Late Game Deckbuilding

Then…

Remember this guy?

When you first picked up your Core Set of the Lord of the Rings LCG, your options were… limited.

If you wanted to stick with a mono-sphere deck, you couldn’t even make it to 50 cards – not unless you bought multiple boxes. You also had only 3 heroes to choose from, and there was no good reason to run fewer than 3 heroes (the threat reduction couldn’t make up for the loss in resources or actions).

Moving into multisphere, your options grew, but they were still limited. Most of the time, it was a 2:1 ratio of one sphere for another, which meant all the cards for your main sphere, and a selection of the best and the cheapest from your minor sphere. You also had a certain amount of decision-making to do regarding your heroes, but it was still a case of picking 1 or 2 from 3.

…and Now

Fast-forward 5 years, and deck-building could scarcely be more different. For heroes alone, the total is staggering, well over 70, meaning that even for a mono-sphere deck, your options are somewhere in the high teens (that’s just the number of heroes, let alone the different possible combinations). It means that when I come to building a new deck, I quickly find myself wanting to put together a Fellowship of 2, or even 3 partnered decks, just in a vain attempt to cover all the bases.

We’ve also reached the point where there simply isn’t room to just put all the “good” cards from a sphere into a deck. In some ways, this is nice, because it adds options, and variety to deck-building, but it can also make life more challenging: In a tri-sphere deck, you probably won’t have room for all of the “must-have” cards from each of the 3 spheres, even before you start adding the cards that tie-in to your particular theme. For me, this has generally led to fat decks (my first attempt generally lands somewhere in the mid-seventies, which I have to prune aggressively even to get down to the sixties. As I looked at in some detail a while back, any time you start adding cards beyond the lower-limit of 50, you significantly reduce the chances of seeing any given card, so my decks tend to be wildly inconsistent, as well as bloated.

 

A New Challenge

Bearing all these things in mind, I thought it was time to build some brand-new decks. I have been trying to follow advice from others and make use of the resource that is RingsDB as a source of ideas, but even if I’m not very good at it, I still feel like building decks is an important aspect of being invested in this game. Today I’m going to briefly introduce a couple of ideas, and the early thoughts about how I’m going to deck-build, then I’ll report back in a few weeks, once I’ve done some actual testing. There were 2 decks I wanted to try, and I’ll give a brief overview of each.

Between my own creations, the 1st Age expansion, and assorted things I’ve spied on the internet, I’ve amassed quite the collection of custom cards

Aside: whose cards?

I’ve always been a big fan of custom cards in this game – they offer ways to explore the possibilities of both the game, and of Middle Earth in varied ways. The trouble is, with a card-pool that’s getting larger and larger, and new card archetypes that push the boundaries of what we think is possible, it’s becoming harder and harder to find the right place for those cards. That’s why – after a fair amount of deliberation – I decided that before I started deck-building, I was going to remove all the custom cards from my box, and build with only the official card-pool (although still keeping numerous proxies for extra copies, allowing me to put the same card in multiple decks). It was a strange experience – I was quite surprised by just how many cards I removed, but it also made me notice real cards I’d forgotten about for ages.

Ride of the Rohirrim

It’s impossible to get too much of this card

My first deck was the latest chapter in my ongoing quest to find a viable Rohan deck for true Solo. In the past, I’ve always struggled, largely with defence and resource acceleration, but we’ve had new cards recently, and I hoped that there might be possibilities, particularly around Tactics Eowyn, who combines a low starting threat, good questing willpower out-of-the-gate, and access to the sphere needed for more powerful combat-cards. That said, I don’t want to be naïve, either about my own deck-building capabilities, or about the difficulty of modern-day quests, so once I had this together, I was looking to try it out against an old cycle (probably Mirkwood – Journey and Escape are still plenty hard enough) and maybe some newer Easy Mode quests. I’m expecting to have a fair amount of solo gaming time this month, so this seemed the most likely direction to take.

I was fairly certain that I wanted Eowyn in this deck, and the Tactics version seemed to offer a lot more than her spirit incarnation – I knew I’d struggle to get the cards to fuel her willpower boost, and being able to smash a boss enemy seemed a much better option.

In solo, you need to be able to get your allies out, to take some of the weight off of your heroes: Santa Theoden is the ideal choice here, giving you access to lots of cheap Spirit allies, and the 1 per-round cost reduction.

The third hero is definitely the trickiest. I’m already fairly happy about my questing power, but combat is an issue in either direction: Theoden’s “sentinel” keyword does little to disguise the fact that he is only a 2 defence, 4 hit-point character, and with no chance of healing in this deck, that make we want to look for someone like Erkenbrand. However, at that point, you’re left with a 3-sphere deck that’s going to struggle for resources, and only really has the Eowyn bomb to deal with big-hitters – it might manage the core box, but I can’t set her getting through the Carrock. Eomer is the obvious choice for smashing things, and brings you more tactics resources, but you can’t really fit them both in the deck, and losing Leadership means no Dunedain Warnings for Theoden.

I decided to start by building a Theoden (Sp), Eowyn (T), Eomer, deck, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll try again with Erkenbrand. Dunhere, Theodred, Hama and Elfhelm are all off the menu for now.

 

The Line of Ecthelion

The other deck I wanted to build was one for the House of Stewards – Denethor and his sons, Boromir and Faramir.

There are plenty of decks out there already that use these guys together. However, things are a little bit more complicated than they seem.

For each of the three characters we have 2 different hero versions (plus an ally apiece, and some Faramir Objectives, but let’s ignore them for now). That’s 8 combinations of hero-versions on offer. A heavy focus on Leadership, with an occasional smattering of Tactics seems to be the way of choice for most deck-builders, but I value healing fairly highly, so really want to make sure that I use the Lore version of one or the other – helpfully cutting the options to 6!

The 3 cards I know WON’T be appearing in this deck…

This deck definitely feels like the trickier task of the two – I don’t have as clear of a sense of where it’s starting from or going to. Tactics Boromir brings a lot of good tools, but without reliable/repeatable threat reduction (none of the heroes are available in Spirit), he can be a double-edged sword. For both Faramir and Denethor, most people seem to rate the Leadership version more highly, so the question is whether I want to sacrifice the resource-smoothing of Denethor, or the ally-reading of Faramir.

I decided that my first draft would be Leadership Denethor, Lore Faramir, and Tactics Boromir. I wanted to go fairly heavily on the Tactics and Lore cards, as I feel they both offer a lot more utility, and will just have Denethor there to bolster the resource-options available to the others – the fact that he can pass all his resources to others really helps out with smoothing, although this is probably going to land quite tactics-heavy, so that’s where Steward will probably be going.

I’m expecting a few difficulties with this deck, not least of which is the question of how to get the best out of Faramir who has high threat for stats that often can’t bring to bear. Hopefully some of these will be answered during play-testing.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed an article that actually talks about some of the cards in the game for once, however loosely. I don’t know exactly how long it’ll take me to get these decks into shape, but I’ll try to post back here around the end of the month with an update.