Moria Navy
Moria Navy is a Shadow deck, first appearing in Movie Block and occasionally appearing in any other format that allows the key cards, including Expanded and Austrian. It's a bomb combo deck that combines the card draw and twilight generation of 
Moria with the hand extension and recursion of Corsair 
Raiders to play huge swarms of minions all at once.
For your turn where the combo goes off, you play all of the Shadow cards you can, discard any extra cards to play more minions with They Are Coming (1C196)
, and then refill your hand with Under Foot (10C52)
. Under ideal circumstances, you can play Under Foot multiple times, since almost all of your minions are cheap or free.
Key support cards include:
- Black Sails of Umbar (8C50)
to play extra Corsair minions - Corsair Plunderer (8C58)
and Corsair Marauder (8R57)
to stack up extra tokens on them to play minions at a discount - Corsair War Galley (8U59)
to set up initiative - Ships of Great Draught (8R65)
to recur combo pieces and activate the Galley's gametext - Goblin Runner (1U178)
and Moria Scout (1C191)
, to fill out the swarm and generate twilight - Goblin Scimitar (1C180)
and Goblin Armory (1R173)
to draw more cards and generate more twilight - Goblin Scavengers (1C179)
to replay Scimitars - Plundered Armories (1C193)
, for a secondary combo where you discard a Goblin Scimitar with Corsair Marauder (8R57)
and immediately replay it with Plundered Armories, drawing an extra card and triggering all of your copies of Goblin Armory (1R173)
again. - In formats where they aren't banned, Relics of Moria (1R195)
and Úlairë Nertëa, Messenger of Dol Guldur (1U234)
can help your swarm
There are several variations of this deck. The original deck did not include the Plundered Armories (1C193)
combo. You can add a 
Gollum splash with Gollum, Plotting Deceiver (7R58)
for an extra body in the swarm, and possibly follow that up with Evil-smelling Fens (5U22)
to retrieve combo pieces and/or Hobbitses Are Dead (7R61)
as a The Tale of the Great Ring (10U116)
counter. An 
Isengard splash is also possible, usually including Isengard Orcs like Isengard Warrior (3U61)
to allow support cards like Saruman's Snows (1C138)
. You can also include Evil-smelling Fens (5U22)
, four copies of Foul Tentacle (2C58)
, and one copy of Huge Tentacle (2R66)
, to have several more self-downloading bodies for the swarm, but this means your deck is even more vulnerable to condition removal.
This deck is conceptually similar to Stupid Swarm, in that it is a multicultural swarm bomb deck, so many of the strategies for that deck can be applied to this one.
Since this deck is a swarm combo deck, it has the usual weaknesses of swarm and combo decks. Its swarm weaknesses are heightened by the fact that it really wants to kill all at once in a single turn, so anti-swarm cards like Power According to His Stature (1R308)
, Aragorn, Ranger of the North (1R89)
, and The Tale of the Great Ring (10U116)
are even more of a problem than usual. To deal with TTotGR, you can run Drums in the Deep (1C168)
, which is free, or Wind That Sped Ships (8C66)
or Hobbitses Are Dead (7R61)
, which can recur themselves. Unlike most swarm decks, you have card draw to spare, so you can afford these.
The deck also has problems with any Free Peoples deck that can discard its conditions and boats. Ships of Great Draught (8R65)
and Host of Moria, Legion of the Underdeeps (9R+41)
can recur these, but against strong removal cards like Galadriel, Lady Redeemed (10R11)
or Blood Runs Chill (8R3)
there's only so much you can do. If nothing else, the deck does still mostly work as a swarm deck even when you can't have the combo go off, but this will always be a hard matchup.
Decks[edit]
- The Moria Navy, by Alazzar on the Last Homely House forums. Alazzar claims to have come up with this deck on the (now-closed) LOTRO forums along with Mike French, some years previous. This decklist is for Austrian, although the post includes notes for adapting it to Movie Block.
- An unnamed Corsairs and Moria swarm deck by The First on the Cobra Cards forums. This is the oldest still-extant version of the deck I could find.
- KnightBomb, a Movie Block deck by ramolnar on the Last Homely House forums. This version of the deck strips the Corsair contingent down to the absolute bare minimum. It may be related to a now-lost FireBomb deck.
- BS Elves \ Moria Navy (2 versions of the shadow), a Movie Block deck by Nappykorn on the Last Homely House forums. As the name implies, this has two versions of the Shadow: one that uses tentacles to help fill out the swarm, and another that uses Goblin Man (2C42)
and Saruman's Snows (1C138)
. - Hobbit/ent and Moria's Navy, a Movie Block deck by Not A Zombie on the Last Homely House forums. This uses the Plundered Armories (1C193)
combo above.
- The hordes of the black sails, by orian on the Cobra Cards forums. (Scroll down, it's the second deck listed.) This is a Standard deck from shortly after the release of The Hunters, and would be legal in both contemporary Expanded and Standard as long as you replace the now-banned copies of Orkish Smith (11C132)
. This deck uses 
Orc minions, since it was made for a format where all of the core Moria cards had been rotated out.
