In thinking about organizing a 4 player cooperative Lord of the Rings strategy for Gencon I figured the deck I enjoy playing the most could be an interesting way to focus the conversation and throw out some ideas.
Heroes- Theoden, Eomer, Hama
The idea of this mono red deck is to basically control the monsters with "feint" and "thicket of spears." Theoden allows shitty red heroes to quest effectively and sentinel the occasional attack. Eomer trucks stuff with firebrand and weapons. Hama enables event recursion. And the team can smash into the staging area with "Forth Eorlingas." The deck is pretty good at tangling up a bunch of bad guys but struggles to smash through locations. I can make a deck list later with specific cards, but I want to tweak things and focus on team comps before looking at individual cards.
Deck pairing: mono colored comp
This pairing is designed to exploit Theoden's bonus to questing by overloading on tactics heroes.
Bard the Bowman, Brand son of Bain, Legolas- this deck spams archers and some of the same event cards in the other tactics deck to crush as many baddies as possible each turn. Probably also plays feint, thicket and the recursion book to help the Rohan deck control the board.
Eowyn, Galadriel, Glorfindel- Blue deck control. Spams threat reduction and control events to mitigate what the stupid bad guy deck throws at you. Eowyn is the strongest quester in the game and Galadriel has a bunch of support tools in addition to her base abilities. I think blue has some of the most OP cards in terms of preventing problems before they even happen. Tweaking this deck could also make secrecy an option due to its relatively low starting threat and threat reducing tools.
Aragon, Celeborn, Prince Imrahil- Purple deck plays classics like sneak attack and gandalf while trying to support the board. Celeborn pushes decks to include a disproportionate number of pointy eared cards.
Pros: mono colored decks limit versatility within the decks but also mean people won't be sitting on dead cards mid game. monsters should die relatively quickly. Each deck can play the books that allow them to recast events in discard piles.
Cons: no green (seems like the weakest color). high starting threats so blue needs to mitigate threat levels quickly. No hobbits. No dwarves. Both seem overly complicated.
This seems like a cool way to go about things. I've definitely seen that red rohan deck do sweet things; thicket is no joke!
ReplyDeletePurple gondor weenies is definitely a thing; the deck can quest ridiculous hard. I read
this deck on a LOTR LCG blog and it seems legit.
I think we would want to change up the heros; starting at 34 threat is probably unacceptable. Dropping Boromir for that guy who untaps aragorn seems like a good compromise, especially if we have two really fighty red decks.
Green is good for healing and that torch card, so we might look into it. I would enjoy playing mono-blue, but I think Galadriel is probably too weak in a 4 player game.
I enjoyed this while we played it in Dallas but man do I not have any incentive to play this game with Rando's.
ReplyDelete@Joe: I think that deck looks like a good core to build around. It looks like it is designed for a low number of players due to the doomed guy and the splashed colors that don't do much. Once you take Boromir out of the deck you can crack the gondor theme. Theodred, Aragorn, Celeborn seems like you get a similar mechanic. to what they are trying to achieve, and Celeborn helps the board.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen galadriel's ring? once you factor that in and maybe the mirror she gains a lot of power in my opinion. Card advantage and threat control on a stick means we can keep people in the game longer. her passive is also quite good for a deck that wants to quest every turn with every character forever.