I've played against this deck a number of times. Yes, it can be time consuming, and it is tough to play against, but I don't think it's as bad as the Gamling horn filter, which is the only deck I truly regard to be totally unbalanced for Expanded. Gil-galad is key to this strategy, just kill him and the loop is over. This loop can do a lot, but it doesn't have healing.
Ya know, I'm starting to rethink this a bit. I still think it's a perfectly legitimate deck, but (based on my experiences so far) may be stronger than I initially gave credit. If you're careful, it really is very difficult to kill Gil-galad, and so long as he's in play, the strategy remains pretty strong no matter who else gets killed. Lately it's been easier to beat the Gamling Horn Filter than this deck, maybe because I've just figured out the best way to play against them. If this deck were to incorporate substantial healing capabilities, I think it has the potential to be one of the strongest things out there.
Yes if you look at this deck in a vacuum, it is strong, and does a lot of things other decks may not, but it is almost completely open to any wounding strategy, and takes some turns to set up, and when Gil-Galad gets killed, it is just a pile of mediocre cards. Heck, even a single shotgun Enquea is a huge threat for this.
I feel like you should be able to incorporate some decent healing capabilities into this design. I still think you'd be better off with
Nenya, Ring of Adamant rather than the original
Nenya. I don't really see what original
Nenya gets you, since you already have as much card drawing in Regroup as you want. With
Ring of Adamant and
Hosts of the Last Alliance,
Aiglos, and
Vilya, it seems highly unlikely to me that Gil-galad could get killed.
I would consider putting in multiple copies of
Celebring, keep killing my fellowship off down to 5 with
Celebring on a guy, then using
Gamling to pull out another
Celebring to get another artifact. I'd also put in multiple hats, just to make sure I can keep getting it.
*It has one way to gain the necessary tokens besides conditions. I would get Gift of the Evenstar with Celebring - you need a safer token starter.
I agree. It seems to me that
Gift of the Evenstar, Blessed Light is also the biggest key to being able to reset the loop if your conditions get discarded. And once it's out, it's basically impossible to get rid of, unless the opponent has Grond.
*Saurman's Power shuts things down for a site. Unlike Madril, this deck wants MoW for Forearmed, instead of being able to block with Wise Guide.
I agree here too. If I were you, I would swap out MoW for
Wise Guide, and forget about telepathy for
Forearmed. Once Smeagol is set up with
Don't Look at Them, you can kill literally anything. Whatever's left over, you can probably deal with using the tokens on your conditions.
*The key card is not in the starting fellowship. 4 out of 106 can get pretty deep sometimes. I'd remove some of the side cards like Asfaloth for safety.
That's a good point. And yet, so far he's gotten Gil-galad sufficiently fast every time I've played him.
*Without its 1 Gandalf's Hat, it has trouble double moving. Corsairs will pitch that hat. Archery will pitch that hat.
Good points (although how does archery pitch the hat?). I'd add more copies of
Gandalf's Hat, or have some way to get it back. The hat is key to the double.
*It discards stuff in regroup which can be too late against Greed or Rapid Reload. I'd run Gladden Homestead, like sgtdraino's Madril.
What about
Namarie instead? Aragorn will put one token on it, which you can then reinforce.
*There's more site-hate, like the mountain that stops tokens or the remove-from-game on discard sites. Madril has less site-hate because no site removes threats.
Well, he's got
Follow Smeagol, so he should be able to avoid most of those site hate problems. I think he can generally make it through a bad site or two.
In real life, this deck is unplayable because it would time out frequently. Is it negative to play against on Gemp? Possibly but not really.
I think he's said that it's actually
faster for him when he plays it in real life, though that is difficult for me to imagine doing. All those interactions make my head spin.
Madril is NPE because it reverses the basic structure of the game - it takes something that's normally a negative and makes it a positive. This is not NPE.
I've never found Madril to be NPE, because it's pretty easy to prepare for, with a simple
Ships of Great Draught. I do think this deck does drift a bit in that direction, because it can get pretty tedious waiting for the loooooooong Regroup phases to complete. However, I still think it is within the realm of legitimate strategy.
I'd like to add that I'm playing this fellowship to support the shadow side as it makes it easier to find the silver bullets against a lot of popular strategies.
In that way, it is a bit similar to the filter properties of a Horn Deck: Gives good Shadow setup, but does leave the Fellowship somewhat vulnerable... particularly to archery.
Right now my win ratio is around 65% which includes the games I played with the very first version of this deck, and the vast majority of my wins are shadow wins (22-13 over all, 7-2 with the latest version - since I ditched the elven brothers).
I think you can make it better. I totally think you can improve your Fellowship side even more.
Topic: High King loop/telepathy - Nazgul (Read 28952 times)
