Uprooting the Evil We Know 1.0

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• 1.0

"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till."

Gandalf, The Last Debate, The Return of the King

Background

I started playing the LotR LCG in late 2015 and have mostly played it in a consistent four-player fellowship over the past year and a half. Similarly to how I live my life in general, there are a few guiding principles that have gotten into my head that I've regularly found myself fixating on across a number of different deck designs. Relevant for this current deck, there are three guiding principles that I've grounded this deck design in:

• Starting Strong: In general, if you're able to start strong then you're likely going to be able to finish strong. Having a good first turn in and of itself can at times be enough to reach the "stabilization point" for a given scenario (the point at which the fellowship is able to handle with encounter deck threats at least as quickly as the encounter deck brings them into play).
• Fifty-card Strategy: Consistency is important in deck design, and the "easiest" way (for some definition of 'easy') to be consistent about what you can play is to draw all fifty cards in your deck. There are certainly other ways to support consistency (e.g., multipe copies of cards, card search, different cards that provide similar effects). For me, the fifty-card strategy is something that I continue to be fascinated by.
• Encounter Deck Control: Different scenarios have different aspects of deck design that they emphasize: some scenarios favor location control, others favor enemy control, and so forth. Bringing a combat-heavy deck to a location-heavy scenario may result in some significant difficulties. In general, encounter deck control is something that will benefit any scenario as every scenario has an encounter deck to contend with.

In alignment with these principles, I present you with this deck.

Deck Goals

This deck has three major goals:

• Provide card draw and resource accelleration to the rest of the fellowship through Deep Knowledge and Legacy of Númenor.
• Cycle through the deck four times (thanks to 3x Will of the West).
• Play Out of the Wild (at least) 10 times to remove the worst cards from the encounter deck.

The goals for each of the cycles through the deck are:

• First cycle: draw (almost) the entire deck, play Will of the West, have two forms of card draw in-hand, and have the resources to play those two types of card draw
• Second cycle: as above, continue to reduce threat through Elrond's Counsel, and optionally play Out of the Wild once or more
• Third cycle: as above, and play Out of the Wild at least three times (from hand, through Scroll of Isildur, redraw, then from hand again)
• Fourth cycle: play Out of the Wild at least seven times (from hand and 3x cycling with Scroll of Isildur)

At the end of all four cycles the other decks should have extra cards, extra resources, and the encounter deck should be significantly thinned. At the end of the turn this deck will die, which is overall fine. Per the opening quote, a significant amount of evil will have been uprooted so that the rest of the fellowship has easier fields to till.

While the result of cycling through this deck won't guarantee a win by any means, overall my guess is that this will greatly increase the chances of success by removing ten of the more powerful encounter cards from the deck.

I've tried making a deck like this before and it's been rather challenging. There are several cards that make this deck significantly easier than it used to be:

• Justice Shall Be Done is a powerhouse for a deck like this. Card draw and major resource accelleration for a deck that is designed to burn through itself on the first turn? Yes, please.
• Sword-thain is also incredibly helpful for this deck. While it costs a great deal to get into play, you save significant resources on playing Scroll of Isildur, getting an extra card when playing Mithrandir's Advice, and getting extra resources when playing Justice Shall Be Done or Legacy of Númenor.
• Unlikely Friendship is also a great addition to this deck. During the first cycle it breaks even on resources (-1 for Henamarth Riversong, -3 for Dori, +3 for Unlikely Friendship, +1 for We Are Not Idle) and gets you three cards. In all of the other cycles it's gravy.
• Heed the Dream allows you to both dig deeper into your deck than most other card draw effects. It also shuffles your deck, which can be very useful for getting Mithrandir's Advice off the bottom of your deck when you've used Scroll of Isildur to put it there.

Empirical Testing

I must admit that I'm generally too lazy to test how a deck performs before putting it into play with a fellowship. I'd rather spend more time designing decks than iterating on a single deck idea. However, for this deck I decided that I really needed to run some trials because there are so many moving parts.

For my trials, I decided that I was looking for four possible outcomes:

• First cycle completed without help. Given my testing, if this deck completes its first cycle successfully then it is (almost) guaranteed to complete its second, third, and fourth cycles successfully. Since I want to run as many trials as possible, I stopped at the successful completion of the first cycle and reset to start the next trial.
  • Per the above, a "successful completion of the first cycle" means that the deck was (almost) emptied, Will of the West was played, the hand includes at least two forms of card draw to begin the second cycle, and the heroes have the resources needed to play those two forms of card draw.
• Blocked once, unblocked with two cards. If this deck gets blocked during its first cycle, then I attempt to unblock it by drawing two more cards. This would represent another player using Beravor, Deep Knowledge, two Campfire Tales, or something along those lines.
• Blocked twice, unblocked with four cards. If two cards doesn't enough to complete the first cycle, then I attempt to unblock it by drawing another two cards (four cards total).
• Blocked thrice. If the deck is blocked yet again, then I end the trial.

There are many different interactions that I could have tested. For example, drawing two cards at the start of the turn (which could be guaranteed if someone else is playing Beravor) would be significantly more useful than drawing cards when I hit a block. Another example would be a player playing Heed the Dream on me when blocked, which would likely be better at unblocking than drawing two cards. Or I could assume that if I've played at least one Legacy of Númenor then the rest of the fellowship would be willing to spend three resources when I play Heed the Dream if I needed to search for a specific card. And so on. There are many things that I could have tested and didn't in the interests of time.

I also assumed that this deck was in the first player position to benefit from Bilbo Baggins's card draw.

Here are the test results for my earlier drafts of this deck:

Then I did a bit of tweaking with the deck to improve it slightly and ran some more trials. These are the results of the current version of the deck:

There's still some room for improvement, yet overall it seems as if the deck has significant consistency.

When it comes to opening hands, you are most intently looking for Song of Kings to unlock all of your cards. This is the most important single starting card. If you don't have one, you almost certainly want to mulligan. The only exception to this would be if you're holding three or more pieces of card draw that you can play from the very start.

However, this is still surprisingly risky. Let's assume that you're looking at your opening hand of 6 cards, none of which are Song of Kings. This means you have 3x copies left in your deck of forty-four cards. On average, you need to draw 18 of the forty-four cards to have an 80% chance of drawing at least one copy of Song of Kings. That's a lot of cards. You get 5 for free (first card draw, three from Erestor, one from Bilbo Baggins). That still leaves you with 13 cards you need to draw, and you only have two resources to do it (because you need to save one resource for playing Song of Kings). Maybe you hit Justice Shall Be Done first, in which case you have plenty of resources to use to dig for Song of Kings, but otherwise this is a rather hard dig. It's certainly possible as you can see in the above trial runs, but almost all of the blocks occurred when I didn't have Song of Kings in my opening hand.

Plays Well With

There are quite a few cards that this deck plays well with:

• Beravor, Galadriel, Deep Knowledge, Campfire Tales all help with getting this deck extra card draw on the first turn to help complete its first cycle.
• Wealth of Gondor, Legacy of Númenor, Parting Gifts can be played by another player to provide this deck with resources when needed.
• Elrond's Counsel, The Galadhrim's Greeting, Dwarven Tomb will mitigate the threat from the Doomed cards in this deck and allow more of them to be played during the cycles.
• Keen as Lances is an obvious choice for the other decks.
• Will of the West would allow this deck to cycle more times and remove more cards from the encounter deck.

Sideboard Options

The only significant sideboard options for this deck are hero choice:

• -Denethor is only being used for his low threat and Gondor trait; his ability isn't being leveraged (other than possibly being able to scout the top of the deck for one use of Out of the Wild). If another deck wants to run either -Denethor or -Denethor, then this deck could swap in Damrod instead as the next lowest threat Gondor hero.
• Bilbo Baggins is used for being able to leverage Good Meal along with starting the game with an extra card. He could be replaced by -Pippin to start with three fewer threat at the cost of one fewer starting card draw, which I would expect would only be worthwhile if another deck wanted to run the Bilbo Baggins ally to search for a pipe (such as Gandalf decks wanting a Wizard Pipe. Of course, if another deck wanted to run the Bilbo Baggins hero, then this deck would be completely fine with Pippin as it would benefit from Bilbo Baggins's starting card draw anyway.
• Galdor of the Havens is an option to help with getting a good starting hand on the first turn of the game. However, this would require either not running a Gondor hero and therefore needing Steward of Gondor or In Service of the Steward, or not running a Hobbit hero and then needing to do something in place of Good Meal, or swapping out Erestor. Swapping out Erestor might result in some opening situations that are better, but Erestor allows you to do a full mulligan and draw three extra cards for searching for Song of Kings.

You could try to change out a couple cards for Campfire Tales (more team card draw during the cycles), Keen as Lances (more team resources at the end of the last cycle once you've played Out of the Wild five times), or something else along these lines. I've tried this myself, and it can be somewhat useful, yet overall most cards that don't help get through the first cycle end up as liabilities.