Con of the Rings 2025 Deck Box: A Hail of Progress 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Time to get a little combo heavy for my Con of the Rings 2025 deckbox.

The entire goal here is to take full advantage of Emissary of the East to be able to do some never-before-seen nonsense to the encounter deck in multiplayer. In order to get everything to work you do need to have both Song of Travel and Song of Battle as well as Emissary of the East and Hail of Stones (and maybe even Strength of Arms as well if you want to do some really obnoxious things). So that is at least a 4/5 card combo, which can occasionally be a little tricky to pull off.

I've found there are two good ways to to make a deck that has a big, fancy, multipiece combo: either stuff it with a degenerate amount of card draw or make sure the deck is really good even if the combo doesn't actually fully come to pass. This deck falls into the latter camp (though Ingold does generally provide enough draw to get us where we need to go).

This is a pretty simple Last Alliance deck, for the most part. It primarily functions like a mono-Leadership Gondor swarm, utilizing Steward of Gondor, Visionary Leadership and A Very Good Tale with tons of allies in the deck to be able to build up an explosive board state thanks to cards like Morwen Steelsheen and Citadel Custodian accelerating that like crazy.

The contract helps us get our big Harad allies into play since there will always be more Gondor characters on the table, and then between Steward and Southron Refugee it tends to be pretty easy to see Jubayr, Firyal, or Knight of the White Tower even if you don't get lucky and hit them with AVGT.

Once your big ally swarm deck is up and running, spending resources for the Emissary nonsense becomes possible. Targeting Emissary alone with the contract can allow for all of your Warden of Healing, Errand-rider and cheap Harad allies to place progress each round in addition to doing their normal effects, allowing for a regular 2-6 progress each round placed on the active location/main quest in addition to the very high top end questing power of this deck in general.

The real explosive nature of the deck comes from Hail of Stones comboing with Strength of Arms though. Being able to target Emissary with the contract and then exhausting an entire board state of characters to deal massive damage to an enemy in the post-staging action window can easily place 10-15 (or sometimes even more) progress allowing for the your group to oftentimes completely clear a quest stage thanks to Hail and then still place enough progress to finish off the progress requirements of the next quest stage due to questing successfully and having already blown up the active location.

I do have a A Perilous Voyage version of this deck as well that uses Beyond the Original Bargain to have the two contracts working together at the same time. I'll link the unpublished version of that here if anyone wants to check it out. I think the theoretical top end power of that can be better thanks to some extra inclusions of other great Gondor allies that I couldn't fit here (like Rammas Sentry and Honour Guard), but I have found that the standard 50 card version is more likely to get the combo fully set up, which is were the true absurdity and fun of the deck shines.

Edited to add since I forgot about it in the original write up: The other effect on Emissary is also incredibly strong in multiplayer, oftentimes functioning in much the same way that a Doom Hangs Still does. With a massive board of Gondor and Harad allies you can use it to your group's advantage to under quest to keep more bodies available for combat on rounds where you don't need to place progress. Because the deck has this ability and Strength of Arms to potentially ready all allies in play, there is a ton of flexibility provided for the table on those sketchy rounds where you know a bunch of enemies will be coming out.