Second Breakfast

Event. Cost: 1.

Action: Each player returns the topmost attachment card from his discard pile to his hand.

...he was just sitting down to a nice little second-breakfast in the dinning-room...
The Hobbit
Magali Villeneuve

Conflict at the Carrock #27. Leadership.

Second Breakfast
Reviews

There doesn't seem to be much love for Second Breakfast, I overlooked the card originally because I'm almost entirely a lore player but after looking for answers to Druadan Forest I found I really like the card. I think it's amazing in the scenario for cycling a specific attachment like Thrór's Key. In a four player game where you have one or two people mostly responsible dealing with the enemies we've gotten a lot of use out of attachments like Cram and Miruvor. One of the complaints is that you have to pay for the card after returning it to your hand but these readying cards are often free. Another free attachment that our spirit player gets a lot of use out of it is Good Meal, this card is especially useful in Druadan Forest for playing events after all your resources have been stolen but also allows them to play cards like The Galadhrim's Greeting for one resource. Chump blocking, which is pretty much discarding a card and paying a resource, is kinda the same thing as Cram or Miruvor except it would allow you to get value from Second Breakfast.

Cram and Miruvor really shine early game when you're trying to clean out the enemies from setup and haven't developed the board yet, having your heroes who if they were allies would cost 3+ resources get a second action is huge.

I really like Expert Treasure-hunter, I can see it discarding an important attachment if you're looking for allies. It can also kinda cancel the drawback of Daeron's Runes and all the other cards with a discard effect.

I think Campfire Tales is usually a better version of it unless you need something like Thrór's Key for the scenario. I can definitely see Second Breakfast adding 3-4 cards to the player's hands consistently for one resource and it doesn't get much better than that.

Traps are single use attachments and I'm sure there are more one use attachments later on like Ranger Provisions, Elf-stone and Secret Vigil that make Second Breakfast even better. There is no shortage of great one use attachments or ways that you'll be forced to discard cards you'd prefer not to, if you feel the need to draw additional cards consider this one.

Covaxe 15
I love it when people stand up for corner case cards. Good job! — Wandalf the Gizzard 2485
I'm surprised anyone thinks this card is corner case. It's a fantastic card. Any kind of recurring is powerful....especially with the prevalence of attachment hate shadow effects and even better with single use attachments. — MDuckworth83 3735

Second Breakfast is a card that makes me laugh. It's not just the art, it's just such a bad card! How many times have there been an attachment in the discard that you would warrant a card slot and a resource for? Granted, It's better in multiplayer, but aside from Cram and Haradrim Spear; (lets not think about Borne Aloft) There aren't many uses for it (other than depriving you of your appetite).

I think that this card is worth another look. :-) I agree that it's much stronger in multiplayer, certainly. Sometimes picking up an attachment card is worthwhile just because it's a card in hand, such as if someone is playing Spirit Eowyn. Additionally, I would readily add Explorer's Almanac and Good Meal to the list of attachments that are worthwhile getting from the discard pile. — HappyHappy 157

Recursion is one of the strongest and most potentially game-breaking effects in the game (outside of its straightforward use-case of defending against specific times of "hate" from the encounter deck). Often, the power of cards is limited by the number of times you can play them-- most of the time, only three times per quest. Recursion lets you turn effects that would ordinarily be powerful escape hatches into reliable, repeatable tools.

What kind of attachments might be worth recurring with Second Breakfast? Many have noted the single-use (often free) attachments like Cram, Miruvor, or my favorite, Good Meal (all of which are a thematic home run with Second Breakfast). The payoff on these is lower, but they're quick, easy to set up, reliable, and cheap. Otherwise, player attachments typically stick on the character they're attached to (barring attachment hate from the quest), but anything that goes on encounter cards typically winds up discarded at some point-- Elf-stone, Ancient Mathom, Ranger Provisions, Thror's Map and Key, and many traps (such as Secret Vigil). And then there are the "single-use" framework-breakers-- Path of Need, Favor of the Valar, etc. If Second Breakfast is giving you an extra round without any heroes exhausting or an extra chance to survive threating out, it can easily be a game-saver.

But the most interesting attachments to recur with Second Breakfast, in my opinion, are the record attachments-- Scroll of Isildur, Map of Earnil, Book of Eldacar, and Tome of Atanatar. In this way, Second Breakfast can recur not just attachments, but also events (which are by their nature single-use and therefore better targets for recursion). And because of the way the record attachments work (recurring the event and then putting it back into your deck), each copy of Second Breakfast potentially gets you two extra plays.

In fact, because it is itself an event, it can be paired with Tome of Atanatar for infinite recursion. You blow up the Tome of Atanatar to recur the event of your choice, then play Second Breakfast to return the Tome of Atanatar to your hand. You blow up the Tome of Atanatar a second time to recur Second Breakfast, and for its target you choose the Tome of Atanatar you just discarded. Then you play the Tome of Atanatar again. It is now free to recur your preferred Leadership event again, and Second Breakfast is in your deck to repeat the loop once you dig it back out. (Easily done if your deck was empty when you started.)

This is an expensive way to recur an event-- with three Leadership heroes, it adds four extra resources for each time you loop your preferred event (though if you add a fourth leadership hero via Sword-thain, this falls to just two extra resource per loop). Each loop gets you two extra plays (once from the Tome, once from drawing it back out of your deck), so this amounts to two extra resources per play (one with Sword-thain).

But Leadership has plenty of events that fully justify the extra cost-- in multiplayer games, Grim Resolve, Strength of Arms, or Lure of Moria could easily ready 20+ characters at a time. (If you're using the pre-errata version of We Are Not Idle, looping that plus Lure of Moria could generate infinite resources, even accounting for the extra cost of playing each.) Sneak Attack + Gandalf is a bargain even at three resources per play since it preserves your Gandalf for future use. By the same token, Reinforcements is well worth the boosted cost if you have enough high-value allies in hand. (Though if you want to recur Reinforcements, there are easier ways to do so.)

The granddaddy of all game-breaking effects, though, is Doom Hangs Still, which completely shuts down staging for a round, albeit at a very high cost. But is any cost too high to justify the ability to prevent the encounter deck from revealing another card for the rest of the game?

So Second Breakfast really has three main use-cases: protecting against attachment hate, getting extra mileage out of single-use attachments, and insane recursion shenanigans. Any of those three can be enough to justify its presence in a deck. But my favorite part is how, once you're running it, everyone else at the table also benefits. Against quests with attachment hate, one player with Second Breakfast covers the whole table. If you're trying to recur Cram or Good Meal, everyone else gets to recur any single-use attachments they might have-- and even if they don't have any, they get a "free" discard to something like Daeron's Runes or forced discard treacheries, pitching an attachment (even one they want) knowing it'll soon be back in hand.

And finally, if you're using Second Breakfast for some game-breaking shenanigans, every other deck at the table is also free to get up to shenanigans of their own. The Tome of Atanatar + Second Breakfast combo only gives you infinite recursion for Leadership events. But once you're infinitely recurring a Leadership event, partner decks are free to run one of the other record attachments to infinitely recur events from different spheres, too-- say The Hammer-stroke and Thicket of Spears so enemies never attack for the rest of the game, or Advance Warning so enemies never engage for the rest of the game (ideally paired with Haldir of Lórien, Arrows from the Trees, or The Great Hunt to clear out the staging area), or The Galadhrim's Greeting so everyone's threat dial rolls backwards every round or Shadows Give Way so you never see another shadow card again. Because every sphere has a couple cards that just completely break the normal framework of the game, the potential for coordinated fellowships to just "turn off" whatever part of the game is giving them trouble is off the charts.

There's a reason why recursion effects are so rare, so limited, and so likely to eventually see an errata (see: Will of the West, Háma). There are few ways to more reliably break the game than getting extra plays out of cards that were balanced in part by the limited number of times one could play them.

Some Sort 3901
Nice write up. I am shocked it took the community until 2024 to write about how good this card is in various scenarios. — DunYoss 53
I wouldn't say it took this long for people to notice how good it could be. I think it's more that a lot of cards don't get many reviews on RingsDB. — Some Sort 3901