Keep It Secret

Player Objective.

Advice.

Side A

Setup: Each player may place 1 token on Keep It Secret to opt in. Flip this card over.

Side B

Action: Raise your secrecy level by 1 for the remainder of the game and reduce your threat elimination level by 2 for the remainder of the game.

Response: At the beginning of the planning phase, if there are at least 3 players in the game and each player is in secrecy, the next card you play this round gains secrecy 1.

“…and keep it safe! Now I am going to bed.” —Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring
Midjourney

ALeP - The Shire's Reckoning #21. Neutral.

Keep It Secret
Reviews

An introduction to EDH decks

Keep It Secret has no restriction on the number of times you can activate it, meaning you can choose to threat out in the first phase of the game.

Usually this would be totally useless, but with A Perilous Voyage, it allows us to flip the contract in the first planing phase, benefiting early from it's bonuses :

  • Absolute tutoring
  • 3 ressources to play a big card
  • heroes does not exhaust to quest

You also start a race against the clock, because you can't reduce your threat from non-contract effects... but with Beyond the Original Bargain, you can add a contract that has build-in threat reduction : Council of the Wise.

Well, now your deck is totally inconsistent, because you avec 100 different cards in it

... and that's how we recreated somehow an EDH from Magic the Gathering

What should i look for ?

You will have one 3+ cost card guaranted T1. That'll be your Commander, the concept which you will build your deck around. For example, Sword that was Broken for a swarming monster questing deck.

Your heroes are not exhausting to quest, so you can use characters with high stats. Glorfindel becomes truly a monster.

Thurindir is also an interesting inclusion, with Gather Information easily completed you can grab another card. For example pick Vigilant Dúnadan with contract, and then Arwen Undómiel or Narya with the side quest.

Some kind of extra draw on your heroes is nice to funnel Council of the Wise : Beravor, Círdan (perhaps with a Silver Harp fetched by Elena?)...

Or you can simply pick Salvaged Supplies with Gather information.

Secrecy

You will probably be in secrecy most of the game.
For example, if i have 30 starting (so 34 with BtOB, 35 after activating A Perilous Voyage once), i will activate Keep It Secret 8 times, ending at 24 and a secrecy limit of 28.

Below a recap for different starting threats :

Starting threat Without One Ring With One Ring
Effective threat Secrecy limit Effective threat Secrecy limit
25 20 30 19 28
26 20 30 21 27
27 22 29 21 27
28 22 29 23 26
29 24 28 23 26
30 24 28 25 25
31 26 27 25 25
32 26 27 27 24
33 28 26 27 24

Have a look at the available decks on ringsdb !

Emmental 464

the response part of this card Seems very difficult to use. How many times are the whole team going to be in secrecy. If you opt in though can each player use is response and action seperately? so they can all benefit from the secrecy 1.

ks5bns 51
This was a card meant to try to create a space for a Secrecy Fellowship. Note that with the Action every player (who build their decks even a little bit towards it, as in start with a threat or 25 or o so) should be able to get easily into Secrecy. — Alonewolf87 2449
But even if the whole Fellowship is not geared towards Secrecy the Action can be useful for a Secrecy deck which maybe ends up at 22-23 threat but still wants to get the secrecy benefits — Alonewolf87 2449
Yes, it’s not immediately obvious but the action can be triggered as much as you want. You can raise your secrecy level to 30… but you’ll also lower your threat elimination level to 30 in the process. But if all four decks do that, then everyone in the fellowship gets a 1-resource discount all game… or at least until two players threat out. — Some Sort 4007