So, I’m still a little bit behind the curve with experimental deckbuilding. Grant Thomson of Card Talk asked me to build a three-player fellowship, with the basic idea of using some of the recently explored Wilderland traits – Beornings and Woodmen, along with the newly revitalized Silvan trait.
Now, we’ve already recorded 2 videos, and made some significant revisions to the decks, but I haven’t yet written up the deckbuilding process. So, full disclosure up front: I’m going to do my best to reconstruct the process I went through to build the fellowship, but I’m already in the middle.of the testing procedure.
This will be the first time I’ve run an Experimental Deckbuilding project with more than 2 decks, and so this will be an interesting experience. The first thing is to figure out the general contours of the fellowship, before building the decks one by one.
So, my thematic outline is Silvans, Woodmen, and Beornings. While Woodmen and Beornings have both received a great deal of support in this cycle, both still have a rather limited selection of allies. In addition, there is only a single woodman hero – Haldan – and 2 Beorning heroes, of which Beorn is better as an ally for the Beorning-style deck. This immediately lends itself towards a Grimbeorn/Haldan deck, incorporating both Woodman and Beorning allies, with some thematically appropriate third hero.
That leaves us with 2 more decks. One will be a fairly standard Silvan deck, I think. Galadriel + some Lore hero, taking advantage of Celeborn’s boosted stats and Galadriel’s action advantage.
The third deck, and the subject of today’s deckbuilding post, is aimed at taking advantage of the newest Silvan hero in our toolset: Thranduil.
Thranduil fills an interesting niche in the Silvan deck ecology. He is a powerful defender for a trait that doesn’t have many of them, another source of Leadership access in an archetype that prefers Celeborn for that sphere. But his ability changes everything. Playing a Silvan ally in the combat phase allows you to utilize a Silvan’s enters-play ability under wildly different circumstances than might have existed during the planning phase. A Greenwood Archer may ready a defender for another defense, or a Galadhon Archer might put a point of damage on an enemy that was not on the board during planning. Even a Galadhrim Healer can heal a set of heroes that were not damaged before enemy attacks happened. The resource smoothing he offers is also excellent – you can play Silvan allies of any sphere, regardless of the spheres your heroes give you access to.
In addition to all of these factors, you also have complete flexibility to play exactly the ally you need – do you need another chump blocker this round, or do you need a little more attack to take out that surprise Hill Troll? Knowing exactly what you need is powerful.
Thranduil, therefore, is extremely good. He does not, however, pair especially well with Galadriel – her ability to allow allies to not exhaust to quest on the round they enter play is wasted on the allies that Thranduil brings in. This is another factor that led me to want to keep Galadriel and Thranduil in separate decks.
But that left me needing an idea to start from, some seed to generate a deck idea from. It wasn’t enough to know what I don’t want to do with him, I had to know what I do want to do. Enter Lord of Morthond.
Lord of Morthond is an interesting attachment, but often overlooked outside of the context of Outlands decks (and even then, the most high-profile of such decks are no longer mono-Leadership, so the card has fallen out of favor even in its most favored deck type). It requires a mono-Leadership deck, but it offers rather significant card draw, which Leadership traditionally lacks. And Thranduil’s combat action is a way to consistently get allies of other spheres into play, thus providing a reliable trigger and solving one of the most glaring issues with this card.
That left us needing a Leadership hero with the Gondor or Outlands trait in order to play Lord of Morthond on. The leadership version of Imrahil was an excellent option – his ability synergizes very well with the constant popping in and out of play that our Silvans do, and his versatile stats are quite useful throughout the game. This looks like a thematic problem, of course. What are the Outlands of Gondor and Imrahil – their Prince – doing in conjunction with Silvans? That forgets, of course, that Imrahil has Silvan blood himself, and that the house of Dol Amroth is descended from Elf-friends. Such a thematic exploration is quite on-point, especially for a fellowship that aims to explore the disparate peoples of Wilderland coming together to overcome their common trials.
That left us looking for a third leadership hero to fill the last slot in our deck, of course. You would think that Celeborn would be the obvious choice here – we knew we want to include him somewhere in our fellowship, and since his boosts are global, it doesn’t particularly matter which deck we place him in. But we are going to want some leadership access in the traditional Silvan deck, and Celeborn doesn’t actually offer anything special for this deck.
A Dwarf hero, on the other hand, opened up some interesting options. Such a choice allowed for Unlikely Friendship, as well as King Under the Mountain, in order to shore up our card draw. It also added some interesting flavor to our theme of the peoples of Wilderland coming together. Thematically, the most appropriate Dwarf to be coming along with the Silvan elves would be Gimli, son of Gloin. After all, he is the dwarf upon which the Unlikely Friendship card is modeled. And with that, our mono-Leadership hero lineup was complete!
So lets get to discussing the deck itself! I decided to be light on events in this deck – just 3 copies of Unlikely Friendship, and 3 copies of Feigned Voices to recur some Silvans if I need to. The bulk of the deck ended up being Silvan allies to play – either normally or via Thranduil – and attachments to load up the fellowship. In addition, let’s add a single copy of a side quest – The Storm Comes – to give us extra opportunity to trigger Lord of Morthond. This will also let us use Celeborn’s willpower boost on some of the off-sphere allies who are primarily questers.
For the attachments, we already committed to Lord of Morthond and King Under the Mountain, which I felt should pretty well cover us in the card draw capacity. We also brought in 3 copies of the venerable Steward of Gondor – the theme was appropriate with Imrahil, and I thought we would need the extra resources in order to spam Silvan allies. Because we had already determined that the fellowship is going to include Haldan, 3 copies of Ranger Provisions offer additional ways to power him up. 3 copies of Elven-king were also necessary to keep reliably triggering Thranduil’s ability – bringing an ally back to hand in order to ready Thranduil helps when more defenses are necessary. We added 3 copies of Ancestral Armor to boost Thranduil’s defense, and then topped it off with 2 copies of Orcrist. Always a powerful weapon, it is excellent in the hands of Grimbeorn the Old – one of the things that has come out of this 3-player deckbuilding experience for me is just how fun it can be to include cards that are only meant to be played across the table.
The core of any Silvan deck, though, is its allies, and this deck is no different. We will need a steady stream of off-sphere allies to keep triggering Lord of Morthond, but we will also want a fair selection that can be played during the planning phase, when we can use Celeborn’s willpower boost for questing.
So, from the Leadership sphere, we added 3 copies of the Naith Guide and 3 copies of the Greenwood Archer. The Archer is an extremely useful ally – he can be played with Thranduil’s ability to ready an extra defender in the combat phase, or to ready a hero for attacking. Even in the planning phase, we can find uses for the Archer’s ability – if Galadriel in the other deck has Nenya attached, we can still use her ability and have her ready to contribute willpower during the quest phase. And even if none of these situations hold, 2 cost for 2 attack is still an excellent resource-to-stat ratio. We also dropped in 2 copies of Orophin, for recycling any fallen or discarded Silvan allies. Finally, we added in 2 copies of the brand-new Greenwood Defender as an extra blocker – although between Thranduil and Grimbeorn, the fellowship should have plenty of defenses.
For off-sphere allies, we went with 3 copies of Galadriel’s Handmaiden and 3 copies of the Galadhon Archer. With so few events, the Galadhrim Minstrel is a poor fit for the deck, so we added 2 copies of the Galadhrim Healer instead. That spot healing in the combat phase can be useful, as can healing during planning, where we get the willpower boost as well. 2 copies of Henamarth Riversong, 2 copies of the Marksman of Lorien, and 2 copies of Rumil rounded out the selection of Silvans. Our final addition, bringing us up to 53 cards, was 2 copies of Arwen Undomiel. She can only be played once we have cleared The Storm Comes, but the defense boost + Sentinel for Thranduil is too good to ignore.
So that was the original deck, before testing. The testing process has been quite interesting – we ran the decks against Lost in Mirkwood and Beneath the Sands, both of which identified clear changes which needed to be made with the decks. There was a lot of adjusting of the exact card counts of the many unique attachments. Eventually, we moved The Storm Comes into a different deck, to make room for more important cards here. We wavered back and forth between the Greenwood Defender and the Defender of the Naith before dropping both of them from this deck, and replacing it with 2 copies of the Silvan Tracker, which will heal our Silvan characters as well as triggering Lord of Morthond (which neither of the other allies did).
Since (spoiler alert) the Woodman deck ended up including Thurindir, we ended up dropping down to a single copy of King Under the Mountain. As a card draw attachment, it is incredibly important, but since we can fetch it immediately with Gather Information, we were able to save 2 more card slots by not relying on drawing into it. Those slots, plus the one we gained from moving The Storm Comes to another part of the fellowship, were used to add 3 copies of Dunedain Warning, to boost the defense on both Thranduil and Grimbeorn. We finally replaced the 3 copies of Ancestral Armor with 3 copies of the Hauberk of Mail. It can’t be played on Thranduil, but it is excellent on Grimbeorn, and it also plays well on the Defender of the Naith (who was moved over to the traditional Silvan deck as a nice neutral ally to eat up extra resources, while also being able to handle some defense).
The biggest change, however, involved our dwarf hero. While Gimli is a perfect thematic fit, his ability sort of runs at cross-purposes to our deck. Early in the game, you really want his 2 willpower on the quest, and so his ability is doing nothing. By the later game, you generally have enough defenses that you don’t need him. In addition, after suffering through a number of debilitating shadows, we decided that replacing Gimli with Balin would leave us with a much stronger deck. The extra shadow control is important, and the lower starting threat has several benefits as well.
Coming up soon, in addition to new entries to Eleanor’s campaign, we will also have deckbuilding articles on the other two decks of this fellowship. In the meantime, watch the fellowship defeat Lost in Mirkwood here! Until the next article comes, happy questing.