Defenders of Ithilien 1.0

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• 1.0

"If by my life or death I can protect you, I will." -Aragorn, Fellowship of the Ring (film)

This deck is intended to do just that: protect your friends and deter your enemies. It was created as a support style deck to go alongside two other decks in a fellowship created by @WingfootRanger. His fellowship can be found here:

http://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/1647/insight-of-the-noble

The design of the deck is a fairly standard take on traps, which in my humble opinion require a lot of dedication to work properly. Unless it's for the purposes of working inside your fellowship with your friends, I have found allies become a hindrance in trap decks unless they help bring traps back (Anborn) keep enemies in the staging area (Guardian of Ithilien, even though he's not in this deck), or they cover some other facet of the game (Ioreth, Warden of Healing). The main reason behind this is that, quite simply, you want to spend your resources on traps, not allies. That's the whole point.

Beregond was an ideal choice mainly to cover defense for the other two decks (primarily the quest deck), leaving more room for the combat deck to kill things without having to exhaust someone to defend. Additionally, his ability to lower threat, albeit by one, really helps when you're scrying with Palantir. I kept the number of Spirit cards intentionally low count and low cost to allow Beregond to attach Blood of Númenor and often get to use it without even needing resource acceleration.

Forest Patrol and Interrogation are also very fun to use in conjunction with Palantir, as you can preplan killing an enemy in order to increase your willpower during questing or even discard a particularly nasty card you don't want to see.

So far, @WingfootRanger and I are 3-0 against various scenarios with this deck (We Must Away Ere Break of Day, Over the Misty Mountains Grim, and Desert Crossing) and the fellowship it is intended to join. If you're looking for a pretty fun setup for you and two mates, I'd say give this a try. Please list any improvements in the comments below!