Hand Extension
Hand Extension is an informal game term. Extending your hand means to make more than eight cards at a time available during your Shadow Phase, allowing you to play more minions or other cards to support them.
Usually, hand extension means drawing extra cards at the start of or during the Shadow Phase, using cards like Goblin Scimitar (1C180)
or Ithil Stone (9R+47)
, or reconciling early, with a card like Under Foot (10C52)
. However, that isn't the only way to extend your hand. Sometimes you can play cards stacked on other cards: Goblin Swarms (1R183)
can store minions for re-use, or Dunlending Looter (4U11)
can stack himself on a site you control then replay himself in a later turn. Sometimes you can play minions directly from your discard pile, with cards like Uruk Captain (2R46)
or Gollum, Plotting Deceiver (7R58)
. Sometimes you can even recur cards from your discard pile straight to your hand, with cards like Goblin Hordes (11R123)
. As long as you're playing more cards that you would've been able to practically fit in your hand, that's hand extension.
Hand extension is very important to certain Shadow strategies, especially swarm strategies that want to play many minions in a single turn. Shadow cards are generally disposable, discarded at the end of the turn, so playing as many as you can as quickly as you can is often important. Free Peoples decks don't usually need to play all their cards at once quite as badly, and generally those decks are designed with more of an eye to cycling and filtering out your deck.
