This deck is part of Mormegil’s Deckbox, an effort to create an extensive catalogue of decks for the different archetypes, themes and playing styles available to players. Click here to check out the whole project.
Preferred Player Count: 1, (2-4)
Rating:
Premise
My optimized solo deck if you only own one revised/new Core Set. The idea here is pretty simple - you use your low strating threat, decent starting willpower, draw and threat reduction to slowly build up your boardstate in a constructive manner, keeping below the engagement cost of nasty enemies all the while. Once you are suitably set up, you can hopefully kill most things through your swarm of allies while keeping a lid on questing through Faramir, on treacheries through A Test of Will and on locations through Northern Tracker.
How To Play
Cards I like to see a lot early on are Steward of Gondor and Henamarth Riversong, especially the former. A hand with Steward is almost never a mulligan and you play it usually on Éowyn. From there on, you draw with Beravor most of the time (but not always!) to have uses for all the resources you are going to produce. Henamarth is absolutely amazing as a way to plan your whole round ahead, just watch out for direct damage treacheries and maybe use his ability after staging in quests that run those cards like The Necromancer's Reach.
Considerations
Miner of the Iron Hills is crucial if you are facing nasty condition attachments, which are not that prevalent during most quests but very present in the Core Set quests. Ever Vigilant is great tech for your allies and a surprisingly flexible card. For Gondor! is useful in quests where you are worried about your attacking prowess - attack is probably the biggest weakness of the deck and it can be hard winning some quests with big enemies without it.
Enjoy!!!
Just finished my second playthrough of Mirkdwood Paths campaign with this deck and managed to beat Escape from Dol Guldur on second try this time :).
For someone who might be interested, what I've found to be the key to beat that quest (despite the luck involved) is to make sure that Beravor is the presioner, so you have Éowyn to quest and Théodred to play Steward of Gondor and generate extra resources when he's questing.
Besides that you need to claim Gandalf's Map as soon as possible and attach it to Éowyn (since she's used almost only to quest) to flip Mendor, wich helps a lot...
Hope it helps someone!