Company of the Ring 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

I had two goals/constraints in mind when building this deck for general play:

• Utilize the Fellowship Contract with the canon Fellowship.
• Experiment with ALeP's neutral Aragorn and his Titles.

The result isn't the most efficient deck ever, but I've had a lot of fun with it and won far more quests than I've lost.

At Setup:

• Mulligan for Sam Gamgee and Bill the Pony in that order.
• The One Ring goes on Boromir. Grab Inner Strength and play it on him as soon as is reasonable.
• Aragorn takes Estel, so he can both pay for Inner Strength/Sam and dig for other cards that are useful early (e.g., Gondorian Shield to support Boromir as defender, cheap allies for questing power).

Thorongil should always be used to grab Loragorn for threat reduction and Lore sphere access. Keep in mind that A Good Harvest + a Lore Title is the only other method to gain that access.

Bill the Pony is technically the ninth character for the Fellowship contract. Gandalf is generally used for support before the contract is flipped, but he has also helpfully if temporarily flipped the contract for me on more than one occasion when I was still hunting or had just lost a ninth permanent ally.

The inclusion of The Free Peoples is debatable. Often, by the time I'm in a position to use it, I no longer need the extra boost. If you want to remove it, swap it for another copy of Gandalf.

I've gone back and forth on whether to include Gather Information or Send for Aid. In practice, I find I rarely have the breathing room to use either one, so I've defaulted here to the one easier to play and to complete. Including both is counterproductive.

If the condition removal provided by Athelas is not needed for a given quest, the copies of that card can easily be swapped for Song of Healing or The Long Defeat as desired.

If you want to shift The One Ring to Frodo for thematic consistency, drop Inner Strength and one copy of The Master Ring for Shining Shield and Sterner than Steel.