Often, when playing a 4 player game, location control is a big problem. I want to play my NTs as fast as possible. The best way to do so - which I know - is a Caldara deck.

Are there any other posibilities/combos to consider?

Thanks in advance!

Off the top of my head:

2 spirit heroes , at least one Gondor, and leadership Denethor.
Play Steward of Gondor on a spirit hero to get to four spirit resources, play Tracker.
Or, errand rider, and move a resouce with that and with denethor. Play tracker.
Or, a good harvest, no resource movement needed. Play Tracker.

So you need a tracker, plus one of the three above cards, in your opening hand to get it out turn 1.

There are probably much better ways.

Imladris Stargazer/Zigil Miner is a good way to get extra resources in Spirit. Or Arwen of course, in a mono-Spirit deck you can guaranteeably get out a Northern Tracker any round you draw one so long as you have something to discard.

2 minutes ago, PocketWraith said:

Imladris Stargazer/Zigil Miner is a good way to get extra resources in Spirit. Or Arwen of course, in a mono-Spirit deck you can guaranteeably get out a Northern Tracker any round you draw one so long as you have something to discard.

Arwen totally slipped my mind. A much better suggestion.

Fastest method (if you get lucky): start with 2 heroes in secrecy mode, one of the heroes is Leadership, than mulligan for Timely Aid if it's not in your starting hand, and if you're lucky, NT will be in your 5 cards.

Hm. My Caldara deck has Arwen as hero, and indeed: I had the first Tracker in round one on the table. Then I was not so lucky anymore. It took ages until I drew a second NT.

I had hoped for a link to a Erestor mill deck or something like that.

But maybe its the TA route to go for me then.

Ah, well, we've all been approaching this from the perspective of ensuring you have enough resources to play them. If drawing them is the difficulty, then there are other posibilities. Erestor probably isn't such a great idea since it's hard to be sure you'll have the 4 resources whenever you draw a Tracker. Elven-light and Mirror of Galadriel (plus Galadriel's own draw) are the two things which really come to mind. Stargazer/Miner also helps since you'll be discarding cards which aren't Trackers and thus getting through your deck towards the Trackers that much faster.

You could also fetch them with Gandalf+Word of Command, or Gather Information (which you could fetch with Thurindir). Or Galdor of the havens can just help with getting a better starting hand/refilling to dig through the deck faster. You could also try some "free" card draw to thin your deck- Daerons runes, We are not idle.

yea, thanks. now I do have some ideas to build adeck around

On 8/27/2017 at 4:46 AM, Flrbb said:

Often, when playing a 4 player game, location control is a big problem. I want to play my NTs as fast as possible. The best way to do so - which I know - is a Caldara deck.

Are there any other posibilities/combos to consider?

Thanks in advance!

Interesting question!

I disagree with Caldara being the fastest option. You can mulligan for one tracker, but it's not so good at finding the others very quickly (apart from the Galadriel+Mirror version). I put together a deck for you that almost always gets out 2 trackers in the first couple turns:

http://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/6176/speedy-trackers-2.0

In 5 simulated playthroughs I got out a tracker on the following turns:

- 1& 3

- 1& 3

- 1& 3

- 1& 2

- 1& 2

It also contains Thror's Key to get around those pesky locations that prevent progress from being placed!

The cause why I initialy asked: my play group is trying to beat the 3rd quest from Grey Havens deluxe. (That quest with the Aflame locations). So, just in case you are interesed how it went so far I am writing this down...

I decided not not play Seastans deck, but - again - my Caldara deck. Arwen, Caldara and (because another Player uses Spirit Eowyn) I decided to go the Galadiels Mirror route.

In the first attempt, we mostly surendered on round two. But at second try both the mate with Eowyn (and a second blue hero) and me drew a NT in the starting hand. Because of Arwen I was able to play mine on turn one. With some card draw I drew another one for turn 2. So the mate and me were playing NTs in round 2. Having 3 of them was clearing locations so fast, that basically all damage to Aflame locations had to be assinged to the Stormcaller. Well, we advanced to stage two with 10/12 counters on the Stormcaller location and had bad luck while revealing the nect batch of cards (and had to place more damage onto the only location in play - we lost). In the end; that extreme isn't the way to either.

We recently play this scenario with 3 players in nightmare. The difficulty increase a lot because of the 6 locations at the start of the game (instead of 4). And we don't play any deck specifically strong in dealing with location. So we were afraid of loosing fast. But it was in fact very soft: we don't loose any location. We got really soon Asfaloth and Riddermark + gamling so we were able to finish location right before they burn (or put choose to put counter on location and then immediately explore them, depending of the point of view). And we have also recursive wait no longer to avoid additional locations or awful treachery. In turn 4 ou 5 we even get Fyrial so we control most of the encounter cards who came up each turn.

So I don't think that focusing on northern tracker is the good path. As you see there is a lot of deadly treachery and you need to be able to deal with enemies too. It is sure that Northern tracker is good on this scenario (we don't pick Caldara to play our game because we thought it will be too easy) but it don't do the job alone!