Deck: Beregond’s Gondorian Armoury – Everything Free!

So Wilds of Rhovanion has been out for a while and we’ve seen many variations on the Dale deck spring up and show off how powerful they are. But one other idea which I think many people had when cards were being spoiled but which few people have actually tried to build since the release, is the basis of this deck. The idea is simply to combine Tactics Beregond with the Long Lake Trader to effectively play all your weapons and armour for free (by playing them for free on Beregond and then moving them to other characters using the Long Lake Trader).

Now of course there are limits to this idea. Some weapons and armour are limited to certain traits. You can’t use this method to get free Rivendell Blades, for example, because Beregond isn’t an elf. However any weapon or armour attachment which attaches to hero, Gondor, Warrior or just Tactics works here. I considered the possibility of a variant which would make Beregond an Elf-friend first, but it gets extra-janky when you realise that if you want Bows of the Galadhrim you need to get Elf-friend, Rivendell Bow, Bow of the Galadhrim in that precise order before it works. It might work but it’d be kind of slow and inconsistent. Going with the ones which can naturally attach to Beregond works fine though.

Some complications remain – you can’t stack Beregond with an ideal setup (whatever you might consider that to be) because you have to keep his Restricted slots free to hold attachments intended for other people, so this deck may have more difficulty with quests that throw big boss enemies at you; but a lot of the time Beregond’s base defence of 4 will still be enough and so you can feel free to move everything off him. Of course the Long Lake Trader can be triggered in any action window so it’s possible for both Beregond and the other recipient to benefit from the same attachment in the round it’s played. The deck starts to get really crazy when you have multiple Traders in play since you can then start shuttling attachments back and forth, though of course it’s important to remember while doing this that if you want to move an attachment back to Beregond later that’s only possible if you keep it on one of your characters, since your Traders can’t move attachments which are controlled by other players.

The deck:

Beregond’s Gondorian Armoury – Everything Free!

Heroes:
Bifur
Boromir (Ta)
Beregond (Ta)

Allies (18):
Long Lake Trader x3
Master of the Forge x3
Defender of Rammas x3
Gondorian Spearman x3
Warrior of Dale x3
Defender of Cair Andros x3

Attachments (20):
Song of Battle x3
Gondorian Shield x3
Spear of the Citadel x3
Raiment of War x3
Bow of Yew x3
Dagger of Westernesse x3
Raven-winged Helm x2

Events (12):
Daeron’s Runes x3
Open the Armory x3
Foe-hammer x3
Feint x3

Sideboard:
Warden of Healing
Honour Guard
Galadhon Archer
Marksman of Lorien
Deorwine
Azain Silverbeard
Blade of Gondolin
Dwarven Axe
Secret Vigil
Deep Knowledge

Sideboard notes first – ideally you want another player to bring healing, but if not you should probably include it for yourself. Honour Guards I usually love to have but in this case they don’t make a lot of use of weapons or armour so they don’t fit as well, still an option though. The Silvan allies may be handy inclusions, especially the Galadhon Archers if you want cheaper attackers, it largely comes down to preference and how much Ranged is important, same goes for the additional unique allies. The other weapons can be swapped in where they’d be particularly relevant – if the quest has Orcs for Blades of Gondolin, if there are more heroes to take weapons and particularly if those heroes are Dwarves (Dwarven Axe is pretty decent when it’s free as it turns out). Finally Secret Vigils and Deep Knowledge depend on how you feel about your threat.
Running the actual deck, I would mulligan primarily for the Long Lake Trader since everything is built around him, but I might still keep an opening hand with a Master of the Forge since that’ll help thin the deck and get everything going. Bifur’s ability is very useful in allowing you to play these 2-cost allies quickly, and beyond that of course you just give him a Song of Battle to help play all the Tactics allies as well. Some of the Tactics allies are quite costly, but since after factoring in Beregond there are only one attachment and one event that aren’t free this should be manageable.
The most significant note on the strategy is to reiterate that you need to think ahead about your attachments. It may be very tempting to just throw a Gondorian Shield onto Beregond, but if you then want to play a Raiment of War you may find yourself in the weird situation of needing to shuttle the Shield onto Bifur to make room for the Raiment (assuming Boromir already has a Shield), then subsequently move the Raiment elsewhere and put the Shield back. It may be simpler to just not play the Shield in the first place and rely on Beregond’s base 4 defence.

Good pairings for this deck – obviously this is a combat focused deck so its companions should be able to handle questing. This deck has a mixed relationship with Dale decks – it can hand out some extra attachments to them, but that won’t trigger the card draw from Brand since the Dale player didn’t play the attachment themself. On the other hand this deck can make some nice use of Bard Son of Brand’s second ability to hold onto all the attachments when characters die or get discarded – and because of how this deck works you don’t even lose any resources playing those attachments again. This deck also obviously works well with decks which can play other weapon or armour attachments onto Beregond to be moved around. The other players will still benefit from Beregond’s cost reduction in this circumstance, so this is very nice if they want to throw around some Hauberks of Mail, for example. Finally it can also be good if other decks have useful targets for some of the attachments rather than just this deck. Of course I designed this deck with a decent number of good targets so you’re not dependent on other players’ deckbuilding choices, but it’s still nice to have additional options.

No screenshot as I tested this out using actual cards instead of OCTGN. It held up just fine against the first two quests in Wilds of Rhovanion in 3-player. It could perhaps be more optimised if I really wanted, but it works and it’s fun, which is enough for most purposes.