Green Anaconda: Heart & Stomach 1.0

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• 1.0

This is deck 4 of the Green Anaconda fellowship and functions as both the heart and the stomach of the anaconda. It steadily performs vital functions and sends resources where they are needed most through questing and resource generation, and it "eats" the encounter deck via the victory display. It also needs to be protected by the rest of the body in order to function.

Here are the three main goals this deck aims to do.

1: Get cards into the victory display as quickly as possible. This weakens the encounter deck and enables all the copies of The Door is Closed! and Keen as Lances in the fellowship to be used. It also helps power Rossiel up to be the main defender for the combat deck.

2: Quest as hard as you can. The heroes quest every round they can. The allies (except for Ioreth) will help with questing after the first round or two. And you've got three copies each of Secret Paths and Radagast's Cunning to help keep the staging area from getting out of hand. These are especially great buys in the first few rounds of the game, while the fellowship is just beginning to get a grip on the encounter deck.

3: Help the Elrond deck move along. With access to Resourceful, this deck is really the only one in the fellowship that can accelerate resources, so you want to send a resource over to Bifur to keep growing Elrond's army. There may be turns where you need to say no to Bifur, but try to say yes as often as possible. You also may need to Heed the Dream to help Elrond find Vilya.

There are a few other tricks up your sleeve, but that's the core of what you're up to here. Plenty of card draw in Expert Treasure-hunter (hint: name event!), Mithrandir's Advice, and Peace, and Thought. Mulligan if you don't see any of those three. Don't be afraid to exhaust a couple heroes for Peace and Thought. Getting even one Secret Paths or Radagast's Cunning out of it should be enough to balance out the questing power you lose by exhausting the heroes.

Aside from your card draw, the cards you want to see in the first round are Resourceful, Risk Some Light, Out of the Wild, Secret Paths, and Radagast's Cunning.

You're basically helpless in combat but with threat so low that shouldn't matter too much. Aragorn or one of Elrond's Defender of the Naith will have to protect you in a pinch, and Haldir of Lórien will kill anything off you have to engage with. More often, though, you'll intentionally engage something Haldir plans to snipe just to get the card draw for Pippin.

Other cards:

~Ioreth gives you another way to spend your resources if they start to pile up. And it's another healing option if Elrond can't find his Warden of Healing.

~Some rounds there are just too many enemies in the staging area to handle. Advance Warning should help you survive that round so you can prepare better for the next.

~This fellowship is at its most vulnerable in the first round, which is where Risk Some Light can be tremendously helpful. It's not bad later either but it's here primarily to help out early on while the decks are all getting set up.

~Gildor's Counsel is a late game purchase for when your money has built up.

~The Houses of Healing is there to bring back Folco Boffin or rescue another hero from misfortune.