Help me slim down this deck

By noctum_carpe, in Strategy and deck-building

Posted at

Personally, I would cut the Gandalf / Sneak Attack / White Council combo. You don't really have many other cards that could benefit from Sneak Attack, and it's not like the deck excels at card draw in order to get all of the pieces in hand all at once, so there's probably some trimming that could be done there. You could keep 2 Gandalfs, since you'll probably be able to pay for them with all of that resource acceleration, or cut Gandalf altogether in exchange for another copy of King Under the Mountain and Rod of the Steward.

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Personally, I would cut the Gandalf / Sneak Attack / White Council combo. You don't really have many other cards that could benefit from Sneak Attack, and it's not like the deck excels at card draw in order to get all of the pieces in hand all at once, so there's probably some trimming that could be done there. You could keep 2 Gandalfs, since you'll probably be able to pay for them with all of that resource acceleration, or cut Gandalf altogether in exchange for another copy of King Under the Mountain and Rod of the Steward.

That combo is basically my ability to reduce my threat and card draw, but mabye white council can go.

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Here's some ideas:

1) Don't sweat getting to 50 cards. That's the maximum for efficiency, but if you find yourself attached to all the cards in your 56-card deck, leaving it at that figure isn't going to kill you -- the odds of a 3x card showing up in your first seven cards is currently 34%, and in a 50-card deck it would only jump all the way to 37%. The difference between 3x and 2x is much larger than the effect of slightly bloating a deck.

2) Handling excess resources -- currently you have eight cards that can make use of excess resources -- 3x Errand-Rider, 3x Gondorian Fire, and 2x Rod of the Steward. That seems a bit much, especially given that within your deck Denethor can transfer to Boromir once per turn anyways. Seeing how Dunedain Mark and Sword of Numenor are missing, it looks like Gondorian Fire is your only way to buff Boromir's attack reliably, so the resources want to flow to Boromir, which can be done for free.

3) Cut down the multiplayer support -- in particular, since you're in a fellowship with a low-threat secrecy deck that (with SpMerry) is likely to stay low threat, 2x Dunedain Cache and 2x Dunedain Signal may not be necessary. The other deck does have some combat capable allies, unlike this one, just in case they do get an enemy.

4) Secret Vigil -- yes, the threat reduction is nice, but ideally you don't want enemies hanging around, and once you get SoG and Fire on Boromir, they won't hang around for the planning phase. If you want to keep it, I'd suggest adding Dunedain Hunter to the mix, which would make playing Secret Vigil in the planning phase easy, and also add some additional attack to the combat deck.

5) Weather Hills Watchmen -- yes, he's handy for getting those Dunedain-family signals out of the deck, but since Dunedain Cache is oddly not a signal, there's only seven for him to find, and he'll whiff around half the time.

Edited by dalestephenson
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You plan to buff Boromir, that he can kill something on his own. But this will take time. So you do not want a Quckstrike in your opening hand. I'd not use 3 times that card.

With Remedy and Honour Guard you have a lot of healing cards in your deck. I suppose that deck is not able to quest on its own, it won't be played solo. So probably another player will be on the table who have better abilities to handle healing.

Also, the idea of using The White Council is realy nice. But to my experience that card is quite costly when playing in multiplayer.