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Cobra
Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 1:29 pm
Joined: 12 Jul 2005 Posts: 1202 Location: Austin, TX, USA
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Overview of Men cards from the new LOTR TCG: Bloodlines set, with a focus on the Evil Man Archery deck.
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This is one of my old feature articles, which is being added to the forum database to help us keep our strategy section more organized. This article is NOT eligible for the contest, but feel free to rate and review it!

Evil Men have been my favorite LOTR TCG Shadow culture since their creation. Strategically, I know that Men aren’t exactly tournament frontrunners; intellectually, I think the "Men" culture shouldn’t even exist. (Most players seem to agree that distinct Dunland, Corsair, Easterling, and Southron cultures would be a better option.) But even so, I have a soft spot for Evil Men because they offer something most other Shadow cultures don’t: archery!

Southrons, as part of the original Raider culture, had quite a few interesting archery cards. But "interesting" doesn’t always equal "good;" Southron archery just wasn’t a viable decktype. With the Shadows expansion set and the creation of efficient Evil Men archery cards like Archer of Harad and Elevated Fire, minion archery was bumped up a notch. It could win against unprepared opponents, but it had too many weak points to be reliable. The Bloodlines expansion bumps the deck up another notch -- and this time, it looks like Evil Men archery will finally be a tournament-worthy decktype.

Bloodlines gives Men one more basic archer, Southron Murderer, plus several minions who have more unusual ways to pile on the wounds. Voice of the Desert, Southron Troop turns all your minions into archers while in Region 2 (or makes them fierce in Region 3), and Desert Wind adds two to the archery total if you can spot five culture tokens (more on this later). The Corsair Champion can be revealed from hand to cause an exertion each time the Free Peoples player plays a possession, and Grima, Footman of Saruman can take advantage of a companion’s death to exert the entire Fellowship at once. Archery kills don’t usually happen until the Fellowship is exhausted anyway, but a surprise skirmish pump or a well-timed Precision Targeting can get you an early kill.

Now, about those culture tokens. If you like cards like Noble Leaders and Great Siege-towers, you’ll love Stragglers, a new token-based condition that allows you to boost your minions’ strength multiple times with a single card. The Free Peoples player can control the damage by resolving skirmishes carefully, but even so it’s an extremely powerful and twilight-efficient way to win skirmishes.

Another token-based condition is ideal for Archery decks, and is also one of my personal favorite cards in the set: Howdah. (From WordReference.com: "a (usually canopied) seat for riding on the back of a camel or elephant.") Play Howdah with two archers out, and you’ll get two tokens on it; remove the token this turn and discard the condition next turn, and you’ll have +2 archery for zero twilight. If you manage to play it with four archers out, you’ll have +3 archery -- like a free Elevated Fire!

Since Evil Men decks are likely to start packing multiple copies of Stragglers and/or Howdah, Caravan From the South is also likely to become a popular card. Simply remove one twilight and spot a plains site anywhere on the adventure path, and you get to reinforce three "Men" tokens. (If this is your first look at Bloodlines, "reinforce a [culture] token" is just a new way to say "add a [culture] token to a card that already has a [culture] token on it.") With Stragglers, those three tokens represent quite a bit of strength, that can be used almost anytime and in any combination. Caravan From the South is less efficient when used with Howdah, since it takes two tokens to make the archery total +1. But even in archery decks, multiple Caravans used with multiple Howdah might be worthwhile. And with the site path getting more and more important these days, Caravan’s possession-removal text can help punish opponents who use too many pathfinding cards.
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