(See previous Days of Yuletide here.)
As announced on Day 2, Shadow of the Past (Set V1) will be released into public playtesting in the coming weeks. Today we would like to highlight some of the cards from the Moria culture and give a little more background to design decisions behind this release.
Moria as an archetype has always been a solid contender in the Fellowship block, and there was little if anything that needed to be added to the well-oiled machine of goblin swarms. However, there are some aspects of the culture that never really took off, and so we set our sights on addressing those.
Of course we are talking about tentacles:
Simply put, the tentacle deck (theoretically based around Watcher in the Water) is a newbie trap. Everybody tries to give it a shot at one time or another, but until the release of set 19, there wasn’t a truly viable way to reliably get the marsh-loving worms out, even with Evil-smelling Fens making marshes a little more bearable.
And of course those cards don’t help anyone playing in Fellowship block, which is where Set V1 comes in.
There are two big problems with tentacles in Fellowship: there are too few minions, and it is prohibitively difficult to reliably play them, seeing as there are only two marshes in the whole site path (Midgewater Moors and Moria Lake). These are not the only problems with the archetype, but no amount of help would do anything unless these two are addressed.
Our first card kills two birds with one stone:
Vile Tentacle aims to be the opening play for tentacles the way that Goblin Scavengers is for standard Moria. Unlike all other tentacles, it is allowed to be played at non-marsh sites (albeit at a steep strength penalty), and then with this toe-hold on the battlefield, it can cycle Moria cards to turn the site into a marsh.
But what Moria cards are you willing to throw away into your discard pile? Well, here’s one option:
Thrashing Tentacle is the perfect fodder to be used for Vile Tentacle’s ability: if you stick it in the discard pile, then play enough other tentacles and/or the Watcher, you can pull the Thrashing Tentacle right back out! And of course as the game winds on and your discard pile grows, these tentacles will be sitting there, ready and waiting for the right time to emerge from the dark pool once more.
But no matter what you do, you are likely to at some point clog with too many tentacles at the wrong time, so there is also a new option for setting up the perfect hand-away-from-hand:
Out of Dark Waters allows you to spend twilight to stack your tentacles in an accessible place outside your hand, similar to how Goblin Swarms works for standard Moria. It’s not free, but neither is letting your opponent march unopposed down the site path because you’re clogged with a hand full of unplayable tentacles.
The defensive response also means that you can do so without losing too much sleep over condition removal outright deleting your well-stocked larder. By sacrificing stacked tentacles, you can keep the rest ready to fight another day–and if the one you sacrifice is a Thrashing Tentacle, well, it might not even be a bad thing.
As mentioned, this card is similar to Goblin Swarms, but the tactical usage is somewhat different. With Swarms, you want to put out as many as you happen to have, and then spread your goblins across all of them to minimize losses if your opponent discards one of them. With Dark Waters it’s the opposite–since discarding 1 tentacle can save many others, you want them all stacked on one card to minimize the number of tentacles you need to discard to keep the Waters intact. Nevertheless the card is non-unique, just in case you need a backup and to avoid penalizing you for sticking multiple copies in your deck.
The Watcher in the Water isn’t the only big minion running around in Moria, of course, and we’ve also thought to try and improve the Balrog’s utility a bit. Everyone packs at least one copy of the Balrog in Fellowship block, of course, but there’s a number of cards that want to use the Balrog on a more dedicated basis. Unfortunately they have to deal with the fact that the Balrog is only usable at 1, maybe 2 sites, and so any strategy relying on using it is fraught with risk.
Thus, we have a card to try and give a little more use to ol’ Burny-Smokey when he’s not eating speed bumps at site 5:
With an early Terror out on the table and a (normally) unlucky Balrog in your hand, you can squeeze a couple more twilight out per move until you can offload him at the Bridge of Khazad-dum as normal, which is certainly better than the uncompensated hand clog you got before.
Decks that want to include more than one copy of the Balrog (which might not include Fellowship block, but might include Movie and above) will also be able to use this to get yet even more twilight on the rest of the site path, albeit at the cost of one card slot (which isn’t much of a cost if you were going to play The Balrog anyway).
That’s it for today’s spoiler! Be sure to check back tomorrow for Day 4 of the 12 Days of Yuletide!
The White Council 