In our last installment, we took a look at both the questing and the narrative challenges posed by the next quest up on our slate – Escape from Dol Guldur. Today, let’s put together a set of narrative decks to take against it.
The first order of business is taking a look at the story of the quest. We were apparently scouting around Dol Guldur when the prisoner was captured – at the behest of Lady Galadriel. That’s going to be…interesting. After all, Lorien really doesn’t like strangers very much. Also, I have the dwarf Thalin as a member of our party, and that is going to get even weirder. But somehow, we manage to get ourselves picked to scout out Sauron’s chief fortress in the North.
So our first story point is that our group doesn’t actually enter Lorien itself. Maybe Eleanor, as a student of Mithrandir, could be allowed in, but certainly not the rest. If Gimli only gets in because of the fact that he’s part of the Fellowship, I really can’t find a decent reason to let Thalin in. And the story doesn’t suffer for Thalin and Eleanor’s escort to be left outside the borders of the Hidden Land.
I’m also a little reticent about the explicit story text – why is Galadriel tasking a couple of humans to scout out one of the most dangerous places in the north of Middle-Earth? Especially in the context of our story – Rossiel has already been perilously close to that stronghold, and it’s her message that we have brought to the Golden Wood.
Now, there are of course a number of ways to resolve these small narrative issues. I’m sure that my perceptive readers have already thought of a few. The one that stands out to me, though, weaves the narrative of Lanwyn’s capture and rescue into Eleanor’s brief visit to Lorien.
Essentially, I’m going to have Lanwyn captured at the end of the last quest, and Eleanor is going to plead for the Elves of Lorien to help rescue her friend. Eleanor, if you can’t tell, feels more than a little bit responsible for the Dalewoman who she kind of accidentally dragged across the entirety of Rhovanion.
After all, the dungeons of Dol Guldur are not a place any sane person would go into willingly. But Eleanor is a little stubborn that way. But I can imagine Celeborn being less than enthusiastic about risking their folk on a foolhardy rescue mission, while Galadriel and Gandalf aren’t willing to let an innocent person endure the torments of those dungeons.
There’s a place for rising drama – going into Dol Guldur is practically a suicide mission, and we have to convince the Lord and Lady of the Galadhrim to aid us in that endeavor. The story opportunities there are rather rich, and they offer some rather intriguing deckbuilding options.
Then, when we finally start the quest, we will be scouting out Dol Guldur for our rescue attempt. Another hero gets captured, which risks giving the whole operation away, and we have to quest just as fast and as hard as we can to get Lanwyn and the other prisoner out of the dungeons before everything comes falling apart.
Silvans of Lorien
I’ve known for a while that I wanted to do a traditional Lorien-focused Silvan deck for this quest. It’s just too thematically appropriate, and the opportunities for using Lorien as a set of thematic allies are going to be few and far between in the upcoming cycles. As an aside, if a certain quest gives me a reasonably thematic option to take a hero that would be otherwise extremely thematically difficult to take, I’m going to jump on it.
Now, lets take a look at heroes. In addition to Eleanor and Thalin, Celeborn and Galadriel are obvious picks – Celeborn powers the Silvan engine and Galadriel is extremely useful for just about everything. Rossiel is probably an obvious pick, but one that I really have no issues with. I love the hero, and the decks she puts together. The other Lorien-aligned hero is Haldir, who is another really fun style of play.
The primary problem with putting together a traditional Silvan deck for Dol Guldur is that we are going to lose one of our heroes right off the bat. Since traditional Silvan decks are tri-sphere, that could potentially have serious consequences for our deck. In addition, Silvan decks generally run off of allies leaving play to be played again the next round. Given the ally-playing restrictions in Dol Guldur, voluntarily removing them from play is a fraught proposition, to be sure.
The first issue will be rather easy to take care of – our chosen heroes will allow us to create 2 dual-sphere decks with Lore and Spirit as the primary spheres and Tactics and Leadership as the minor spheres.
A dual-sphere deck will still be vulnerable to having the minor-sphere hero taken as a prisoner, but it will not be crippled in the same way as a tri-sphere deck might be. And we might look at bringing some discard effects – that way, if we lose a sphere entirely, the cards aren’t sitting wholly dead in our hands.
The second issue is going to run deeper. I played around with a couple of different deck types, and I think that a traditional Silvan deck just isn’t going to work very well against this quest. The restriction on playing allies is going to be a huge deal for a deck that explicitly relies on getting multiple allies out per turn to take advantage of the boost from Celeborn.
So let’s take a look at ways to get around the ally restriction. It should be noted that we are only prevented from playing more than one ally as a group from our hands. So, any of the numerous mustering effects in the game are going to be worth trying out. In Lore, the best effect we have is Elf-Stone. Normally, you use that to get an expensive ally into play for only 1 resource. In this quest, though, just the fact that it lets us get a second ally into play is enough to make us consider it. The Tree People is probably the only one of the Silvan events that I would like to consider in this quest, because it is at least neutral with regards to board state. Returning an ally to hand and bringing in a new one is going to be potentially useful.
Spirit gives us access to Stand and Fight, letting us resurrect a dead ally from the discard pile. I actually haven’t seen this card played very often, but I think it fits our needs perfectly. And the narrative potential is just awesome. With our 2 spirit heroes, we can definitely plan on affording this. It also points towards using the discard pile, so we’ll jot down a mental note to look double-carefully at those types of effects. In addition, Bofur bypasses the play-from-hand restriction as well, so he will be a useful card to retain from earlier decks.
In Leadership, we can look at Sneak Attack, A Very Good Tale, Timely Aid, and Herald of Anorien. Sneak Attack actually combines well with The Tree People in this quest – we can put an ally into play, quest with it or attack with it as needed, and then use The Tree People to bring it back to hand and hopefully get a permanent ally out of the deal.
Timely Aid is too expensive, as Secrecy isn’t really a viable option with the heroes we have chosen. A Very Good Tale is going to be tricky to get out enough allies to make it worth it to start with. On the other hand, it might get allies into our discard pile. Herald of Anorien is a little sticky thematically, but we might be able to fit them into Eleanor’s escort. The bigger problem is that every Gondor ally we include dilutes the effectiveness of events and abilities that key off of Silvan allies.
So, of the available mustering options, the one that looks the most useful to me is Stand and Fight. Since it’s in Spirit, recursion is going to be easy to accomplish, with Dwarven Tomb and even Map of Earnil (although with only 2 Spirit heroes, that would be an expensive way to do it, and probably not worthwhile without resource generation).
Deckbuilding Revisions
I ran a few test runs against Dol Guldur with a deck that took Eleanor, Galadriel, and Celeborn, and tried to make a traditional Silvan deck of sorts out of it. The other deck was remarkably similar to the Rossiel/Legolas/Argalad deck from our earlier quests, even though Thalin replaced Legolas and Haldir replaced Argalad. Although I won the first attempt at the quest, further attempts showed me that the decks had fatal weaknesses. The Spirit/Leadership deck had no way to get allies into the discard pile to play Stand and Fight unless the Lore deck drew Protector of Lorien. In addition, I was struggling to get good use out of Celeborn’s ability – the Silvan theme of both decks was sufficiently diluted that I wasn’t getting consistent enough benefit to justify 11 threat – especially since I can’t justify playing the events that really define the archetype. Mostly, he ended up being a 3 WP quester – not useless by any means, but certainly not living up to his full capacity. I also struggled greatly with card draw – a lack of repeatable draw-sharing options from the Lore deck often left me unable to get key cards when I needed them.
On the Lore/Tactics side, it quickly became apparent that relying on a single Tactics hero to fund the weapons and armor attachments for both sides of the table, along with Galadhon Archers, Honour Guards, and Gondorian Spearmen was a losing proposition. While, in theory, I could discard some of the Tactics allies to be played later with Stand and Fight, or put one into play via Elf-stone, getting the cards in-hand to run the combos was difficult.
What I really needed was a way to put allies in the discard pile from the very start of the game. I’m pretty sure my astute readers have already figured out the solution to my problems already. There are three spirit heroes in the game at present that allow targeted discarding from hand. Legolas is interesting, but runs against the Lorien theme. Eowyn is powerful – and would solve my early game willpower issues – but has the unfortunate drawback of completely breaking my narrative beyond repair.
But Arwen, on the other hand, is perfect. She exactly fits the needs of the deck, and the theme is perfect. After all, after a few more quests, Galadriel is going to ask our heroes to escort her granddaughter from Lorien to Rivendell, so it is pretty clearly established that Arwen is in Lorien at the moment. Replacing Celeborn saves me 2 threat, and the resource generation combined with the discard makes her incredibly useful.
Of course, I am losing out on one of the very few thematic places to use Celeborn, but I’m pretty sure that I can justify a Lorien-themed Silvan deck for some of the Gollum-hunting quests, so there will be other opportunities.
Also, a third Spirit hero means that I can get both decks running copies of Stand and Fight. Putting Galadriel and Nenya into the Lore deck means that it can function almost as if it were mono-sphere, greatly helping with consistency. Also, Arwen can pass resources across the table to Galadriel, meaning that I can get both decks running just a little bit smoother.
This opens up even more interesting narrative possibilites – if Celeborn denies our heroes aid (perhaps he feels like he can’t risk his folk on what certainly appears to be a suicide mission), but Arwen is willing to defy his will and aid us. And maybe to convince a certain Lorien Ranger to come with her…
Take a look at the fellowship here!
