The introduction of RingsDB has invigorated the Lord of the Rings community, sparking creativity and enabling the sharing of ideas at a rate never before seen. With this explosive growth in new content, however, it is becoming easier and easier for interesting and exceptional work to fall through the cracks. The Deck Spotlight project is an attempt by the Cardboard of the Rings community to direct attention to deserving decks that, for one reason or another, have escaped notice.
Selected decks and fellowships might be especially unusual, creative, unique, strategic, or thematic. They might be funny, illuminating, powerful, or noteworthy for any of a number of other reasons. In all cases, however, the decks are worth a closer look.
When browsing the forums or the CotR Discord channels, I often see Rossiel placed into specific deck archetypes: secrecy and victory display control. Whole decks are formed around one or both of these concepts. A common frustration is that it takes time for Rossiel and her control cards to take effect and hard to make consistent use of her boosted stats. You know… it’s all valid. Rossiel can be very tricky to use effectively.
What if I told you that it didn’t need to be this way…
In these spotlight articles, we strive to cover as many deck and fellowship types as possible. One area we haven’t covered yet is saga play, so today we rectify that!
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I’m a fan of fast starts. I’m generally of the opinion that the first planning phase is pretty much the only point all game where you’re free to do what you want without any interference from the encounter deck, (barring a particularly disastrous setup). So when I build a deck, I usually want to make the most of that opportunity.
Delving deep into RingsDB has been beneficial in exposing me to deck compositions that I otherwise would not have considered. As players, we tend to settle into our own preferred playstyles, developing a tunnel-vision that has us playing with the same staple cards in the same style decks. I’ve certainly recognized this in my play, so in an effort to step out of my comfort zone, I took a random 2-handed fellowship out for a spin. And you know what? It turned out to be pretty good.
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There I was at the Thursday evening Siege of Annuminas FFG GenCon event, teamed up with three completely random players for the second “middle” stage of the quest. We just sort of picked whatever combination of decks would not cause hero conflicts. Fortunately, I saw this deck from across the table.
Credit must be given to Seastan’s The Deck you Want Your Friend to Play for inspiring this deck, but this is a clever update that I’m spotlighting for a very timely purpose:
If you listened to Episode 103, you heard me talking up the “inspired by” feature on RingsDB, which allows an author to link to a deck that it was derived from. Not only does this give credit where credit is due, but it also lets future deck-seekers trace a deck’s lineage; maybe some cards were changed to support a specific strategy, or maybe the deck was being updated to a more current version of the cardpool.
In honour of this feature, today I will showcase a fun little ditty that was derived from an FFG staff deck, and one from which I have myself drawn inspiration.
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There are a lot of decks on the internet that are fun to play. There are plenty that are powerful, capable of crushing quests and securing victories with ease. This deck isn’t either of those things. I mean, just look at it
Today we are going to delve deep into the archives. Even though RingsDB is a relatively recent addition to the community, it still surprises me how quickly the card pool and meta-game have evolved since its inception; and yet, fascinating ideas and potentially meta-changing observations frequently fall through the cracks. I think today’s feature perfectly exemplifies why we started this spotlight series. This deck has been buried for a long time, and even though it is a whopping four months old (ancient in internet time), it still has some tricks to teach us.
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When I first saw Lords of the Eldar, I was seriously underwhelmed. For three spirit resources, you could give every Noldor character +1 willpower, +1 attack, and +1 defense until the end of the round. But most of them would lack any sort of action advantage, so they’d only be taking advantage of one of those bonuses each.
For comparison purposes, For Gondor! has been around since the core set. For two leadership resources, it would give every Gondor character +1 attack and +1 defense. Sure, it lacked the +1 willpower bonus, but like I said, most characters can only use one of the bonuses, anyway. And For Gondor! actually applied its +1 attack bonus to every single character on the board!
It seems like For Gondor! is the unambiguously superior card, right? Not only is it cheaper, but it comes in a sphere where resources are easiest to come by, and it still confers a global benefit to characters who lack a trait match. If For Gondor! is a card that doesn’t see very much play as it is, how useful could Lords of the Eldar possibly be?
The answer, as ff0x demonstrates in this fellowship, is “very”.
This is a straight up solid Gondor deck that manages to pull off solo play pretty well. A lot of the staples are included, but there are also some fun nuances and not as common cards that make it worth further inspection.
Cardboard of the Rings 