Experimental Deckbuilding – To Isengard!

So, technically this series is still doing detailed deck testing for the Scions of Arnor fellowship, but I’ve had some deckbuilding ideas that were exciting enough that I had to explore them anyways.

Most of these deck ideas are based around cards that hardly ever get used, and today’s is no different. Let’s talk about the Isengard trait and the Doomed deck.

First off, many of the various Doomed cards are just fine, and a few are excellent. Of the 5 events that come in the Voice of Isengard deluxe box, Deep Knowledge is among the very best events in the game, and Legacy of Numenor is an expensive but potentially game-swinging accelerant. Power of Orthanc feels like it has become the default condition removal in the game. Only the Wizard’s Voice is less-often used, and that’s a stylistic choice – a lot of groups end up having dedicated combat decks whose job it is to engage all of the enemies and kill them (it makes it easier in pickup games), so it’s seldom that all the players at the table have enemies engaged to make it worth it. In dedicated a fellowship where both decks are designed to engage enemies, it’s still a very powerful effect. Finally, Seeing Stone is a full-deck search, and some of these events are worth an extra threat just to get them out in the early game (especially Legacy of Numenor). Still, it’s probably the least valuable of the events.

The other cards that played with the Doomed mechanic never really caught on in the meta. Grima is an incredibly powerful accelerator hero for any deck, but the consistent threat increase – turn after turn for the whole table – makes decks designed to take advantage of his ability a hard sell. Saruman has likewise not caught on in the meta – his ability is situational, and the Doomed 3 is an incredibly high cost to pay.

The subsequent cycle brought a series of allies who had optional Doomed triggers, but of these, Herald of Anorien is an excellent ally-mustering card, and Mirkwood Pioneer is likewise excellent (although widely panned at release). But Henneth Annun Guard suffers from being a generalist in an age of specialists, and Greyflood Wanderer suffers from being expensive enough to justify the ability without the Doomed cost.

But the cards that I want to look at today are probably the most lackluster of the lot – the Isengard-traited allies from the Voice of Isengard deluxe. The first card, Isengard Messenger, is a reasonable inclusion for any deck that is running Grima, and not impressive anywhere else. Without a reliable way to trigger Doomed, the Messenger is 2-cost for a single point of stats, and isn’t worth either the resource cost or the deck space.

But the most confusing card of all of the ones that play with the Doomed mechanic is the Orthanc Guard. At 2-cost, you aren’t expecting anything spectacular, to be sure, especially in the Leadership sphere. After all, the Guard of the Citadel has only 1 willpower, 1 attack, and no ability. At least the Orthanc Guard has an ability.

But the problem is that it’s really difficult to see what to do with the ability. Sure, you can quest and then ready the card to do something else, but there’s precious little that that something else could be. With only 2 defense and 2 hit points, you’re not going to be defending anything big with it, and chump blocking seems a waste – might was well go with the Snowbourne Scout or the Squire of the Citadel. And with no attack, you can’t even chip in against a difficult enemy.

Not to mention the fact that reliably triggering the Guard’s response is much more difficult than it sounds. Most of the cards with the Doomed keyword want to be played during the Planning phase, so that you can take advantage of the extra cards, the resources, or the reduced cost via Grima. The allies from the cycle are ‘played-from-hand’ abilities, which are likewise confined to the planning phase (with a very slight exception if you are running Hirgon and the Henneth Annun Guard). None of the very limited things which the Orthanc Guard could possibly be used for are available in the planning phase.

So, for a long time, the Orthanc Guard has sat in my binder, gathering dust while other cards more worthy of my attention got put into decks. But no longer. Yes, this is actually a deck about the Orthanc Guard, and whether or not it can be made to actually function.

The idea for this deck started when I saw a proof-of-concept deck on RingsDB, put together by user AKrafty. Their idea of pairing the Guard with the brand-new card Ancestral Armor got me off on a chain that led to a new deck, focused almost entirely around the Isengard trait.

Ancestral Armor is certainly the first piece to the puzzle. With 4 defense and 4 hit points, the Guard actually has a use for his readying. And – since the readying has no actual limits – once you turn him into a decent defender, you actually have a large portion of combat handled.

I also like the new Wild Stallion ally for this purpose. My gut sense for this ally is that it is generally only worth the cost if you are going to be able to get multiple uses out of the stat boosts it will offer – either by using two stats per round or by using one stat repeatedly. Attaching the Wild Stallion to the Orthanc Guard makes it a decent defender, at 3 defense/3 hit points (for comparison, these are the stats of Deorwine, the 4-cost unique Rohan defender). But it also now has 2 willpower, and can offer substantial contributions in the quest phase before readying to help with combat. And, should the defenses prove unnecessary, the extra point of attack is seldom unwelcome.

Between these two attachments, we now have an ally who quests for 2, readies, and then defends for 5 with 5 hit points to back it up. But we still have the significant problem of triggering the readying effect. Most of our player card Doomed effects are still ideally played during the Planning phase, when our poor Guard will already be ready.

Enter the third and most powerful of the generic Isengard allies, the Steward of Orthanc. It’s trigger processes off of playing an event card, and there are plenty of events which are best left until the quest or combat phase, which means that we are much more likely to get readying out of the Guard when it matters.

The most interesting option here is the event Elven-light. Unlike most events, Elven-light is played from the discard pile, and playing the event returns it to your hand. This means, though, that with a repeatable means of discarding a card from your hand, you can play the card repeatedly, turn after turn and often several times in a single turn. Combined with the Steward of Orthanc’s ability to doom an event card at will, this essentially equates to repeatable, consistent readying for the Orthanc Guard on-demand, as long as we have a means to discard it repeatedly.

So, let’s step back here. We’ve determined that the modern card pool can make the Orthanc Guard a reasonable inclusion – between defense boosts for allies and the on-demand readying offered by the Steward of Orthanc, he can fill the role of a powerful ally defender. But what we need to do now is to build a deck to see if he can actually live up to this theorycrafting.

So, first order of business is to choose our heroes. We’ll need access to Leadership and Spirit, at a minimum. But, since I want to try and build around the Isengard trait here, one of the heroes is going to be Grima – not only is he thematically a perfect fit, but he also can give us extra Doomed triggers to ready the Orthanc Guard. That implies a tri-sphere deck, which could make thing more difficult – luckily, Grima is one of the best heroes to try and run a tri-sphere deck with. Lore access also gives us the single best Doomed card in the game – Deep Knowledge.

For our Leadership hero, I want to keep with the Rohan theme here – there are no other heroes that are particularly appropriate for an Isengard deck, but if this deck is meant to evoke a time before Saruman fell into darkness, then a deck that shows Rohan and Isengard working together is an attractive theme to me. For a tri-sphere deck, Theodred is a perfect Rohan hero. In addition to being low threat, his resource acceleration is flexible enough to help out wherever it is needed, and he is a hero that doesn’t require any extra support in the deck.

The last hero is going to be the most difficult one. We still need Spirit access, and we lack any early-game combat ability. Grima can be a passable defender in an emergency, but he’s nowhere near up to the challenge of handling multiple defenses against powerful enemies. We also have no attacking power, and that can cause us some significant problems. Other weak points include the fact that our threat is going to be ramping up significantly, and that our proposed interaction is a 3-card combo. Even our starting willpower is rather low. We can’t solve all of those problems with a single hero, of course, but we can knock out a lot of them in one blow.

Galadriel is just about the perfect hero for our needs. The threat reduction will help offset the Doomed cost – in fact, she can completely offset the use of either Grima or the Steward of Orthanc. The extra card draw is another important note, allowing us to draw into our combos twice as fast. With her ring, Nenya, she can also solve our starting willpower problem.

Thematically, she’s unfortunately a little bit more out there, but I think we can make her fit. As a member of the White Council, she would have assisted Saruman on many occasions before he turned, and having her influence behind the scenes is something we can easily imagine.

Now, with our heroes chosen, let’s get to addressing the rest of our weaknesses. Even with Galadriel and Nenya, we are still low on willpower, and we have no attack to speak of. The logical place to start is with our allies. We’re committed to 3 copies of Orthanc Guard, 3 copies of the Steward of Orthanc, and 3 copies of Wild Stallion. That gives us some willpower – the Stewards are decent, and the Orthanc Guards can contribute to the quest and still be ready for combat. But we definitely need more than we currently have. So, let’s start with 3 copies of Arwen Undomiel. As Galadriel’s granddaughter, we can imagine her assisting her grandmother in influencing affairs out in the world, and as an ally, she is probably one of the single most useful cards in the game. Giving the Orthanc Guard sentinel and an extra point of defense puts it in a position to defend against multiple Hill Troll attacks with no degradation. In addition, we’ll add 3 copies of the Isengard Messenger, who will be triggering his willpower boost on most of the turns of the game.

Now that we have our willpower sorted out, we need some additional combat muscle. Our heroes aren’t doing much in the way of combat – although Grima can tank a few weak hits in the early game if need be. With a copy of Protector of Lorien attached, he can even defend against more powerful enemies. This also gives us our consistent means of discarding Elven-light in order to trigger Doomed at the most convenient times. Hopefully this should last us until we can find the Orthanc Guard and get it set up.

But what we really need is some attack power. 3 copies of Gandalf will certainly help – especially with the action advantage oferred by Galadriel (and his flexible enters-play abilities are all potential game-savers). 2 copies of Saruman add even more punch to the mix, in addition to letting us pull some sneaky tricks with encounter cards in the staging area from time to time. But we really need a good attacker who isn’t going to go away at the end of the round. Our answer is found in another high-cost neutral card – Treebeard. There’s not much to say – the ally is among the most powerful allies in the game, bar none. We can probably even pull a thematic justification here, since Fangorn is close to Isengard. If this deck is drawing inspiration from a time when Saruman was not yet a traitor to the White Council, then it is also drawing on a time when Saruman had not yet developed his enmity with Fangorn, and the Ents might be persuaded to lend their aid.

Unfortunately, Treebeard’s 4 attack alone won’t amount to much. So, we’ll add a couple copies of the Rider of Rohan in as well. If we can get a side quest into the victory display, the action advantage will be even more useful. The Rider is another excellent target for Wild Stallion, able to use both the willpower and attack boosts in the same round. We’ll add a copy of the side quest Double Back, to bring these Riders online while also helping with the essential task of managing threat. Finally, we’ll also add 2 copies of the Warden of Healing, in order to prolong the lifespan of our defensive allies. Although they are technically a Gondor ally, I find that they are so thematically bland that they can fit in many places that you wouldn’t otherwise expect them to.

That rounds out our allies. With 26 in the deck, we should find ourselves in a strong position with our available options. Moving on to attachments, there isn’t much to say. A single copy of Unexpected Courage for Galadriel, to let her use her ability and Nenya in the same round should we need to, and 2 copies of the ring as well – it’s useful but not essential, since we’ll be wanting to use Galadriel primarily for her ability. 2 copies of Protector of Lorien, as a way to discard Elven-light multiple times, and 2 copies of Keys of Orthanc to generate the money to keep paying for it. Two copies of Ancestral Armor will round out the attachment section.

The events are – by and large – even more simple. 3 copies of Test of Will, 2 copies of Elven-light, 3 copies of Deep Knowledge, and 3 copies of Elrond’s Counsel and 3 more of Sneak Attack to manage threat, which will be even more of an issue this time than any of the other playthough.

The final 2 cards, however, are copies of a little-known and little-used card: Word of Command. Normally, exhausting an Istari ally is a significant cost, but with all the added activation advantage offered by Galadriel to our allies, there are likely to be multiple opportunities to exhaust Istari allies. This also makes it so that our single copies of Double Back and Unexpected Courage can be fished out at need, but I’m more likely to use them to fish out some of the core pieces that bring the Orthanc Guards online.

And that finishes our deck. It’s not top-tier by any means, but it covers all of our bases. We have powerful attackers, a small army of questing allies, and a unique but hopefully fun and engaging means of defending enemies. After deck testing for the Scions of Arnor fellowship is complete, we’ll return to this idea and see if we can build a companion deck for it, and put together a deck testing regimen to put it through its paces.

Take a look at the finished product (more or less – I added the Keys of Orthanc post-publication) on RingsDB here. Watch for more posts and videos to come soon!