Tom Bombadil is Not a Stranger

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Portinouille 62

The Principle of this deck is plain simple: Make Tom Bombadil Quest for 20, Attack for 20, Defend for 20 every turn.

We attach every possible Song attachment to him (yes, including double copies of the neutral ones), plus one Song event per turn. With the resources of Steward of Gondor, Denethor and Love of Tales, + the card draw of masters of the forge, Gleowine, Bilbo and the events, we empty the deck by turn 6.

We will draw Fatty Lumpkin, Nor Am I a Stranger, Herugrim and the Golden Shield soon enough and from there... you get the strongest hero ever.

The One Ring and inner Strength go on Denethor, just for extra safety in the early game where we are the most fragile.

21 comments

Mar 06, 2024 doomguard 2006

would perhaps add some shadowcancelling and more actions for Tom Bombadil, else solid deck!

a song to consider is: Song of Eärendil song+carddraw

Mar 06, 2024 Urthli 271

With so few allies and immediately the one ring in play, Forth, The Three Hunters! might bring more advantages to the table after including a few more restricted attachments?

Mar 06, 2024 Portinouille 62

@Urthli Actually, the allies are decisive here for card draw. You easily play 6-7 cards per turn rapidly, and you need to do so in order to boost Tom. Meanwhile, restricted attachments do not really bring much value here, apart from the 3 I included.

Mar 06, 2024 Portinouille 62

@doomguard Yes, I included Song of Eärendil in a former version, it might replace one of the other songs. As for Tom, the thing is, you can only use Herugrim and Golden Shield once per round. For shadow cancelling, I have inner strength and armored destrier, they are all I need.

Mar 06, 2024 doomguard 2006

Tom Bombadil can only have 2 restricted. The One Ring is 1. but then only 1 of the others. with Golden Belt you can increase to 3 but if u want Golden Shield and Herugrim there is no room for Armored Destrier and until u have the Golden Belt you can only have a good attack or defense.

or does ring+destrier go to Denethor?

Mar 06, 2024 Portinouille 62

@doomguard Oh, the One Ring is absolutely not for Tom, as I wrote in the description! It goes on Denethor just to defend safely during the first 3-4 first turns!

Mar 06, 2024 Portinouille 62

And that's the same for destrier. Arwen also helps Denethor: he can safely defend 2 attacks for a partner, since he becomes a Sentinel, while Tom carries your enemy by himself!

Mar 06, 2024 doomguard 2006

then i agree needs no more shadowcancelling

Mar 07, 2024 wehehe 1120

After things like this, are there still people defending that ALEP is well designed and balanced? I had my reservations after the first cicle, but this one is just an aberration. I'm totally out of it, I'm so sad, but I'm feeling they are breaking the game. And this is just the "deluxe", there's still a full cicle to be revealed. Good luck for those who doesn't feel that, enjoy it. In my case, there's no fun in playing with a bunch of overpowered cards designed specially to build insane combos. I really envy those who are excited for it and still enjoy it. that's not my case, for me the game is closed since The fortress of Nurn.

Mar 07, 2024 Urthli 271

@wehehe up to the player to decide whether or not they want to play fan made content. These are definitely strong cards but FFG already had their fair share of broken cards in the Ered Mithrin and VoM cycles.

Mar 07, 2024 doomguard 2006

@wehehe you can achieve an equal deck with regular content. use Fireside Song on a hobbit (e.g. Sam Gamgee) and you can achieve about the same. i rate this deck as very solid, but not the same tier as elrond-vilya or a good noldordeck.

Mar 07, 2024 wehehe 1120

Sure, of course is up to players. That's why I envy those who are excited to play with them, as you can still feel the excitement of having new content. For me, I feel that they are poorly tested, and designed with specific combos in mind, which, in my opinion, instead of encouraging different deck building options in some strategies it just gives you a clear more efficient option, which is the "one to follow". I feel that instead of giving you more options, they are just guiding you to a unique path for each strategy, which is exactly the opposite of the purpose of creating new cards.

For me, that is a total failure in the design, and that's why I stay apart from it. As a player from the very beginnings of the game, I love if, and I feel compeled to express how I feel about it.

On the other hand, I must say that I feel that the quests on the first cicle are great. I really enjoyed and I think that they are some great ideas in them. My opinion about the quests is radically opposed to what I think about the player cards.

Mar 07, 2024 wehehe 1120

Anyway, this is probably not the right place to talk about that. Sorry to @Portinouille for diverting the chat from their deck idea. Totally my fault.

Mar 07, 2024 Portinouille 62

@wehehe No worries, you are free to share your opinion. I don't think that Alep testers imagined something as stupid as playing "Nor Am I a stranger", without that Tom Bombadil is strong but not broken.

To answer to the remark of @doomguard, I did playtest this deck on the first 4 Angmar Nightmare scenarios, and killed them: I won all of them on the first try between turn 6 and turn 9, with Tom finishing between 14-14-14 and 20-20-20 every time. I would so far rate this as weaker than Sylvan Combo, since it takes 2 extra turns to setup, but clearly stronger than Noldor in solo. And still, I did not really optimize the deck here, I built it pretty quickly, so I think it has potential to be even stronger.

Mar 07, 2024 Ipswatch 429

@Portinouille During playtesting I made almost this exact same deck. I found that I could, as Doomguard points out, easily do the same thing without Tom using only official content. I also found that while this deck absolutely rocked some scenarios, it struggled in others as the 'broken' side of what you are doin is limited to 1 attack and 1 defense. This deck I rate as REALLY strong, but nowhere near official One Decks in terms of its versatility.

Sidenote: If someone is going to be without limits and have a chance to be pull off crazyness like this... it should be Tom right? He treats the ring like a party favor.

Mar 07, 2024 Portinouille 62

@Ipswatch Agreed about the thematic side of it: if someone's willpower can go through the roof, it's definitely Tom's. I disagree that you can do the same with official content. In theory, sure, but you need Fireside Song and are only boosted by attachments. It is slower, weaker and less reliable. Here, you start building on turn 1, with Tom at 4 willpower in most cases. And we should not neglect that, while doing all this... Tom kills all enemies, heals all characters and keeps threat under control. Sure you can only kill 1 enemy per turn. But between the 2 extra defenses offered by Denethor, the double feint offered by Song of Slumber and the recursion of Hey Dol! Merry Dol!, I never had any trouble crowd-controlling and killing 2-3 engaged enemies. The mix of control and raw power is really strong here, and this is not doable with Rosie Cotton IMO.

Mar 07, 2024 Portinouille 62

However, I saw things way more broken than this with official content (Vilya, Host, you name it). And as you mentioned, this is absolutely not a One Deck.

Mar 07, 2024 Urthli 271

A friend just jokingly came up with another name for this deck: "The Adventures of Tom BOMBadil" Thought I'd share it.

Mar 07, 2024 doomguard 2006

it is not the same with hobbits but kind of equal. yes without Goldberry you cannot attach song-events, but a (MotK) Rosie Cotton can double her willpower and with that gain crazier values that Tom Bombadil specially if buffed by Galadriel with Nenya. rosie can get to 12 wp first round if she has a refresh and narya is out and then +2 for every song (if Fireside Song is out) . there are broken Alepcards out there (imo e.g. the riddle-contract and i would have made the attributes of Thengel 1-2 points worse) but i think this deck is very good but not broken.

be aware that we are far away from thematic here. (in tolkiens world these 3 heroes would never stride together and denethor would never get and keep the ring and stay sane ;) ) so it is a powerdeck not a thematic one.

Mar 07, 2024 Kaspatou 560

@ wehehe, yes there are still some! I just lost 3 times in a row Morgul's valley with this deck with 0 chance of winning. (I did't see the Nazgul)

It's a very good deck, a good idea from Portinouille, it beats many scénarios that leave you alone few turns but it's far from being broken.

But you are free to play with what you want ! :)

Mar 08, 2024 Seastan 42289

@wehehe I am very proud of the ALeP playtesting team. I have it on good authority (from playtesters that have taken part in both FFG and ALeP playtesting) that the amount of time that ALeP devotes to playtesting and the number of design iterations the cards go through far exceeds FFG's. This is not a knock on FFG, it's just a natural consequence of ALeP having a much bigger team and no deadlines.

I am not saying that we will never make a mistake. It's quite possible that someone will discover a broken combo we didn't consider. So far this hasn't happened, but if does we'll issue an errata as FFG did.

As for this type of deck, it is one that we considered. Just to give some perspective, we have been testing and revising Tom since August of 2021. He's had some version of his current ability since October 2022. He went through 484 playtesting sessions before release. So yes, conversation around capping his willpower certainly came up.

Personally, I pushed for no limit. One of my reasons was because nobody was able to demonstrate that this version of the Tom deck was significantly stronger or more versatile that many decks you can make with strictly FFG cards - especially ones that run Steward and The One Ring like this deck does.

Another reason is because of the very point you made about not liking it when the cards have a specific build they were meant for. Well, this is clearly not that! But were we to limit him, there would certainly be fewer possible deck styles he could be viable in, so I prefer to keep deckbuilding options more open if possible.

Finally, my biggest reason for not wanting to limit him was because the testers had a lot of fun building decks and playing around the uncapped ability! Just as I'd wager @Portinouille has been having a fun trying to optimize this build. And that's the main reason we make these cards after all.