I'm going to try one of these soon and wonder what everyone's line ups are? I expect a lot of hobbits, the are basically tailor made for it. My Idea is Tactics Eowyn and Spirit Glorfindel because I'm being a little lazy. At 11 starting threat you can't beat it and having natural access to both Spirit and Tactics is great in my opinion. There's more than enough room for a third, I was leaning to works Leadership Denethor.

I do have a lot (probably around 15) of secrecy decks published here in this three topics:

Secrecy is my fetish. I do notice that tactics is not a great secrecy sphere: not a single card with the secrecy keyword in tactics, a lot of cards working around fight, and we can (and must) avoid many fight in secrecy. But there is, at least, great heroes who are Merry, Eowyn and the new Tom Cotton.

Secrecy in spirit is of course great. Many way to reduce the threat (and stay in secrecy), many good heroes (glorfindel, merry, frodo, galadriel), celduin travel who is great with the secrecy keyword, the usual spirit counter baggage and the pipe mechanic who allow us to draw a lot.

Leadership can also give a good thing to a secrecy deck with an ally mechanic: Timely Aid is the best reward we can actually find for playing secrecy since we can have a huge ally for only 1 resource. Since we have a lot of big allies in our deck we can also have a very good tale to spend one turn to bring even more to the table. We are the second sphere who is the most effective in threat reduction with Gandalf + sneak attack. But we don't have any hero with less than 8 threat. Sam Gamgee and Denethor are the ones who can make her path through secrecy decks but it make complicated to choose the two others heroes. Steward of gondor is not as great as the other leadership deck since we want to early spend leadership resource for timely aid and have also resourceful in secrecy. It is pretty hard to have in the same decks a good spirit (based on event) and a good leadership (based on ally) secrecy mechanic.

As usual lore is good. Not essential but we have great card who works on their own (good leadership and spirit cards mentioned above need a lot of conditions to work) so it is very easy to put a lore hero as the third hero and enjoy the good ally/event of the sphere. Plus, Pippin is very cool on the secrecy matter.

I like to try to get secrecy working a bit, and was inspired by Strider to try out a two character secrecy deck. The idea was to get Thurindir to be a mega-quester with Strider and side-quests:

http://ringsdb.com/deck/view/68396

Sam makes an obvious addition, both because he can ready after questing, and because he gives access to Timely Aid. Thurindir is useful because he makes getting key cards easy: just pick Gather Information as your side quest and then if, after mulligan, you don't have Strider then go questing for it. Or if you do have Strider, go questing for Resourceful, or Timely Aid, or The Storm Comes. It's fun, but needs support from a decent combat deck, since combat ability is limited: it's clearly built to be questing.

@monkeyrama Strider was my inspiration too.

http://ringsdb.com/deck/view/71063

I hobbled this together after thinking it over on a car ride. It's not perfect and hasn't been tested but it's my general idea. With low ally count, Strider is basically LoV for Eowyn. I could potentially quest for 7, and still have both heroes ready. Another player, @Onidsen , put me on to the idea of Eowyn + Golden Shield makes her a super tank.

Do side quest not count towards you deck size and can you use Gather Information to tutor another side quest?

1 hour ago, DezzyBassist said:

Do side quest not count towards you deck size and can you use Gather Information to tutor another side quest?

I think they do, so the deck comes out at 51 cards (I should probably work out one card to cut, but I like them all...). Gather Information can also grab another side quest, yeah! In my best plays with the deck I had a starting hand with Strider, Resourceful, and Timely Aid, and used Gather Information to grab Send for Aid. By the end of round two I had two high cost allies in play, and Thurindir was questing for 6 on his own. It's by no means always that effective though!

As to Eowyn, yeah, she's pretty good for secrecy, and can be tooled up to be either a solid defender, quester, or attacker. The main reason I didn't go for Glorfindel was because I've used him so much in other decks, but he is always a strong secrecy candidate.

I've had another deck pairing that used Elfhelm (hero), Windfola, and a Song of Travel to have Eowyn capable of questing for 6 and then readying to hit for at least 11. Sometimes secrecy decks play nicest when paired with a support deck that can throw over some help (ie stat boosting the mounts to boost Eowyn's already great stats). I think secrecy has always held a soft spot in my heart, and I'm always interested to see how other players build for it.

Side Quests DO count towards your deck size.

I haven't experienced SpGlorfindel fatigue yet. I have more decks with the Lore Version actually. Thurindir seems like such a subtle, but powerful hero.

I dont think my build takes full advantage of secrecy. As you said not having leadership removes some of the more powerful cards. I could add Theodred, he may be a choice than Leadership Denethor.

What the point of getting gather information with Thurindir and then shearch for another quest when resolving gather information? You can have it on the first place with Thurindir.

Denethor is usually better than Theodred. Theodred is long before you can have the three resource and can't play immediatly steward of Gondor. I have a Eowyn/Glorfindel/Denethor deck among my solo decks, but I warned you: it is the worst of my secrecy deck ^^.

4 hours ago, Rouxxor said:

What the point of getting gather information with Thurindir and then shearch for another quest when resolving gather information? You can have it on the first place with Thurindir.

Gather information is +1 willpower for Thurindir. Then you get a second side quest and finish it for +1 further willpower. If you have legacy blades in pay, it's an attack boost too.

11 hours ago, Onidsen said:

Gather information is +1 willpower for Thurindir. Then you get a second side quest and finish it for +1 further willpower. If you have legacy blades in pay, it's an attack boost too.

It also works when you get luck and all the cards you need to set up the deck come out in the opening hand. Then you can use Gather Information (which you had to pick pre-setup-hand, if that ruling is right) to get a different side quest. And, like you say, it boosts Thurindir's willpower. It isn't an optimal use, but one of the reasons I like Thurindir with Gather Information as the side quest of choice is that it provides immense flexibility. Sure, most of the time you don't want to search for another side quest, but you can when you need to (Send for Aid, eg, is good for this - effectively +1 willpower and a new ally)

Thanks :). If you can do so it is great to give bonuses to thurindir. In my gaming experience I have hard time putting progression counter on the firsts turns because it is the time I have to handle most enemies and locations so I'm not able to pass over side quests on the firsts turns. We probably don't play against the same quests :).

13 minutes ago, Rouxxor said:

Thanks :). If you can do so it is great to give bonuses to thurindir. In my gaming experience I have hard time putting progression counter on the firsts turns because it is the time I have to handle most enemies and locations so I'm not able to pass over side quests on the firsts turns. We probably don't play against the same quests :).

That is a problem, for sure. I have to say that I built my own Thurindir deck to be played with another deck, and found I could usually get enough progress first turn to explore Gather Information. But when it doesn't work...

This is probably a good reason for that style of deck to never be top-tier. I don't think Thurindir is a top-tier hero, but he is very entertaining.

If this is common problem you should think about taking on first place a quest who have a powerful immediate effect (send for aid, double back or keep watch for example) so when you pass it the rest of the game should be really easier. With gather information you need to get back-to-back to good success at questing to do that.

But if you play it in multiplayer it make more senses, in solo using the full gather information effect to get a side quest that you may have looked for in a first place seem very greedy. I mean if you can succeed so easy at questing this +1 willpower gains was may be not necessary. And you may have taking too much risk.

I agree about your point on Thurindir. I haven't play it for the moment but I planned to do so because he bring an original mechanic.

I very rarely, in this case, use Gather Information for another side quest. I use it to find, for Thurindir's deck, whatever I don't have out of Strider, Resourceful, or Timely Aid. It helps that the other deck then gets to hunt out something useful as well - Steward of Gondor, or Visionary Leadership, for example.

In solo I completely agree: Send for Aid or something similar are much better plays. Thurindir makes side quests something worth thinking about, and I appreciate that very much. After they released side quests, they were OK, but with Thurindir they offer compelling strategic questions. And get discussions going on the forum

@Rouxxor

Good points. I probably wouldn't pull out gather information in solo play with Thurindir. Or at least, not if I was going to use it to pull another side quest.

But I normally play 2-handed, where I can grab gather information r1, pull out another side quest for Thurindir (my favorite is prepare for battle) and pull out an essential combo piece for the second deck.

Or the second hand could grab *their* copy of gather information from the first gather information. Then use that to grab a side quest in their deck.

With two hands you can guarantee five side quests (as long as you can complete gather information). That's probably only useful on turtle quests, but it'd really power up Dour-handed.

9 minutes ago, dalestephenson said:

Or the second hand could grab *their* copy of gather information from the first gather information. Then use that to grab a side quest in their deck.

With two hands you can guarantee five side quests (as long as you can complete gather information). That's probably only useful on turtle quests, but it'd really power up Dour-handed.

OK, now I want to build two decks that just aim to power up Dour-handed and Thurindir. What else triggers off side-quests? Legacy Blade and Halfast Gamgee...hmm. OK, so not that much to work with. Plus I suppose the allies who don't exhaust if there are side quests in the victory display. Speaking of which, are we due an additional one of these in Leadership, since the other three have Halfling Bounder, Vigilant Dunadan, and Rider of Rohan? Is there space in Dungeons of Cirith Gurat?

4 minutes ago, dalestephenson said:

Or the second hand could grab *their* copy of gather information from the first gather information. Then use that to grab a side quest in their deck.

With two hands you can guarantee five side quests (as long as you can complete gather information). That's probably only useful on turtle quests, but it'd really power up Dour-handed.

I... may have done this on more than one occasion

Actually, I've even been known to use Gather Information to grab a copy of Dunedain Message, which I then used to pull out another side quest. Not with Thurindir, of course, but in a deck where the side quests provide important boosts, and in which I got a lucky opening hand, pulling Dunedain message gets me an extra card out, thinning my deck and still getting me the side quest I wanted.