I've strayed away from the tribes to another archtype, using Lore Anborn as the distinguishing card. Damrod is more of an enabler, but I see Damrod as a very splashable Lore hero that you can throw 6-9 trap cards in and be good. I see that as a sideline, not a deck theme. Anborn means you're *serious* about Traps.

Unfortunately my sample size was pretty low. I probably should've thrown together both the Damrod/Faramir/Haldir and Damrod/Faramir/Mirlonde decks for analysis so that I could bump the deck sample from 7 to 14, they're eligible and benefit from pretty much the same cards.

Raw analysis can be found in this thread, with more commentary than usual:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1521375/deck-analysis-part-19-traps

And the stereotypical deck can be found here:

http://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/9284/a-stereotypical-traps-deck-1.0

Love this series.

In this case, I take some issue with the methodology of using Anborn as your marker for a trap deck. You say, "I think the required card for a real traps deck is the lore Anborn ally," when I think this is inverted: the presence of Anborn usually means you're serious about traps, but I don't think vice versa has to be true.

But I'm biased because I have many personal trap builds, and only a couple of them run Anborn. What do others think?

Anborn is too expensive for my tastes, he rarely makes the final cut in my trap decks. Damrod may be splashable, but I still think he's a better indicator that a deck is going for a trap focus.

Anborn is expensive, and unlike other key cards he *isn't* a card you want to see in your opening hand. I can see leaving Anborn out of a trap deck, especially if you pack Hammersmith, though Anborn does have good attack and isn't useless when he's not fetching traps. I suppose there are levels of seriousness -- in the case of Rohan I used SpTheoden instead of Gamling (or now Guthwine). I suppose there's a difference between a Rohan deck and a Rohan Recycling deck, and the same is true for traps.

Lore Anborn has 10 pages of decks, and 90% of the creators used Damrod in those decks. Damrod has only 12 pages of decks, so it looks like using Damrod as an indicator instead of Anborn wouldn't have changed the deck count a great deal. Would it have broken the tie between Mirlonde and Haldir? No, but it would've allowed a 7th deck for Damrod-LoFaramir-Mablung making it a three-way tie.