Quickbeam Often Laughed 1.0

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• 1.0

All that day they walked about in the woods with him, singing, and laughing; for Quickbeam often laughed. He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees. - The Two Towers

A The Grey Wanderer deck featuring Bregalad.

Mulligan for Pippin or Treebeard. Treebeard for obvious reasons, Pippin for the immediate willpower. Or, if you're feeling lucky, mulligan for the secrecy cards Resourceful and Timely Aid. Slightly riskier because the deck is thin on draw effects, and you do want to see Treebeard especially.

Merry is included here for theme, he really doesn't contribute much to the deck, and you can only play him as a combo with A Good Harvest or if you're lucky with Timely Aid. Drop him if you don't care about theme.

Why Quickbeam? Grey Wanderer lets you get extra resources, which you typically want in the planning phase. But then your contract usage is not so efficient because you don’t get the ready or benefit of healing. Quickbeam is interesting for this because he can still ready himself, incurring damage. Then, on the following round, you can get the full benefit of the contract even if you use it in planning again, as he uses its healing.

Weak points for the deck are draw and especially early game willpower. There is a lot of lore, so drawing Song of Wisdom is essential.

Now a crucial question: would this deck be better with 3 heroes and no contract?

Most heroes would cause you to lose the secrecy potential that this deck carries, and maybe even end up requiring you to use that deck space for threat management. You would lose the early game healing provided by the contract, and would need to include something like Self Preservation or other healing. On the other hand, if you used more heroes, you could solve your early game willpower problems, sphere access problems (the contract itself is only a partial solution to sphere access), and potentially get access to draw and some resource generation at the start of the game (rather than relying on drawing Resourceful). So it’s not a black and white call. I ask this question of every Grey Wanderer deck I try to build: would it be better without the contract and adding two heroes? So far, for all of them, the answer has been "definitely." This is the first one where the answer has been "probably." So, progress.

Anyway, it's an interesting deck to try. I decided it does work better 2-handed than pure solo.

Testing:

Pure solo:
Passage through Mirkwood: 1/1
Journey Down the Anduin: 1/1. Drew 2 Hill Trolls in first 2-3 rounds. Not a problem, but questing through stage 2 was daunting. Failed the quest phase a couple of times; ended game around 46 threat. Topdecking a lot, 10+ resources on Quickbeam near the end, adjusted deck to add Gandalf after that.
Intruders in Chetwood: 0/1, way too slow to build willpower.
Desert Crossing - 0/1, too slow to build willpower. Threat and enemies were not a problem (even a Were-worm with 5 atk 5 def was easy to deal with), but the temperature mechanic caused me to lose.

2-handed play, next to a Dale deck:
Desert Crossing - 1/1, not so challenging when the Ent deck has a little buffer to heat up, courtesy of Dale. The Ent deck ramps up combat a lot faster than willpower. Ent deck was topdecking for much of the game.