A Stereotypical Eagles Deck (Gwaihir edition) 1.0

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• 1.0

This deck is not creative at all, it is a crowdsourced Eagles deck. However, it's a different Eagles deck from the one I published earlier:

http://www.ringsdb.com/decklist/view/9330/a-stereotypical-eagles-deck-1.0

The earlier deck was based on The Eagles Are Coming! and Support of the Eagles, which predictably led to an early mono-tactics deck. But while Support of the Eagles really requires Eagles, the reverse is not true -- having an Eagles deck doesn't require you to use Eagles to buff the hero.

One eagle ally was not in the earlier deck at all, the only eagle card released after Mirkwood cycle -- Gwaihir. Gwaihir's enter play ability retrieves an eagle from the discard. Since it's an enters play ability for a hideously expensive ally it's not the equivalent of Anborn for traps, and I wish Gwaihir did more to enable the archetype. But the card does serve as a good separator for recent Eagles decks (especially solo-capable Eagles decks) compared to first-cycle tactics-heavy decks.

My procedure was as follows -- I analyzed decks with Gwaihir and The Eagles Are Coming! to see what the most likely hero lineup would be, using the most recent suchdeck by 82 creators. The most popular sphere configuration was mono-tactics (33 decks), and the most popular tactics heroes in Eagles decks were Mablung (30 decks), Éowyn (24 decks), and Hirgon (23 decks). The three were combined in the same lineup by four different creators, barely edging out the three with the lineup Hirgon/Eowyn/Théoden. Mablung's resource generation helps pay for expensive eagles, Hirgon helps reduce their cost, and Eowyn (or TaTheoden) help make sure Hirgon can quest successfully.

For the purpose of constructing the deck, I looked at mono-tactics decks from 14 different creators using at least two of the three heroes in this lineup. I then used the median count to apportion card slots to the most popular choices in each category, trying to use the most popular count for each until I ran out of space. I also limited the cards to a single core set.

The end result should be a stereotypical solo-capable Eagles Deck -- one that only includes cards that others have used the most (by percentage, not raw count) in their own Eagles decks with at least two of the three heroes. If you want the typical Eagles experience, this may be a good fit -- and if it's not, don't blame me, blame the committee!

If there's one card that I'd like to see in the opening lineup, it'd be The Red Arrow, since there's only one per deck. But I wouldn't mulligan for it -- I think the most important card to have in hand is a decent defender, so if you send all your heroes questing you can have a way of defending against an enemy coming out. Wait no Longer can be a great way of ensuring successful questing (by reducing the number of cards revealed to zero) while generating another resource. Defender of Rammas will be fine defenders, especially with Raiment of War, though eventually you'll want Gondorian Shield and Support of the Eagles on Mablung. Gwaihir and Eagles of the Misty Mountains will replace him as questers, and Misty will absorb Vassal of the Windlord and Winged Guardian to power up Support of the Eagles. Legolas gives you card draw, Rúmil gives you willpower and some direct damage from the Vassals, if they are around.