Rethinking The Low-HL Company

[Bandobras Took]

The orthodox doctrine for competitive decks has been the idea of the low Hazard Limit. Small company sizes combined with HL reducers to sidestep hazards. The prevalence of this philosophy was due in no small part to Josh Grace, who had an undefeated record in tournaments using such a strategy. Larger companies often had their own ways of reducing the hazard limit/avoiding hazards, such as the Balrog's Great Shadow/cloaked by darkness or large companies squatting at a relatively safe site, e.g. Red Hills.

I've recently started wondering about the potential benefits of the other extreme -- simply wandering around with seven characters in a company, for a base hazard limit of 7 instead of 2.

Once the initial shudder of revulsion passed, I realized that there can be some advantages to such an approach, so long as you go full bore. A company size of 4-5 inherits the worst of all worlds.

Some points in favor of absurdly large companies:

1) You have more tools to deal with hazards. A triple river just doesn't mean as much when you're wandering around with seven Rangers.

2) The odds of your opponent actually *having* seven hazards in their hand are actually low. Barring something like Revealed to All Watchers, you're probably looking at 7 characters to deal with 4-5 hazards in a given movement/hazard phase.

3) As a related point, it opens up cards that would be murderous to smaller companies while dampening the power of some other cards. A card like Orc-mounts is useful with a large company -- shifting the HL from 7 to 9 is ultimately trivial, while a -1 prowess to all hazard creature attacks that turn is great, while with a small company, going from a HL of 2 to 4 is atrocious. On the hero side, Hundreds of Butterflies just doesn't have drawbacks when used with a large company, while an extra hazard against a HL2 company is often disastrous. Daelomin at Home and Power Built By Waiting, which are often to be found in hazard portions, are functionally useless when the HL is already 7.

So instead of focusing on "how can I get the hazard limit lower," a more fundamental question to ask when designing a deck is: "Do I go big or do I go small?"

Some decks might benefit more from one approach than from the other.

[Mordakai]

I totally agree with you. Against a HL2 company you can play Cave-drake + Cave Worm with devastating effects. Against a HL7 company, it will just tap or wound (or kill) someone (probably Bombur, as usual), but there are still other guys to do the job at the site phase. They are usually unbothered by high-prowess-low-strike-count creatures, like Worms, Nazgûl and agent attacks.
HL increasers are useless, you will never consume all.
Most probably your opponent will not be able even to discharge all his hazards on the company, as some of them will be more specific to key (Assassin and Cave Drake to a squatting company, for example).
If you stride through relative safe regions ( , maybe ), some hazards will totally remain in your opponent's hand.
Big companies are immune to Alone and Unadvised, never undestimate that. They can also tap more frequently to help with cc's or combat.

The drawback is that you must make that (probably) only site phase count, and count a lot. But again, cards like Thorough Search, Lucky Search or Bounty of the Hoard can help you a lot with that. Also resources that can be played at tapped sites, like Noble Steeds, Noble Hounds and things like that are a very good choice. A Chance Meeting / We Have Come to Kill is totally your friend here to replace fallen pals (aka. get more cannon fodder).

You are also more vulnerable to attacks with "each character faces....", but the metagame is not sailing on those waters... for now.

[dirhaval]

Yes, I think I ran or slammed into such a deck at a tournament; kept creatures in my hand instead of direct deposit the creature card into other's MP pile.
Now, I think that such a large company must avoid potential multi,high prowess attacks such as dragon ahunts unless you plan to kill, cancel, or use cards like Hail of Darts. Washed and Refreshed is nice to use along with Refuge for short distances when Rescuing Prisoners.
Was not a whole book written for a large company or two? That is a deck idea: move over the map stopping at sites where you can play characters to replace others: Start with Gildor, Bard; move south to Isengard for palantir, Edoras for faction and Eomer, then Minas Tirith to play another faction when Bard killed by Assassin. Then move into Mordor using Mountains of Shadow. Wonder if a new hazard can slow a company to build a cairn for the fallen; and to sing a dirge too.

[Bandobras Took]

I actually started looking at the idea of big companies in the context of a FW company hitting all the dark-hold sites in Mordor while just playing generic orcs at every place they visit.