Friend of Friends (MD - Hobbits Fellowship)

This fellowship 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: 2-4

Rating:

Premise

I seldom build fellowships, however I just had to build one for this iconic duo at the heart of the story. Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee are the central heroes of the Lord of the Rings and their relationship is so wonderful that I wanted to build a pair of decks where they really shine alongside each other.

Both decks utilize The Grey Wanderer, allowing you to fetch Necklace of Girion for Sam (which under the current setup ruling can just be played on him without the pain of freeing its guarded card) and Strider for Frodo. You then start with a decent bit of willpower alongside a very sturdy defender in Frodo, who uses Inner Strength to become basically unkillable. Havin both of them (with all their action advantage) also equipping Friend of Friends just creates two extremely potent stat powerhouses that can be used multiple times per round due to Strider, Sam's ability and Fast Hitch.

How To Play

The Sam deck likes to see some resource generation early on, allowing you to quickly swarm the deck with allies to bring the necessary stats for questing and attacking. Gandalf is especially useful in that regard, supporting your hobbits as the great ally he proves to be in the source material.

The Frodo deck also swarms allies quite nicely but also has a nice solution for combat - playing either Out of Sight, Hobbit-sense or Desperate Alliance allows you to prevent any attacks made by enemies engaged with Frodo - no matter how many there are (since giving Frodo away with Desperate Alliance allows you to take undefended attacks at your leisure, having no target to put the damage onto.) This I find not only very thematic but actually leads to the decks being very able to hold their own in a combat sense even before getting a ton of allies into play.

Considerations

For the Sam deck, Power of Command can be a nice swap if Inner Strength is not needed (in that case, Staff of Lebethron also becomes a very decent card). Resourceful is surplus to requirements here since Steward of Gondor, Necklace of Girion and Red Book of Westmarch (along with your contract) are more than enough resource acceleration I find. If some of these are taken elsewhere however (or if you choose to setup the contract after step 7 of setup), Resourceful becomes a lot more attractive of course. Campfire Tales and Man the Walls are really good if you plan to play with 3 or 4 players.

For the Frodo deck, Northern Tracker is a great fit in case Rhovanion Outrider is not enough to solve your location issues (which could increasingly be the case with more players being added to the game) while the tactics package is really fun and effective but just couldn't make the cut. If you want to include it however, it certainly adds a different flavor to the deck.

Enjoy!!!