After walking you through making a deck from the core set that I used to use, now we are going to go over a guide on how to make your own from start to end. Deck building can be the most daunting task in the Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game. Some people start looking at all of the cards and have one of those moments where their mind explodes. Deck building is one of those things that can be done in many different ways. Keep in mind this is one of the many ways of making a deck.
Goal
The first step of deck building will be figuring out the goal of the deck. What do you want your deck to accomplish? Do you want a “theme” deck, where all of your cards share similar traits like hobbits or dwarves? Or do you want you have a specific ability in mind? With just the Core Set at your disposal, the card pool to pick from for a theme deck is kind of out of the picture. However, you can apply the same concepts I will cover here to make a themed deck.
Since a theme deck is out of the question, we will look at abilities. Do we want our deck to be a questing powerhouse? Do we want to be the fighter in our group, the guy who does all of the fighting? Do we want to manipulate our deck, trying to get the best cards out of it? Or do we want to manipulate the encounter deck and it’s cards in the staging area? These are some of the examples abilities you can pick from. No matter your ability, you need to think, “How will my deck be able to handle the encounter deck?”
For this example, let us build a deck that is good at manipulating both our deck and the encounter deck. So this will be the abilities we need to look for when building our deck.
Picking a Sphere
Lucky for us, most of the abilities are segregated out into the spheres of influence in the game. Once you have your goal in mind you can then check out which spheres do what, and that will give you a direction to start in.
- Lore: drawing cards, healing, manipulating both the player and encounter decks, managing location and threat levels of the encounter deck
- Tactics: damage, attacking, defending, tanking
- Leadership: generating resources, manipulating your deck, and readying
- Spirit: manipulating your deck, location and threat management, canceling treacheries, readying, boosting willpower, and getting cards back that have been played already
Based on our ability from above that we are setting as our goal and our list of the spheres here, we would be able to use Spirit, Lore, and some of Leadership. We are going to go the Spirit/Lore way because they fit the outline of our goal much closer.
Picking Heroes
As we discussed in our other tutorial, with just the Core Set, we will have 3 heroes to consider per a sphere of influence. If you look at the six heroes to pick from:
- Éowyn
- Eleanor
- Dúnhere
- Denethor
- Glorfindel
- Beravor
Based on our theme we are going with, the four heroes that perform well with that theme best are Éowyn, Eleanor, Denethor, and Beravor. Next we will compare them all and see what we want to pick.
Éowyn has really good stats for questing and she has her ability to discard a card to increase her willpower. In my opinion, she is a must have for this deck. Eleanor has a low starting threat, decent defense compared to Éowyn, but her magic lies in her ability. You can exhaust her to cancel the ‘when revealed’ effects of a treachery card, and replace it with a new card from the deck. This will come in handy, since we are going to be coming up short on physical power with this deck. However, lets keep looking at the other too. Denethor is another Hero with low starting threat, he has great defense for the Core Set. His ability allows us to exhaust him to look at the top card of the encounter deck. If we do not like what we see, we can move it to the bottom. This card has some potential. Not only does he have 3 Defense, but he also has the ability to alter the next card from the encounter deck, and for us to be prepared for it.
Lastly, is Beravor. She is a personal favorite of mine from the Core Set. However, of the four heroes we are looking at, she does have the highest threat. She has 2’s down the board with 4 Hitpoints so she is the most rounded out hero of the list. Her ability allows us to exhaust her and pick a player. That player can draw 2 cards, but it has a limit of once per round.
With all of this information in mind and our theme in mind we can now see which ones are our best 3. Éowyn is a must for this deck. She is going to be the dedicated quester. This puts our starting threat at 9. Next, I say Eleanor is crucial to this deck. We will not have a big beefy hero to defend us, so we need a hero who can defend us from treacheries at least. So Eleanor gets a spot. This makes our starting threat 16.
The last one is going to be the hardest choice. Beravor will give us some great card draw ability each turn. However Denethor will allow us to alter the encounter deck more than once a turn if we can find a way to ready him in the middle of the turn. I think we will go with Denethor for this deck. I like the ability to change what card the enemy gets to use and think that could really help keep us alive. This makes our starting threat level 24! This is going to be very helpful.
Picking Allies
Picking allies is where things will start to get a little more difficult because sometimes the allies can be deceivingly useful/useless. So we will have to sit down and look at each one to see which ones will make the list. Some people will follow a ratio of 50% allies/ 25% attachments/ 25% events, but we will not set out to do so. I believe that sometimes prevents people from trying new things with their decks.
We will start with the spirit allies because there are only 3 in the Core Set, The Wandering Took, The Lorien Guide, and the Northern Tracker. The Wandering Took is out automatically because it’s ability will only work when you are playing with more than one player. Both of the other two will provide us with some location management. What that means, is they will give us a way to handle locations, as the encounter deck deals them out. Both of their abilities work when they are sent questing. The Guide will put a progress token on the active location, just for joining in the quest, and the Tracker will put 1 progress token on ALL of the locations in the staging area. Together, you can blow through locations in no time flat. We will include 2 of each in the deck.
Next up is the Lore allies. First is Henamarth Riversong. It only costs 1 to play and allows us to look at the top card of the encounter deck. This will be great addition to our deck. There is only one to bring along in a single Core Set. Next up is the Erebor Hammersmith. When he is played you can grab the topmost attachment from your discard pile and add it to your hand. We will add 2 of him as well.
Miner of the Iron Hills is next and he allows us to choose 1 Condition attachment and remove it from play. If any of you have been reading the play test with the first deck we made, you will know this will be a great card to handle the A Caught in a Web treachery. We will be adding 2 of him as well. Gleowine will allow us to exhaust it to draw 1 card. This will be a helpful way for some card draw. We will add 2 of these as well. Daughter of the Nimrodel is going to be our healer. We can exhuast her to heal up to 2 damage on any 1 hero. This will come in handy if we get in trouble.
- Lorien Guide x2
- Northern Tracker x2
- Henamarth Riversong x1
- Erebor Hammersmith x2
- Miner of the Iron Hills x2
- Gleowine x2
- Daughter of the Nimrodel x3
- ————–Total: 14——————
We now have our allies lined up. They all will either help us with our cause directly or will give us some minor way of support (like the Minor of the Iron Hills).
Picking Attachments
We will follow the same method for picking attachments. We need to find attachments that will help our theme. If they go against our theme they are out.
We will keep it going with Spirit first like above. Power in the Earth is a decent one. We can attach that to a location to reduce its threat by 1. This can work well if we get stuck early on. We will add 2 of these. The Favor of the Lady will increase attached hero’s willpower by 1. We can definitely take these and pile them on Eowyn. We will also take both of them. Unexpected Courage is pretty much a must have for every Spirit deck. It allows attached hero to ready if you exhaust Unexpected Courage. This can be useful in tons of situations. We will take our 1 copy.
Now the Lore cards. Protector of Lorien will give attached hero the ability to discard a card to increase defense or willpower by 1 until the end of the phase. This could help out as well if we get into a bind. We will take 2. Dark Knowledge would give attached hero -1 willpower. But we would have the ability to exhaust Dark Knowledge to look at 1 shadow card that was just dealt to an enemy. I would take this, but we will have better cards in events to help us. Forest snare is going to be one of our trump cards. Forest snare will attach to an enemy that is engaged with us. Once we attach it, the enemy can not attack at all. We will take 2. Lastly is Self Preservation. We attach it to a character. We can exhaust Self Preservation, and it will allow us to remove 2 damage from the character. We will take 1 of these.
So far our deck looks like this:
Heroes-
- Eowyn
- Eleanor
- Denethor
- ——–Total: 3——-
Allies-
- Lorien Guide x2
- Northern Tracker x2
- Henamarth Riversong x1
- Erebor Hammersmith x2
- Miner of the Iron Hills x2
- Gleowine x2
- Daughter of the Nimrodel x3
- Gandalf x3
- ————–Total: 17——————
Attachments-
- Power in the Earth x2
- The Favor of the Lady x2
- Unexpected Courage x1
- Protector of Lorien x2
- Forest Snare x2
- Self Preservation x1
- ————–Total: 10——————
Our deck is coming together quite nicely. Now the only thing we need to add is our events.
Picking Events
I left us plenty of room when we go to pick event cards because I know my guilty pleasure are the event cards. I always end up wanting way more than will fit into the deck. We will look at these the same was as the others.
Up first is Strength of Will. Normally I take this. It is free to play, all you have to do is exhaust a spirit character when you travel to put 2 progress tokens on the new location. We will not have any of our spirit characters ready after questing except Eleanor. Hasty stroke will allow us to cancel shadow cards. We will take 2 of these. Will of the West will let us take our discard pile and shuffle it into our deck. We will take 2 of these for now.
A Test of Will will allow us to cancel the When Revealed effects on a card just revealed. We will take 2 of these. Dwarven tomb will let us return 1 Spirit card from our discard pile to our hand. We will take the only copy. A light in the dark allows us to take an enemy we are engaged with and return it to the staging area. We will not be taking this along because we will have our forest snares. The Galadhrim’s Greeting we will definitely take, because it lets us reduce our threat by 6. Fortune or Fate will allow us to revive a dead hero. We will not take this(and hopefully we will not need it). Lastly is Stand and Fight. Stand and Fight will let us bring back and characters from the discard pile. We will take 3 copies of this.
For the Lore cards, we have Radagast’s Cunning/Secret Paths. They both work similarly, just with different targets. Radagast’s Cunning will allows us to choose an enemy in the staging area. The one we pick does not contribute its threat. Secret Paths does the same but with locations. We will be taking 2 of each. Lore of Imladris will be another healing card. It will let us completely heal one character. We will take 1 of these. Next is Lorien’s Wealth. This will allow one player to draw 3 cards. We will take 2 of these. Beorn’s Hospitality Will heal all heroes of chosen player.we will take none of these. Lastly is Gandalf’s Secret. This card will let us look at cards on the top of our deck and take one of them and add it to our hand, and then we can place the remaining cards back on top of the deck. Which means we will know what is coming up. This fits perfectly with our theme. We will take 2 of these.
Now to take another look at our deck updated with event cards:
Heroes-
- Eowyn
- Eleanor
- Denethor
- ——–Total: 3——-
Allies-
- Lorien Guide x2
- Northern Tracker x2
- Henamarth Riversong x1
- Erebor Hammersmith x2
- Miner of the Iron Hills x2
- Gleowine x2
- Daughter of the Nimrodel x3
- Gandalf x3
- ————–Total: 17——————
Attachments-
- Power in the Earth x2
- The Favor of the Lady x2
- Unexpected Courage x1
- Protector of Lorien x2
- Forest Snare x2
- Self Preservation x1
- ————–Total: 10——————
Events-
- Hasty Stroke x2
- Will of the West x2
- Test of Will x2
- Dwarven Tomb x1
- The Galadhrim’s Greeting x2
- Stand and Fight x3
- Radagast’s Cunning x2
- Secret Paths x2
- Lore of Imladris x1
- Lorien’s Wealth x2
- Gandalf’s Search x2
- ———Total: 21——
Rounding Out the Deck
We have a 48 card deck. However, we have 24 Lore cards in this deck. With only 1 Lore hero we should try to keep the amount of Lore cards to 1/3 (the number of pertaining heroes we have for Lore). So what we need to do know is look into what we can change about this deck to fix this issue. We can get rid of one Daughter of the Nimrodel and our Self Preservation. We can add our additional Lorien Guide to this as well. Now we have 22/47 cards being Lore. We are getting closer. Now we need to look at additional cards we can add extra copies of for spirit to balance it out some. We have added the maximum capacity on the Spirit cards we have, so we can add 3 copies of Wondering Took. His ability will be of no use to us, but with the limited card pool of the Core Set, it is the best we can come up with. We will also take out our Lore of Imladris and 1 of our copies of Lorien’s Wealth.
Since we have added the Wandering Tooks we can now add the Strength of Wills and that will leave us with 50 cards. Now our of Lore for the deck is 20/50. This is not the best ratio, but with only one Core Set, this is the best that can be done.
Here is our deck now:
- Eowyn
- Eleanor
- Denethor
- ——–Total: 3——-
Allies-
- Lorien Guide x3
- Northern Tracker x2
- Wandering Took x3
- Henamarth Riversong x1
- Erebor Hammersmith x2
- Miner of the Iron Hills x2
- Gleowine x2
- Daughter of the Nimrodel x2
- Gandalf x3
- ————–Total: 20——————
Attachments-
- Power in the Earth x2
- The Favor of the Lady x2
- Unexpected Courage x1
- Protector of Lorien x2
- Forest Snare x2
- ————–Total: 9——————
Events-
- Strength of Will x2
- Hasty Stroke x2
- Will of the West x2
- Test of Will x2
- Dwarven Tomb x1
- The Galadhrim’s Greeting x2
- Stand and Fight x3
- Radagast’s Cunning x2
- Secret Paths x2
- Lorien’s Wealth x1
- Gandalf’s Search x2
- ———Total: 21——
Figure Out the Cards You Will Need in Your Opening Hand
Looking at our cards here for this deck, we need some questing ability right off the bat, and of course some threat reduction. The cards I would look for with this deck in my first hand would be: The Galadhrim’s Greeting, Unexpected Courage, Favor of the Lady, Test of Will, and the Lorien Guide. Maybe even Henamarth Riversong or Gleowine as well. If I did not get at least half of those cards, I would take a mulligan.
Play-Testing
Now that you have your deck created, and you figured out what you need to make it start off well, the last part is to test it out. Play out a quest. Grade it. Critique it. Did it perform how you expected it? For this deck:
Did it reduce our threat enough? How often did we actually get to manipulate the encounter deck or our deck? Did we get bogged down in locations? After you answer some of these questions you move onto updating your deck. What cards can you remove to increase performance?
If your deck does not work well on the first try do not fret. This game can be harsh at times. Sometimes the encounter deck knows when you have a crappy hand or are low on resources and just decides to crap on you. Give it a few tries before you rule out that the deck is bad.
The goal of this deck is to be able to help with questing, and deal out some serious punishement. 
Her ability is also going to be used to help us boost our hobbit hero, Frodo. Her ability lets us give a character Sentinel and +1 defense. Because of Frodo’s ability, this is a great bonus to him, giving him 3 defense. This will make him quite formidable.
The Cliched Tavern 