Council of Elrond

On the Lure I finaly managed to play my dragon country deck with King Under the mountain.
And I played with bard in the starting company with Black Arrow.

After some time we realized that Bard might be a little bit too good:

The Basic ability with the -3/-3 is greath but not too good. A greath ability which helps you to kill a dragon at home, or to lower an auto attack.
But the main problem with the card, is the untap ability.
Because if anybody plays a hazard on you, you can just tap the bow without thinking about the auto attacks. This especialy is strong against the ahunt dragons, which normaly are sideboarded against this deck.
The main problem is not the untap ability, because it is nice to have an enhancement against the ahunts. But it beginns to be TOO strong when, then the bow untaps and you even can lower the auto attack afterwards.

The abliity to kill a dragon with the help of Old Trush is good, but not overpowered...

Of cause on the other hand, bard is an easy to kill character, because if he gets a strike, he will problably get killed when he fails it. With his body of 6. And he cannot benefit from most of enhancement cards in a dwarven deck, because he is no dwarf himself.

Maybe it needs some more testing, because my opponents maybe can kill him fast in the beginning and it was just bad luck that he remained in play that long.

But I just wanted to test my five cents of coments after playing him!

The counterbalance to this, of course, is that Bard has only 3 prowess and 6 body. As soon as your opponent sees him, he's pretty much going to be target boy. High strike non-dragon hazards should clean his clock.

even high strike dragons are mostly going to kill him

yeah but with a large dwarfen company... it is likly that he won't get any strike at all!

But you might be right.... it was just my experience from playing that he stayed alive quiet for a long time.

Boder might have a point there with the Dwarven bodyguards.

Anyway, since Bard's modifiers of -3/-3 only apply to dragons and drake strikes, in second thought I think to give him the advantage of -1 per m/h phase once isn't that bad, of course cave-drakes become useless, but there's still plenty that hurts his company.
The thing I actually don't like is that with Old Thrush now the bodyrolls are automatic, that somehow seems too easy to me.

get rid of him then before he can make it to the dragon

I killed with his help smaug in the thrid round or something like that....

but it mainly depended on drawing King und the mountain and old trush early...
I don't think mainly the ablility of -3/-3 ist too strong.... because it finaly gives you the ablility to kill a dragon without sacrifice of form... which is quiet boring from a flavour perspective....
and only one roll of 5 or greather must be done!!!

So I think it is more style to kill a dragon with bard and old thrush...
making one of the big ones... two strikes with 10/3
or something like that. wich is still something you have to cope with!!!

I Don't believe bard itself is too strong.... and he is fun to play....
I am allways just talking about the untap ablity...
wich mainly... makes DRAGONS AHUNT useless against your company...because they become easy MPs for you....
they then become something like: two strikes with 10/3...
EVEN WITHOUT OLD THRUSH...
So you just handle the main hazard with Bard... AND even have the arrow untaped to beat the auto attack in an easy way!!!

I plead you... let's please keep bard .... i realy love the card.... let's just tweak him maybe!

Even then, Bard can only untap Black Arrow at the end of the m/h phase, so multiple Ahunt Dragons should still be able to do some serious damage.

yeah but how manages it to sideboard more than one dragon at hunt at once????

BoderHamster wrote:yeah but how manages it to sideboard more than one dragon at hunt at once????

people use to run both smaug and intangast ahunt straigt in (and sometimes a third one as well), as well as some cave drakes and unabated in malice/ tidings... It is not hard to hit a dragon country deck at all, even with a more or less normal grab bag.

yeah.... i meant it is quiet hard to get both dragons ahunt on hand at the same time...!

also he's great for killing opponent's Roused factions, these attack first so there's not much you can do about that.

I still think 2 body rolls at 3 for Scatha/Itangast, or at 2 for Smaug, is rather easy, prowess usually isn't the deal anyway.

btw. if you run Beorn now with just Arrow and old thrush, you also have a nice chance to kill Bairanax, no need to sacrifice, just make it a one man mission. In dragon-hunt scenario I used to play just Elrond with Vilya's, the key is just to roll 1 body.

could also say for Bard: arrow gives -3/-3 if he faces a strike, you may untap Bard when you tap arrow.