Council of Elrond

It seems like the goal in most hazard decks is to use as few creatures as possible, including Uvatha, Mouth, Adunaphel, etc. to barely get to 12. However, I'm interested in decks that use a lot of creatures. Does anyone use a heavy creature portion in any of their decks? And would you be willing to share and discuss how it works?

It seems like Orc hazards are good for this due to their playability and variety of enhancers. But, once you start adding a lot of enhancers beyond Minions Stir (e.g., Doors of Night, Scimitars of Steel + Nazgul, Fury of the Iron Crown, Host of Bats, etc), then you are starting to use up a lot of your 30 cards. And orcs are fairly weak without enhancers, which is the trade off for their playability. I have an example below.

Undead are stronger than orcs, but are not nearly as playable. The various Drakes cover a lot of ground and seem fairly well balanced. And they have some neat enhancers. I'm still looking into these.


Anyway, here's a variation of a hazard deck that I've been using. It's got 20 Orcs and Wolves. It doesn't use Doors of Night as that conflicts with my resources. What is fun is that there is often a creature or two that can be played. But, these creatures mostly just give away MP, unless there are low prowess characters. Fury and Pierced help boost the damage and can sometimes wound or kill (though Pierced mostly works with the lower prowess creatures). Of course, this hazards aren't robust - lacking any sort of corruption, roadblock, anti-low-GI, etc. I put some of these in the sideboard. But overall, I haven't found this hazard deck to be worse than other hazard decks, despite being unconventional. Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions.

3 Orc-lieutenant
3 Uruk-lieutenant
2 Little Snuffler
2 Orc-warriors
2 Orc-guard
3 Orc-warband
3 Dire Wolves
2 Wargs

3 Minions Stir
1 Fury of the Iron Crown
3 Pierced by Many Wounds
3 Twilight

Wargs and Dire Wolves do not cover your blind spots, so rather include some "An Unexpected Outposts" to recylce your Minion Stir, also include Searching eyes to deal with Scout canceling cards, and 2 or 3 Tribes present

yours Nicolai

look into the pre-made DCCDs most are heavy creature based

Hi,

I played a combination of Men+Drakes creatures hazards against hero/FW. It was quite a lot of fun and it worked fairly well, expecially with a CvCC minion deck. Several comments:
1) Searching Eye worked extremely well against Stealth/Sneakin' decks, especially with Two or Three Tribes.
2) Two or Three Tribes - creatures - Revealed to All Watchers - more creatures is a nice overload for 2 hazard limit used. Primary use for Mouth of Sauron is to recycle Revealed to All Watchers.
3) Of course, there have been several modifications to creature mix. A must is the Sellswords covering and . Basically, the men creatures are dangerous enough without Rank upon Rank. Most common change was Abductors instead of Ambushers.
3) Thiefs work surprisingly well. One notable moment was a single Thief (with Rank upon Rank) stealing Orcrist and Wormsbane from a company. Following Sellswords then killed the previous owners.
4) Ruins and Lairs are not covered well (only by the drakes and that not always). A hero player is likely to visit a or a at least once for a faction or a hero ally. SB hazards must reflect that, however (especially with regard to Fallen Alatar). See also Point 6.
5) Another liability: . Covered only by Uvatha and Mouth of Sauron as creatures and by my own CvCC companies.
6) With Sauron decks, the hazards included also 3x Ride against the Enemy + 2x Khamul and 1x Witch-King as Ringwraiths in the character pool.

Deck list:

Hazard Cards:
Creatures (14+):
3x Sellswords between Charters
3x Assassin
2x Thief
2x Corsairs of Umbar
2x Rain-Drake
2x Cave Worm
2x Ambusher

Half-Creatures (3)
Mouth of Sauron
Úvatha the Horseman
Daelomin at Home

Events (12)
1x Revealed to All Watchers
2x Rank upon Rank
2x Searching Eye
3x Two or Three Tribes Present
1x An Unexpected Outpost
3x Twilight

I share your interest in creature heavy decks. Two ideas from me are:

1. GoM + Fog + two or three tribes + an army of double wilderness big hitters (Giants, Thunders companion,, Giant spiders, Cave Drakes, etc). Advantage here is GoM and Fog are resources, leaving plenty of room for creatures. This is potentially a great deck against the ever-popular Radagast or Dwarven decks.

2. I like to start with the hazard portion of the Gandalf challenge deck and adapt from there. There are 20 creatures in this deck, which is maybe fairly 'optimal' for a creature theme deck. This is my favourite Challenge deck mainly for this reason.