted to heroes. But a new attachment released in the Withered Heath expansion pack – Squire’s Helm – is something that can actually work with this ally. Unfortunately, it isn’t a defense boost, but 2 hit points is not insubstantial. And since we are going to be playing Self-Preservation on him, we can get some repeatable use out of those extra hit points as well.

For our events, we have very little deck space remaining. 3 copies of Feint will actually bring us up to 51 cards, but are definitely worth the inclusion. The final cards will be 3 copies of Deep Knowledge, which will give this deck some card draw that can be useful in the early game, even before we’ve built up a suite of engaged enemies.

And there we are. Again, slightly above my preferred number of cards in the deck, but Deep Knowledge will help with that a little bit, and Beravor can help us draw over here too. And when we finally do get those Sarn Ford Sentries coming in, we are going to draw so many cards that the slight efficiency reduction should probably not be an issue.

The fellowship can be seen on RingsDB here, and I should start posting deck testing videos soon. The next post project, however, is returning to the Agents of the White Council narrative for the Conflict at the Carrock and A Journey to Rhosgobel. Following that, we should start deckbuilding for Return to Mirkwood. I hope to get the narrative all the way to the end of the cycle before NaNoWriMo starts in November, because I’m going to be taking a hiatus from here for the duration of that month – I’ll need all of my writing focus on my original fiction to make any headway there.

Anyways, thanks for coming along on this adventure with me, and happy questing until we meet again!