Welcome back to Experimental Deckbuilding. Today, we are going to take a look at the second deck in the Wilderland United fellowship. The first deck was Ties of Blood and Friendship, a mono-Leadership Silvan deck focusing on Lord of Morthond and Thranduil’s ability. This time, we’ll be walking through a deck that focuses on the men who make Wilderland their home – the villages of the Woodmen and the Beornings.
The start of a woodman deck is Haldan, of course. The entire woodman archetype is based around playing attachments on locations, and Haldan lets you get a consistent benefit from those, even if the location attachments themselves are benefiting some other player.
Our second hero is Grimbeorn the Old, for thematic reasons. He also provides a powerful early-game sentinel defender, and tactics access to pay for the Beorning allies we are going to include in the deck. Since his ability will eat up his resources as well, we will probably want to look into some ways of generating extra resources for him.
For the third hero, we want someone who fits thematically with the region, and also helps tie these two disparate themes together. I’m going to go out on a limb and include one of my favorite heroes – Thurindir. As a Dunedain, he tends wander all over the place, and could easily spend some time in Wilderland. And as a hero, his abilities are going to really help us to jump-start the engines of our various decks.
The side quest he’ll be starting off with, of course, is Gather Information. This will let each deck fetch a certain key card for their engine on either turn one or turn two. For the Thranduil deck, that will be King Under the Mountain, an important source of card draw. For the Silvan deck, that will be O Lorien, to start the engine of playing silvan allies. And for this deck, that will be a second side quest – the Storm Comes.
This side quest is essential over the long term. It isn’t extremely important on turn one, but it smooths out the engines of every deck in the fellowship. For the Thranduil deck, it allows for multiple off-sphere Silvan allies to be played each turn, accelerating card draw from Lord of Morthond. For the Celeborn deck, it provides valuable smoothing over the three spheres, making it easier to get the allies you want on the turns you need them. And for this deck, it allows us to play Beorning allies without using up Grimbeorn’s resources, which he needs to activate his ability.
So now for the deck proper. The first version of the deck tried to use Gather Information to fetch a single copy of the Song of Travel, to give Thurindir or Haldan a Spirit icon so that we could play Ancient Mathom and South Away. A single test run was enough to show that even when we had spirit cards in hand, there were more important things to fetch on turn 1.
So, the attachments were the first focus in our deckbuilding process. This is the only deck in the fellowship with Tactics access, so any Tactics attachments that we want to include have to come in this deck. Additionally, Grimbeorn will eat up our Tactics resources fast, so we’ll want to pare down the Tactics stuff as much as possible. So, the only Tactics attachment we’ve included is Elven Mail. 2 extra hit points and Sentinel for Thranduil is nothing to sneer at, especially with Silvan Trackers on the table to heal off the damage he takes. The leadership deck includes most of the defense boosts we will need, but we also added 3 copies of the Cloak of Lorien as well, just to have more options that would work on Thranduil. It also happens to be another defense boost that can work on Defenders of the Naith.
Since location attachments were important for this deck, we added 3 copies apiece of Elf-stone, Woodmen’s Path, and Woodmen’s Clearing. Between these, the Ranger Provisions in the Leadership deck, and a few location attachments in the Silvan deck, we hoped to be able to make use of Haldan on most rounds, and get some decent card draw going. For a while, we used Gather Information to fish out a Song of Travel, so that we could play Ancient Mathoms and South Away from this deck, but we eventually moved those over to the Galadriel deck, which had native Spirit access, because it was a lot of effort for minimal benefit.
We played around with some other attachments, testing out Legacy Blade and Raven-Winged Helms for attack and defense boosts on Grimbeorn, Thranduil, and Argalad. But we ended up replacing the Blades with Glamdring, so that Argalad could draw extra cards for the Silvan deck, and the Raven-Winged Helms with Cloaks of Lorien. The ability to play them on any character turned out to be extremely valuable, and helped turn Defenders of the Naith into viable defensive allies.
The final attachments in the suite we chose were a few quality-of-life boosts. Necklace of Girion gives additional resource acceleration for the deck – ideally played on Thurindir, as he could use the willpower boost as well. We also ended up putting Nenya into this deck, in order to free up deck slots in the Silvan deck so run Ancient Mathoms and South Away. The last one was Elf-friend. This attachment offered on-demand healing for any of our non-Silvan heroes as soon as the Silvan Trackers hit the board.
For events, we went minimalistic – 3 copies of Deep Knowledge and 3 copies of Daeron’s Runes. Even though that put the deck up to 56 cards, the math indicates that it is more efficient with these card draw events than without. And between these and Haldan’s card draw, we hoped to move quite quickly through the deck.
The allies were a far more tricky proposition. There are a number of useful Woodmen and Beorning allies – more than we can fit into a single deck. We tossed 3 copies of the Forest Road Traveler in, along with 3 copies of the Mirkwood Hunter – the focus on location attachments matched up with the other things we were doing with the fellowship. The Beorning Skin-Changers were additionally an obvious choice for Beorning allies, along with Giant Bears and 2 copies of Beorn, to give them decent targets to bring it.
After we dropped the Raven-Wing Helm, we decided to add 3 copies of Honour Guards, just to provide additional protection against direct damage effects – with them, we can keep at least a few 1 hit point allies alive, and they can also supplement defense against boss-level enemies. 3 more Silvan Trackers cemented our healing ability, as well as offering hit point pools for Archery damage. The final allies we added were 3 copies of the Erebor Hammersmith and 2 copies of the Mirkwood Explorer. The first recurred location attachments, which is extremely valuable to our engine. The second helped control the staging area, which also turned out to be important.
Thurindir’s side quest was Gather Information, and after things settled down, we decided to use it to fetch out The Storm Comes, which is central to letting the whole fellowship function properly.
This deck was probably the hardest to get settled down, but it was one of the most fun to play after we got it nailed down. Up next is a discussion of the final deck in the fellowship, a (mostly) traditional Silvan deck, with a little bit of Woodmen flair. Until then, watch these decks go up against Beneath the Sands. In addition, we have finally posted the fellowship on RingsDB here.
