Daeron's Runes

Event. Cost: 0.

Action: Draw 2 cards. Then, discard 1 card from your hand.

"These are Daeron's Runes, such as were used of old in Moria..."
Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring
Carolina Eade

Foundations of Stone #108. Lore.

Daeron's Runes
Reviews

I would argue that Daeron's Runes should be a three-of in every deck that has a Lore hero. Conventional card game wisdom goes that you should build the smallest deck possible, so as to get your most important cards early and often. Three copies of this free, instant draw effect - for most purposes - reduces your minimum deck size to 47, with the barely-existent drawback of having to discard something afterwards. You'll almost never have a full hand of things you immediately need or can't replace, and you'll often want to dig for a specific card that you need more than what you currently have. You'll also probably have extra uniques to toss at some point, or cards that you can interact with in the discard pile later.

I started using this card. Thanks for the recommendation. I made a deck with Elrond, Daeron's Runes, Vilya, and Will of the West and it has been awesome. Been able to get Vilya out quickly and if I happend to throw something away I need now, I can still WotW a card back into my deck. — k_rock 23
is this card really that good? I mean, you draw two cards for free, but since you have to discard another card and you are using daeron's runes, when all is settled, you have the same amount of cards in your hand. I know it helps find you important cards, but it's not really card draw. I feel like King under the Mountain is better. — BlackArrow 309
Daeron's Runes is powerful not because it draws cards, but because it successfully thins your deck for free. This is similar to why people will throw in 3x We Are Not Idle to optimize start for any deck running leadership. — kjeld 612

I find it weird that this card has only one review, so i decided to make sure that everyone know this is the second best card in the game, after steward of gondor. If you're running lore, you need to run this, 3x. It makes you go through deck way faster, and the selected discard means you can ditch the least useful (or useless) card at the moment and keep going. It's a card that makes foundations of stone a good expansion to purchase multiple copies of.

Zura 297

This is literally the most broken card in the entire game. And I mean design-fail level flawed one. It just must be auto-include in any deck able to cast it (having hero with a lore resource icon, or Song of Wisdom). The card costs nothing. It replaces itself, filters a player deck and you can even play it when you draw it and quest prevents you from getting any resources (I mean no rebuy, just zero cost). Imagine you have two combo piecies in your deck and no limit for a number of copies in a deck. Would you be better running 25 card A and 25 card be? Or one copy of card A, one copy of card B, and 48 copies of this madness? You could draw 15 cards A in a row and never assemble the combo. Similarly, you must have noticed how Surge keyword is anoying. Imagine simple treachery card: "The first player chooses a character. Deal 1 damage to that character. Surge." Well, encounter deck consisting only of copies of such card would make you lose on the spot! In Magic the Gathering, this would be the best card printed ever, like 500% than Black Lotus. I don't get how this could ever see print.

I personally disagree that this is the most design-warping card in the game (I'm more partial to thinking so of Smoke Rings myself, as it necessitates limits on the number of Pipes they create) but I definitely agree with you that it is broken. Yes, FFG, free card draw/filtering is good. — AlasForCeleborn 681
I disagree with your comparison to Black Lotus. Black Lotus was broken because it was always to good. Daeron's Runes is broken because it is never bad. A MTG with Lotus gains a far larger advantage than a LOTR LCG deck with Runes. — NERD 808

Others have already said it, but I'll also say it: with no known exceptions, you must play three copies of this card in every deck that has a Lore hero. I suppose if there was a quest where discarding a card would mean you lose the game or incur some big penalty, then that would be an exception to the rule, but I'm not aware of any such quest.

DunYoss 34
There are quests in the Voice of Isengart/Ringmaker Cycle that punish you for drawing cards that also fall in this category. Otherwise you're right. — Roka 1584
I consider this to be the best card in the game by quite a comfortable margin. — Mormegil 3062

This is a great card draw tool, as mentioned below, I don’t think I have to convince anyone about it. But about the deck-thinning aspect, different from what others said, 3x Daeron's Runes make your deck size effectively 44, not 47. If you imagine you only have 2 cards left in the deck, after you play it you have 0 cards, so two cards less than the nominal number (it doesn't matter that you have to discard one, it's as if it never existed in your deck). In terms of card draw, you end up having the same hand size, but you see two new cards; often you have duplicates or cards you are not particularly interested in (or which you give less value to what you could potentially draw), so in many cases you thin your deck by one card (replacing Daeron's Runes) and get a new, potentially interesting card (thinning your deck by one more). A 0-cost card that does card draw and deck thinning this way must be one of the most powerful cards of this type.

fiffox 62