Feint

Best when played tactically.

Background

A feint is an attack meant to mislead an opponent and open them to another attack. the card image shows a sword fight which can employ feints. In the books, it is used to describe battlefield tactics. The flavor text refers to the one instance it appears in The Hobbit. The men of Dale put up a token resistance to the Goblin vanguard. This is a feint intended to get the Goblins to following the fleeing men into the battleground of their choosing, the valley between the arms of the mountain. The other instance of it is in Lord of the Rings as Aragorn leads the armies of men to The Black Gate. Near the Crossroads, they are ambushed by Orcs and Easterlings, but it was an easy victory for them. Aragorn believes that it is a feint to give them a false sense of the Saruon’s military strength.

Card Theme

A deceptive move or battlefield tactic is hard to simulate in a card game where the opponent isn’t another human player. The result of it, however, the advantage gained can be. Here the designers gave the player that plays this card the biggest advantage in canceling an attack and get the first swing at the enemy.

Card Synergies and Interactions

Event Recursion

Discard Recursion

The other way to get more plays of Feint is to shuffle it from the discard pile back into your deck. Nori ally is the only in sphere option for this effect. He does enable a strategy where a player thins there deck to a few cards. Then endlessly recycles those few cards. It is not easy to achieve and takes quite a bit of set up and enemies for him to destroy each round. Outside of Tactics, Will of the West, Galadhrim Weaver, and The White Council can also shuffle it back into the deck.

Quest Specific

The core set scenarios provided a few great targets for Feint. It works well for the Hill Troll in Journey Along the Anduin to get a free hit on it and avoid having to raise threat by chump blocking. It also prevents the Marsh Adder, Chieftan Ufthak, and Nazgul of Dol Guldur from triggering their additional effects when they attack along with avoiding dealing with their relatively high attack.

Ring Rating

Card Talk uses the highly scientific yet arbitrary scale of 1 ring for the card to rule them all to 10 to be cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came.

I rate Feint at 2 rings. Once you can play it, it’s almost always helpful. Even if you have a strong defender, it works as shadow cancelation as well since you never reveal the shadow card. You also get the action advantage of not having to defend freeing up a character to quest, attack, or use an ability.

The challenge with this card is when to play it. You can easily hold onto it the whole game saving it just for when you need it. It feels like a waste to stop an attack from a single enemy with 4 or less attack, but sometimes you have to. Besides that a player could want to save it for when they have to engage 2 or more enemies in a single round. Another concern can be seeing a surprise big enemy like the second Hill Troll in Journey Along the Anduin.

The main reason I don’t give it a one is the prevalence of enemies with immune to player card effects. Understandably, the boss enemies often have this to avoid being “feint locked”. Still it makes it much less useful because those enemies who you’d most need it for, it won’t work. In those cases the deck space is better spent on action attachments with a strong defender like Beregond, Erkenbrand, Grimbeorn, or Dain

It’s still very helpful to deal with an unexpected enemy or ones with additional attacks. Although a strong defender with Armored Destrier and/or Unexpected Courage is generally better. Overall, it’s a great emergency button card.

• Dave – 1
• Grant – 1
• Ted – TBR
• Matt – 2
• Average 1.3

External Links

• Hall of Beorn
• Ringsdb

Sample Decks