This card is very powerful, though few seem to have noticed. The Card Talk podcast people noticed, though they didn't rate it quite as highly as I would. (They rated it an average of 3.25 out of 10, where 1 is best.) Here on RingsDB, no one (until me just now) has posted a single comment on this Smoke and Think page. Someone did post about Smoke and Think over on the Spare Pipe page, but only grouped in with the other two pipe events and not really with any meaningful commentary. My internet search turned up those two as the only places on the whole internet that this card is discussed. Perhaps the lack of attention is because Smoke and Think wasn't printed until the second-to-last adventure pack of the entire LOTR LCG universe, so most people don't even own it.

I completely agree with this quote from the Spare Pipe page: "[Spare Pipe] and Smoke and Think really brought the whole Pipe deck archetype finally together." In fact, I'd say it's an understatement. The sheer resource advantage of Smoke and Think is likely too powerful, assuming you're all-in on the pipe motif. For comparison, look at Gaining Strength and similar cards, which trade card-for-money one-for-one. Even the much-loved Good Meal trades at "only" one-for-two and it comes with significant restrictions (Hobbit hero only, must match sphere). Smoke and Think has no sphere restrictions and trades at one-to-X where X is the cost of the next card you play!

How will we get enough cards to use with this abundance of riches? Good thing we have Old Toby, and while Gandalf needed no more help being awesome (see Sneak Attack, Reinforcements, Vilya, etc.), Smoke and Think gives us yet another way to abuse his power. As one simple example, play Smoke and Think then Gandalf to draw three cards (replace the two spent plus one more card, maybe Smoke Rings) for zero cost, and that's just the enters-play ability, ignoring Gandalf himself helping you out for the rest of that round!

The obvious downside of Smoke and Think (and all the pipe events) is the significant setup and investment required before it achieves greatness. To pull off a free Gandalf you first must have five pipes in play, which is no small thing. Make sure you have cards like Beravor (with a Dúnedain Pipe), Gléowine, Master of the Forge, Daeron's Runes, Deep Knowledge, Heed the Dream, and Old Toby to help bring the pieces together in a reasonable amount of time. Despite the pipe motif being clearly designed for just blue () and green (), if you can manage room for purple () in your lineup, the usual Steward of Gondor and maybe King Under the Mountain (if you're using Dwarf Pipe especially) will also help you accelerate to your payoff.

In summary, even though it seems to have gone unnoticed, Smoke and Think is a secret powerhouse available to those paying attention. Despite its drawbacks, Smoke and Think is my favorite kind of card: big investment for a huge payoff.

Rating: 10 out of 10 from me (with 10 being best)!

Reinforcements came up as the "Card of the Day" in the LotR Discord and I spent way, way too long going on and on about my love of this card-- it's one of my two favorites in the game (with Stand and Fight). And then it occurred to me that I'd never posted a review of it, so I'm cleaning it up and copying much of it over here.

From a design standpoint, the unique thing about Reinforcements (and Stand and Fight / Reforged) is the ability to use others' decks as an extension of your own. Can't fit the cards you need? That's fine, just use someone else's cards instead. Unless your partner is running Forth, The Three Hunters!, they almost certainly have allies.

It's easy to think of Reinforcements as just a double Sneak Attack, but the ability to put those allies in the "wrong" play area is crucial to the "straightforward" uses for Reinforcements, which is often bringing in two allies during the combat phase to solve any issues that need solving. Unlike Sneak Attack, which puts the ally in your play area, Reinforcements can show up anywhere-- as a practical matter, it's akin to giving any allies both ranged and sentinel, which (as anyone who has played a lot of multiplayer games can attest) is fantastic. If there's any player at the table with one more engaged enemy than ready defender, or if there's any enemy at the table with one more HP than available point of attack, Reinforcements can ride to the rescue.

If you don't need the actions for combat, Reinforcements is perfect fodder for A Very Good Tale-- getting you up to 10 (or even 11) resources worth of permanent allies at the same fixed 3 cost. (Sneak attack also works well, but Reinforcements' ability to pull the two most expensive allies from anyone's hand and to supply both exhausts for the Tale especially stand out.)

Beyond the basic case of getting extra stats and actions, Reinforcements (like Sneak Attack) is usually used as a way to repeatedly benefit from effects that trigger on characters entering or leaving play. Played during the quest phase, it can get Prince Imrahil ready for combat (or if you Reinforce Éomund, it can ready all Rohan characters at the entire table!). Éomer gets his attack boost. You can use it to tuck a couple eagles under Eagles of the Misty Mountains. You can even use it to create a trigger for Valiant Sacrifice.

Enters play effects are even stronger. Obviously something like Gandalf will be the gold standard-- Sneak Attack + Gandalf is the grandaddy of all combos for a reason. Early in the game's life, the primary problem with it was simply getting both pieces in your hand at the same time. But with Reinforcements, even if you didn't draw your own Gandalf, odds were great that at any given moment someone at the table had a Gandalf kicking around. As the cardpool has expanded, Gandalf is no longer an auto-include and these odds have declined, but Reinforcements remains as relevant as ever (if not more so), because it allows you to ask not just "does anyone have a Gandalf?", but also "does anyone NEED a Gandalf?"-- and someone always needs a Gandalf.

With a Gandalf in hand, Reinforcements suddenly becomes a The Galadhrim's Greeting (drop any player's threat by 5) or a Lórien's Wealth (any player may draw three cards)-- with two temporary allies for good measure. (I don't mention the direct damage option here both because that option doesn't depend on whose play area Gandalf winds up in, and also because there's still no real analog to Gandalf's direct damage option. The only other cards that guarantee you at least 3 points of damage are Forest Patrol and Fierce Defense. The only other cards that let you pick any enemy at the table as a target-- regardless of location, trait, or status-- are Ranger of the North and Taking Initiative. All of these cards have restrictions that prevent them from matching Gandalf's predictability and universality.)

But when you look past Gandalf and start looking at Reinforcements as a way to trigger "Enters Play" effects on allies, Reinforcements itself starts to look a lot less like an effect and a lot more like an engine-- it's not something that you want to do, it's something that enables what you want to do. What kinds of things will it enable you to do?

• Draw (e.g. Gandalf, Elrond, Lindir, Sarn Ford Sentry)
• Threat reduction (e.g. Gandalf)
• Direct damage (Gandalf, Faramir, Longbeard Orc Slayer)
• Healing (Elrond, Galadhrim Healer)
• Condition removal (Elrond, Miner of the Iron Hills)
• Location control (Meneldor)
• Engagement control (Mablung, Faramir, Guardian of Ithilien)
• Action advantage (Eomund, Greenwood Defender, Greenwood Archer)
• Stat buffs (Merry)
• Scrying (Celduin Traveler, Ithilien Lookout, Cautious Halfling)
• Search/shuffle (Bob, Bilbo Baggins, Galadhrim Minstrel, Long Lake Fisherman, Wolf/Fang/Grip)
• Resource smoothing (Envoy of Pelargir, Halfast Gamgee, Wolf/Fang/Grip)
• Incredible nonsense cheese shenanigans (Saruman)
• Recursion (Ered Nimrais Prospector, Galadhrim Weaver, Gwaihir-- this category is extra special because it's so rare and limited)

Many of those effects are the best in their class in the entire game. Nothing can beat Elrond's ability to heal an unlimited amount of damage off of a single hero, and Meneldor is essentially the location equivalent of Gandalf's direct damage, only better (since you can split the tokens to prevent overkill)-- he's like two Asfaloth and you can drop him multiple times per round. Lots of cards let you engage enemies out of turn, but-- paired with Reinforcements-- Mablung lets you move any eligible enemy to any player's play area or even back to staging.

Other of these effects are less impactful, but since Reinforcements brings in two allies, as long as one of the two is one of the high-impact stars, that more than justifies the cost and any second effect you get is a nice bonus. And given the sheer number of allies with Enters Play effects or Leaves Play effects, again, the odds that someone at the table has something useful are quite high.

The recursion category deserves its own special mention, however, because it is so rare and so potentially game-breaking. Most of the broken infinite loops in the game's life have depended on some sort of recursion, and much of that recursion has been errata'd as a result. Letting you play powerful effects round after round after round is pretty good, it turns out. Most of those powerful events require some sort of outside recursion to keep them flowing, but Reinforcements is nearly alone (exception: Host of Galadhrim) in its ability to recur itself-- simply reinforce a Galadhrim Weaver to shuffle the last copy of Reinforcements you played back into your deck. With one of the simplest recursion loops in the game, it's trivially easy to play at least one Reinforcements per round indefinitely, and not too tricky to even get a second (or, if you really want to ramp it up, third or fourth) play. If one Gandalf per round is good, four Gandalfs per round must be really, really good.

But more than that, again, the ability to put allies into play under anyone's control lets you recur other decks' key cards. In a dedicated fellowship, a single Reinforcements deck can handle all recursion for the entire table, turning on unlimited plays of high-value cards like Thicket of Spears or Doom Hangs Still or Path of Need.

Are there any other points worth making? I haven't touched on its interaction with Sword-thain yet. If you Sneak Attack in a unique ally and then play Sword-thain on it, it doesn't bounce back to your hand at the end of the phase (because Sneak Attack directs you to return the chosen ally to your hand and the card is no longer an ally). Reinforcements can do the same trick, except you can give that extra hero to any other deck at the table. Forth, The Three Hunters! decks can't include any ally cards... but that doesn't mean they can't play across the table from a Reinforcements deck and have it drop some allies in their play area and turn them into an extra hero (who gets all of the boosts of the Three Hunters contract).

Perhaps my favorite thing about it is that while many power cards can make other decks at the table feel less powerful (I'm sure most people have had the experience of playing across from a Vilya deck and feeling a bit like a sidekick), Reinforcements makes other decks feel more powerful. It makes Rohan feel Rohannier, it beefs up Eagles, it creates a Fourth the Three Hunters, it helps out with combat, it provides draw and threat reduction as needed. It's a powerful card, but also a collaborative card, one that captures well the spirit of this cooperative game we all love.

Whether you view it as useful combat smoothing, a way to get extra enters/leaves play effects, a powerful and flexible engine, or a way to engage in some fairly unique shenanigans, there's no card in the game like Reinforcements, and that's why it's my favorite card.

Well, except maybe for Stand and Fight.

A zero-cost attachment is always nice. However, the benefit of the discounted cost is reliant upon the condition that triggers the attack boost. In this case, the condition is discarding a card from hand for +1 attack per card, with a limit of three times per phase. Additionally, Elven Spear can only be attached to a Silvan or Noldor hero. Based on this, we know that the card is designed primarily for a Noldor deck.

Considering the card in this light, two things immediately stand out to me. The first is that there is a severe lack of Tactics heroes with the Noldor or Silvan trait. In fact, there is just one for each with Elladan and Legolas. Neither hero typically sees play in the traditional Noldor deck that seeks to discard a lot of cards. And to make Elven Spear useful, the deck will need to be designed to do just that. The beauty of the Elven Spear is not that it can get you +1 or +2 attack, it's that it can get you +3 with a single attachment costing no resources, something few other cards can do. This improves the situational usefulness of the card tremendously. The kicker is that you need to be prepared to consistently discard three cards per turn. The fact that the two primary targets do not synergize with the types of decks that can consistently pull this off is a bit problematic.

Luckily, there is a particular card that solves this issue. Namely, Elf-friend. This allows us to get any tactic hero we want with the Noldor and Silvan traits, opening up the deckbuilding options significantly. Unluckily, we are still hard pressed to find a tactics hero which we want to put into a Noldor deck anyway. That being said, I have had great success pairing Elf-friend and Elven Spear with Aragorn in a variety of Noldor decks. Additionally, adding Elf-friend to such a deck will allow your off-trait hero to interact with the rest of the Noldor cards in the deck. In this light, I think that Elven Spear is niche card, but not a bad one. If your deck can handle the steep discard price, and if you can find a desirable target for it, you'll see a pretty significant return on investment.

Recursion is one of the strongest and most potentially game-breaking effects in the game (outside of its straightforward use-case of defending against specific times of "hate" from the encounter deck). Often, the power of cards is limited by the number of times you can play them-- most of the time, only three times per quest. Recursion lets you turn effects that would ordinarily be powerful escape hatches into reliable, repeatable tools.

What kind of attachments might be worth recurring with Second Breakfast? Many have noted the single-use (often free) attachments like Cram, Miruvor, or my favorite, Good Meal (all of which are a thematic home run with Second Breakfast). The payoff on these is lower, but they're quick, easy to set up, reliable, and cheap. Otherwise, player attachments typically stick on the character they're attached to (barring attachment hate from the quest), but anything that goes on encounter cards typically winds up discarded at some point-- Elf-stone, Ancient Mathom, Ranger Provisions, Thror's Map and Key, and many traps (such as Secret Vigil). And then there are the "single-use" framework-breakers-- Path of Need, Favor of the Valar, etc. If Second Breakfast is giving you an extra round without any heroes exhausting or an extra chance to survive threating out, it can easily be a game-saver.

But the most interesting attachments to recur with Second Breakfast, in my opinion, are the record attachments-- Scroll of Isildur, Map of Earnil, Book of Eldacar, and Tome of Atanatar. In this way, Second Breakfast can recur not just attachments, but also events (which are by their nature single-use and therefore better targets for recursion). And because of the way the record attachments work (recurring the event and then putting it back into your deck), each copy of Second Breakfast potentially gets you two extra plays.

In fact, because it is itself an event, it can be paired with Tome of Atanatar for infinite recursion. You blow up the Tome of Atanatar to recur the event of your choice, then play Second Breakfast to return the Tome of Atanatar to your hand. You blow up the Tome of Atanatar a second time to recur Second Breakfast, and for its target you choose the Tome of Atanatar you just discarded. Then you play the Tome of Atanatar again. It is now free to recur your preferred Leadership event again, and Second Breakfast is in your deck to repeat the loop once you dig it back out. (Easily done if your deck was empty when you started.)

This is an expensive way to recur an event-- with three Leadership heroes, it adds four extra resources for each time you loop your preferred event (though if you add a fourth leadership hero via Sword-thain, this falls to just two extra resource per loop). Each loop gets you two extra plays (once from the Tome, once from drawing it back out of your deck), so this amounts to two extra resources per play (one with Sword-thain).

But Leadership has plenty of events that fully justify the extra cost-- in multiplayer games, Grim Resolve, Strength of Arms, or Lure of Moria could easily ready 20+ characters at a time. (If you're using the pre-errata version of We Are Not Idle, looping that plus Lure of Moria could generate infinite resources, even accounting for the extra cost of playing each.) Sneak Attack + Gandalf is a bargain even at three resources per play since it preserves your Gandalf for future use. By the same token, Reinforcements is well worth the boosted cost if you have enough high-value allies in hand. (Though if you want to recur Reinforcements, there are easier ways to do so.)

The granddaddy of all game-breaking effects, though, is Doom Hangs Still, which completely shuts down staging for a round, albeit at a very high cost. But is any cost too high to justify the ability to prevent the encounter deck from revealing another card for the rest of the game?

So Second Breakfast really has three main use-cases: protecting against attachment hate, getting extra mileage out of single-use attachments, and insane recursion shenanigans. Any of those three can be enough to justify its presence in a deck. But my favorite part is how, once you're running it, everyone else at the table also benefits. Against quests with attachment hate, one player with Second Breakfast covers the whole table. If you're trying to recur Cram or Good Meal, everyone else gets to recur any single-use attachments they might have-- and even if they don't have any, they get a "free" discard to something like Daeron's Runes or forced discard treacheries, pitching an attachment (even one they want) knowing it'll soon be back in hand.

And finally, if you're using Second Breakfast for some game-breaking shenanigans, every other deck at the table is also free to get up to shenanigans of their own. The Tome of Atanatar + Second Breakfast combo only gives you infinite recursion for Leadership events. But once you're infinitely recurring a Leadership event, partner decks are free to run one of the other record attachments to infinitely recur events from different spheres, too-- say The Hammer-stroke and Thicket of Spears so enemies never attack for the rest of the game, or Advance Warning so enemies never engage for the rest of the game (ideally paired with Haldir of Lórien, Arrows from the Trees, or The Great Hunt to clear out the staging area), or The Galadhrim's Greeting so everyone's threat dial rolls backwards every round or Shadows Give Way so you never see another shadow card again. Because every sphere has a couple cards that just completely break the normal framework of the game, the potential for coordinated fellowships to just "turn off" whatever part of the game is giving them trouble is off the charts.

There's a reason why recursion effects are so rare, so limited, and so likely to eventually see an errata (see: Will of the West, Háma). There are few ways to more reliably break the game than getting extra plays out of cards that were balanced in part by the limited number of times one could play them.

Love this guy does well gimli or gloin or beorn and his fellow bree barliman. Stat wise he is 8 cost l ant isn't too bad can quest or attack. Can even take an undefended hit also. Really good if you need him to take undefended hits early on