Deck for the Campaign

By goblin981, in Strategy and deck-building

Posted at

Hi All,

I recently dug out my cards (they were buried under other games) and tried getting back into the game; but I need better decks. I'm pretty awful at deck building for any game. I would like a deck or 2 to use on the saga campaigns.

I have one copy of the core game, both hobbit expansions, the first three LotR saga expansions (I'll get the rest eventually), and the whole Shadows of Mirkwood Cycle.

I also have The Massing at Osgiliath, The Battle of Lake-Town, and The Stone of Erech. So decks that can stand up to those would be good too.

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

Edited by goblin981
Posted at
For the Hobbit quests, here's a deck that could work. It's an adaptation of this deck (built with only the Core Set ad Hobbit Sagas). I added some good cards from Shadows of Mirkwood and the LotR Saga boxes (Longbeard Map-Maker makes it easier to reach 5 Dwarves quickly) and cut Faramir for thematic reasons (though the deck is better with Faramir). My description in the decklist gives some advice for playing the Hobbit quests, though with these changes it's probably better to put Steward of Gondor on a Lore Hero. You might want to add Song of Wisdom so that Bilbo can get A Burning Brand (or for resource smoothing, if you put Steward on Thorin), and you might want to include Song of Travel and Will of the West for Dungeons Deep and Caverns Dim. If you want to pair this with another deck, you could try Dain/Nori or Oin/Thalin, Bard, Beorn, or (unthematically) Boromir. Dain makes dwarves much better, and you could include a couple of Songs so that Dain can spend most of his resources on Spirit or Tactics.
Hero (3)
Ally (28)
2x Bifur (OtD)
2x Dori (OHaUH)
1x Elrond (TRD)
3x Gandalf (Core)
1x Gimli (ToS)
1x Glóin (OtD)

Event (8)
For the Lord of the Rings campaign, I like to be thematic and use different decks between The Treason of Saruman and The Land of Shadow, as well as introduce characters in The Road Darkens that weren't in The Black Riders. If you want to play that way, you could try a solo Hobbit deck in The Black Riders (using Sam, Merry, and Pippin, with Elf-stone and A Very Good Tale to get big allies into play; Fast Hitch is great), and perhaps a Gandalf/Merry/Aragorn deck for the Road Darkens (with Boromir, Legolas, and Gimli allies; this deck would need threat reduction). I'm not sure how well those decks (which I haven't sketched in detail) would work with your limited card pool. You might find Tales from the Cards (search his site for campaign mode and the name of the quest) and Warden of Arnor's (scroll down to Lord of the Rings Saga Campaign) discussion of the campaign quests to be helpful, although they're working from a larger cardpool.
The Print on Demand quests are quite challenging. A pair of Dwarf decks (including Dain) with Boromir would probably help. You might want to get Khazad-dum and Dwarrowdelf at some point, since Khazad-dum improves Dwarf decks and Dwarrowdelf has a significant number of powerful cards in it: Arwen, Warden of Healing, Master of the Forge, Daeron's Runes, Elrond's Counsel, Glorfindel + Light of Valinor + Asfaloth, Elrond + Vilya, Lore Aragorn + Sword that was Broken, Legacy of Durin + We Are Not Idle + Lure of Moria (for dwarf decks), and Resourceful + Timely Aid (for secrecy/hobbit decks).
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Great, thanks. I don't care if a deck's thematic or not, just want it to work well.

I'll put that deck together and give it a go.