I love challenges. For the last 10 years that I have been playing Lotr, I have always strived to make decks none has seen before. I have played 190 card decks that build themselves in the first site, I have built decks with nothing but gandalf events, I have built a shadow deck that almost always kills the opponent in site 2. And I want more
So I was watching some MtG lately, in the legacy format. One of the famous legacy combos is Sensei's Divining Top + Counterbalance. For those not following the game, this combo lets you rearrange the top of your deck all the time and if your opponent plays a card that has the same cost as the top card of your deck, then the Counterbalance will not let them play the card. So by continuously rearranging the top cards of your deck you can keep your opponent locked out forever.
So I thought "Lotr is as good game as any to bring this concept into effect". Ergo my new try. I call it "Lockapult". Yes, it's a stupid name.
The main thought revolves around using
Catapult all the time to maximize its effect.
Catapult is an amazing card, able to discard ANYTHING in the maneuver phase, making it effectively the hardest counter against any shadow IF IT HITS. But we don't want to just be lucky, do we?
First problem is that the
Catapult does not reveal OUR deck, it reveals our opponent's deck. What we do about that? We do
Halls of my Home. This allows us to look at the opponent's deck and rearrange the top cards so that our
catapult does not fire at random. Since this happens after they reconcile, we get to keep his card on top during the shadow phase.
What we need now is to be able to know what's in our opponent's hand, so that we can put what we need on top of his deck, and maybe even force his hand a bit to our advantage. That's what gandalf does. The Palantir of Orthank,
Recovered Seeing Stone and
Treachery Deeper than you know let us see the opponent's hand, look at his minions' twilight cost and then cast our
Halls of my Home to prepare to hard counter his only win condition: his minions.
In addition to that,
A new Light lets us even make his hand into something we can discard more easily by giving him the twilight cost we can discard with
Catapult.
So the combo consists of
Catapult,
Halls of my Home, The Palantir of Orthank,
A new light,
Treachery deeper than you know. It effectively goes like this: "Palantir of orthank, look their hand, see 3 minions with casting cost 3 and one with 4. Play
a new light, return a 3 cost to hand, discard a 4 cost. Play
Halls of my Home, put a 3 cost card on top of the opponent's deck. Whatever comes down you can
catapult away.
This is quite a stacked combo, because it needs a dwarf with lots of vitality, gandalf and two knights to even be able to assemble. Therefore the easiest path seems to be
Gimli, Bearer of Grudges,
Gandalf, Leader of Men,
Isildur, Sword-bearer and Aragorn+ Elendil as bonus knights to make the
Catapult work.
The deck also needs ways to take back its events.
Grimir, Dwarven Elder and
Ring of Guile help us get
Halls of my Home back,
Barliman Butterbur, Prancing Pony Proprietor and
fireworks to get our
A new light back. We also need a lot of draw since we will be discarding our hand a lot. Gimli with
delving and Questions that need answers can both help us. Finally we will need some healing for our dwarf, so
Dark Ways and Isildur can come handy.
The deck can also benefit from cards like
What are we waiting for? etc.
The main problem is that the fellowship consists of too many cards. The second problem is what happens if our
Halls of my home do not reveal the twilight costs that we want.
That's why I need your help to overcome those problems. Any input for the deck and how it would fare anyone???