Trait: The Female Falconers 1.0

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Just a couple of notes:

--Why two copies of Gavin? I assume you are going to go fetch him in setup, so if you already have him in hand, you have the dogs you could get instead.

--There might be too many gimmicks for this to work. For example, you cannot play Against the Shadow if you are placing Messenger of the King on Firyal (which ought to by card number 57) in your deck.

@Jtothemac good thoughts. I definitely had some loose ends to tidy up. Corrected in v2.

Unfortunately you can't use MotK Firyal with the Beyond the Original Bargain contract. When you use Messenger of the King with any contracts that specify a number of heroes (Grey Wanderer, At the End of All Things, Bond of Friendship) the MotK hero replaces one of the starting heroes.

alongextendedparty.com

Still a very cool deck though with the falconers!

I believe this ruling is in line with the FTCL, but I don't think it necessarily breaks the game -- the at the end of all things contract specifically mentions your starting heroes for effects, and the MotK Firyal is essentially excluded from that contract. It wouldn't be much different than using sword thaine, except it's a bit more automatic and costs threat instead of resources.

@Jtothemac Sword-thain would require two rounds' worth of resources, plus the resources for playing an eligible ally, and then this ally wouldn't start gaining resources until the next round. That's a massive tempo hit. Using Messenger of the King to add a third hero (instead of making the Messenger of the King one of your two starting heroes, as I believe is intended), you could start with Halfast Gamgee and play a first-turn Steward of Gondor on him, completely negating any major downside of At the End of All Things

@Sackmoney,

you could (MotK) Halfast Gamgee this way, but:

• first he is not a good target for At the End of All Things because he hast not the great startingstats
• seconds, you have to gain Steward of Gondor in your startinghand, possible bur not sure
• 3rd. (and possible the most important one to do not this way) is with the contract At the End of All Things the heroes cannot gain res from attachment-cardeffects and Steward of Gondor is such one.

there is an (easy) option to start with more res and use At the End of All Things that is Denethor if u want that, i recomand this way. (that is not op, might be god but not op)

@doomguard, what I'm saying is that if you use Messenger of the King as it's written and not according to the ALeP Free-to-Choose List in order to get a third hero in conjunction with At the End of All Things, then that hero is not one of your starting heroes and those restrictions do not apply. I do not think this is how it should be played

I see what you're saying about negating a major downside, but it also costs 9 threat to include Halfast, which essentially eliminates one of the upsides of the contract -- namely, low starting threat (not to mention making Strider essentially useless). It wouldn't be much different than playing two copies of Legacy of Númenor.

In this particular case, there isn't any attempt at shenanigans trying to circumvent the contract, but rather get a Firyal into play with two spirit heroes at the cost of 13 threat (9 from MotK and 4 for BtOB). Seems fair enough to me.

It does make me question why you would even need the At the End of All Things contract for this deck anyway. You don't really need the stat buff, and with some clever balancing you could make this a pretty strong location control deck (with plenty of lore cards)

I guess we could also look at any deck with a MotK hero and ask: is a 12-point threat increase worth it in exchange for the non-MotK heroes to get a 1 point boost in every stat, a built-in ready once per round for the first three rounds, 6 free resources plus 2 cards from your entire deck at the beginning of the fourth round, and some sphere-smoothing? Based on the number of Bond of Friendship decks that already start with high threat and manage just fine, I'd say that in the vast majority of instances, that would be a huge boost to the deck.

it is. you will nearly never lost a game where u can reduce thread normally if you are at least an average builder and player