Forging Your Fellowship 4: Like a Hobbit - Going out of Harms Way

Forging Your Fellowship is a series about how I approach deckbuilding in LotR:LCG.
I know that there are many ways to skin a cat (or Wargs (Core) for that matter) and I do not claim that my view are the end all be all way of deckbuilding. But maybe I can still get you to follow along and walk the path with me as I share my ideas.

Howdy readers,

alright, time to get back to the deckbuilding stuff. I guess I have kept you waiting long enough. The current article is going to wrap things up a little bit as it gives you the third (and last imo) answer to the three basic questions. Wait, what? Questions? There ya go:

1. How does my deck deal with locations?
2. How does my deck deal with enemies?
3. How does my deck deal with treacheries?

So far we have seen the straight-forward hard-countering approach and the indirect soft-countering approach, but there is still one more option left that is not seen too often I guess. I like to call it the avoidance strategy.

I mean what is better than killing enemies? Not even encountering any in the first place! When no treachery whatsoever shows up from the encounter deck, than how essential is A Test of Will (Core) again?
So this strategy revolves around Encounter deck manipulation and related cards to sway the cold determination of chance in your favor.



Shh, don't make so much noise, I am your deck and I am trying to ...

... avoid enemies/locations/treacheries

I usually like to differentiate the answers depending on whether you apply the strategy to enemies, locations or treacheries, but most of the cards that fit within the avoiding strategy are of very general use. Because of that, I will highlight all those cards and talk a bit about them:

• Eleanor (Core): One of the best cards for avoiding treacheries. You significantly encounter less treacheries, but get more enemies and locations that way. But that is exactly what avoiding is, as seeing less of one card type will lead to an increase in the two other. Now you might say "But the 2nd card might be another treachery". True, that may happen, but it is less likely now. While you would like to see no treachery whatsoever in theory, you will stumble upon one from time to time. Just less than before.
• Out of the Wild (RtR): You decided you want to avoid a certain type of encounter card? Why not just remove one of them from the deck permanently? Revealing 5 cards from the Encounter deck has good chances of at least giving you one card you want to remove. And don't we all love it, when there suddenly is only one Sentry sleeping?
• Denethor (Core): Another strong avoidance card. Use his ability at the end of the turn and if there is a card type you don't want to see, just put it on the bottom of the Encounter deck. Might be a good target for Unexpected Courage (Core) now that Beravor got errata'd. His avoidance potential is especially strong for a solo player.
• Short Cut (TWitW): Your deck can slice enemies into the smallest pieces? But it struggles with locations? By using Short Cut, you decrease the amount of locations you got to deal with.
• Gildor's Counsel (THoEM): This card sort of fits this theme, too. You want to encounter less enemies? Why not just encounter one less card in general?
• Shadow of the Past (RtM): A very strong card in my opinion. Locations are to your decks strengths? Just put one on top of the Encounter deck and the next card suddenly is not going to be an enemy or treachery (who knew )

As you can see that theme is not yet widely developed, but since two of those options are heroes, you can already apply it in some decks. But I firmly believe, that we are going to see a little bit more in this direction in the future. (And after this article was initially written, Risk Some Light showed up in the Shadow and Flame Adventure Pack adding one more card to the avoidance lineup)

Now in order to give a complete picture, there is another way how you can reduce your chances of meeting a certain type of encounter card and that is "simply" speed. A good example of that strategy in action is a Rohan Rush deck. You combine lots of cheap willpower (Eowyn (Core) or Escort from Edoras (AJtR)) with some powerful nukes for "boss fights" (like the ever-favorite Sneak Attack (Core) + Gandalf (Core) or For Gondor! (Core)) and then hope (and rush) to finish the game in 5 or less turns. These decks can ignore treacheries for the most part, because the first two The Necromancer's Reach (Core) are not going to kill any hero and you likely are finished with the game already once the third shows up (of course this might be on turn 3 after all, but it is still a game of probability and those Rohan decks have proved very successful during the Mirkwood cycle, at least as far as I know.).

There is also a different layer to ignoring stuff. When building not one, but more decks at once, you can have each deck freely ignore some stuff from the encounter deck. When one deck focuses on dealing with enemies, while the other targets locations pretty hard, you will likely have answers for most problems. If both of you would run "universal" decks instead, you might both draw a "combat-heavy" hand (e.g.) and stumble into trouble.

Now a word of warning though: If you try to build a deck that avoids/ignores certain kinds of encounter cards, limit yourself to only one type. While it might sound like fun to manipulate the Encounter deck until only locations show up and then have your Northern Tracker (Core) run amok, I firmly believe that this will lead to disaster as it is very unpractical and sets you up for quite a blow out, should cards slip past, that you were not prepared for. But playing like a Hobbit and avoiding one type of encounter card is already viable, you should give it a try.

Ok, I guess thats it for now. Next week I will be highlighting another weird combo and the week after that I will provide you with a deck that applies one of each possible answer (hard-countering, soft-countering, avoiding/ignoring) to each encounter card type (locations, enemies, treacheries).

Stay tuned,
Sebastian

P.S.: Anybody tried approaches like this already? Don't hesitate and let me know.