Starter - The Shire

Format: King Standard

Author: Phallen

Ring-bearer:
Ring:

Adventure deck:

Free Peoples Draw Deck:
1x
1x
1x
3x
1x
1x
3x
1x
1x
4x
2x
3x
4x
2x
1x
2x
3x
1x

Shadow Draw Deck:
4x
3x
3x
2x
2x
3x
3x
2x
1x
3x
1x
2x
3x
1x
1x
1x

Notes

Black Riders descend on Bag End. I think this is a good beginner deck. The FP is fun combos while the Shadow is straightforward big minions. It covers important concepts too: skirmish loss management and the impact of minimizing twilight (i.e., choke) on the FP side, and various aspects of hand management on the Shadow side. Any deck will need some awareness of them, but they're so important to this one that lessons learned here might transfer over to the others.

Free Peoples: (Starting Sam, Merry, and Pippin. I recommend a low bid, 0-2)
Hobbits have little ability to clear the board or even win skirmishes, but best-in-show healing and good choke potential. That's not as flashy as most other decks, but it is no less effective. Skirmishes you lose will have no lasting impact; this sort of deck is known as a "Hobbit Hospital" deck as any wounds you take will be healed away by your Hobbit support area.

The healing isn't all you have to offer though, this deck has strong choke. You 4 Hobbits give just 11 twilight when moving to site 9. There's no Shadow side that can beat that. In fact, once you get A Talent for Not Being Seen and a few copies of A Promise out, there's not much to fear on any single move. The trouble is that you'll need to make a double or two if you actually want to get to 9, and doubling requires more strategy and planning for this Free Peoples. Where other decks would spend a pump in the first move to kill a minion and open the door for a second move, you will probably want to withhold on a pump in the first move (often losing the a skirmish that could be won otherwise) in order to have it on deck for the second.

Put another way: most Free Peoples are concerned with how to win skirmishes, but playing this deck effectively means figuring out the most beneficial way to *lose* skirmishes. Skirmish pumps are less to keep you from losing skirmishes and more to keep you from being overwhelmed while high Hobbit vitality and reliable healing cover the rest. There are plenty of 1-vitality minions worth beating and you have Dagger strike and Cliffs of Emyn Muil, so it's not as if you're never going to be killing anything. But big picture, winning the game for Hobbits is about losing skirmishes in the most efficient way possible.

Shadow:
Your standard beatdown Nazgul, the primary oppressor that makes decks require condition removal. Black Breath and Blade Tip put a timer on how many turns a companion can survive. Blade Tip requires you to win a skirmish first, which should not be a problem for your biggest Nazgul even before you equip them with Black Steed and Morgul Blade. For the matchups where it is, Morgul Blade gives you a way to put Blade Tip on those companions anyway. From discard, no less!

It's not all upside though, this deck suffers from the classic Nazgul troubles: it's all unique and expensive minions. Especially in the back 3 sites, you will have enough twilight for 3 minions but only be able to play 2 because of duplicates. Your hand can become clogged with more minions than you can play if you're not careful, and your Hobbits need cards if they're going to be able to survive. Sometimes you will need to play a supporting card to no effect in order to cycle through your deck: if you have several copies of the same 2 Nazgul in hand, you want to burn Morgul Gates anyway just to get it out of hand, and you will probably be reconciling Shadow cards. The Witch-king and Out of Sight and Shot are solutions to bad hands, but you'd often rather use WK on supporting cards and OoSaS to pile onto a good hand.

Not Easily Destroyed is a neat little card with a few uses. First and foremost it removes the natural limit of Ulaire Enquea's text. If your opponent has 9 companions, they are dumping a ton of twilight and betting on you only being able to use Enquea three times. "Kill a companion" isn't a big deal when you have 8 others, but "exhaust 4 important companions and force your opponent to kill unimportant ones until they're back down to 5" is game-ending. If your opponent doesn't have many companions though, the skirmish ability will be a big asset against skirmish wounding and Rohan, which about half of the FPs will be employing.

Wreathed in Shadow is only in here for the Parapets matchup, and I'm thinking it will be replaced with the more versatile All Blades Perish instead once I see how fearsome the archery really is.