The Rapid Charge of Fellowship 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Named in honor of 13nrv's deck, this one is meant to achieve the condition of the recently spoiled Fellowship contract on turn 1.

To achieve this, we need to play 6 unique allies. We start with the cheap ones: Galion and Ioreth are free, Henamarth Riversong costs 1, and Fili or Kili costs 3. That's 5 unique allies for 4 resources.

Now, it's still a deck, and needs to function as one, so we need to be able to defend and kill stuff. This leads me to pick Treebeard as the 9th unique. At 4 cost, he's still playable on turn 1 thanks to Denethor's bonus resources and some cards like Captain's Wisdom, Wealth of Gondor, and Gaining Strength.

With the Fellowship and Narya boosts, Treebeard defends for 5 with 5 hit points and attacks back for 6 (with another Narya'd ally). And he's able to do extra defenses or attacks once he builds up his resources. Denethor serves as a relief defender at a respectable 4 . This should handle combat quite well.

Questing is great, with Cirdan/Erestor/Fili/Kili/Ioreth/Galion questing for a combined 14 .

You have healing support with Ioreth and scrying support with Henamarth Riversong, which should help you avoid losing your squishy allies to a surprise treachery.

If you do happen to lose an ally, you should be able to pop Glorfindel into play from your discard to get your Fellowship back on track.

Bofur is included as a backup unique. If you can only get out 8 unique characters in the first planning phase, make sure to fail/tie questing by a little bit so that you can get Bofur to stick around for 1 resource.

In Practice

I've goldfished with this deck many times now and in nearly every attempt I'm able to fulfill the contract in the first planing phase. Rarely will it take me two turns. Never three. I find it helps if you mulligan for Drinking Song, just so that if the bonus cards you see with Erestor and Cirdan are no good you can shuffle them away.