The Hunt for Gollum – Quest Analysis

While the writeup for Escape from Dol Guldur is still a work-in-progress, I’ve already done some long thinking about the next quest in the cycle. The Hunt for Gollum represents another narrative gap in the story here – such things will become much, much less common as the designer-provided storylines become tighter and more interwoven, but I see no reason not to take advantage of these things as they come up. In fact, there’s at least some kind of narrative gap between almost all of the quests in this cycle, but that’s something to discuss at a later time. Interestingly, the story which starts in the Core Set is nearly unrelated to the story told through the Mirkwood cycle. With that said, I’ll be skipping an interlude between Dol Guldur and this quest. Enough time is assumed to have passed that I can introduce the story in the write-up itself, without needing an interlude to connect the two.

Anyways, as normal, here’s the link to our favorite quest analysis blog, Vision of the Palantir. The quest’s primary mechanic is looking a number of extra cards and revealing one of them. This is much less punishing than it sounds – a number of the treacheries in the deck are not threatening at all if your threat remains low, or end up revealed at a moment when their effect doesn’t matter. Thematically, the mechanic represents searching for signs of Gollum, and finding the eponymous Clue attachments can sometimes be critical. At the very least, having some sort of control over the rate at which these clues appear is very useful.

Questing

Questing is going to be the primary difficulty of this adventure – in particular, location lock is the biggest threat. The locations in this quest are generally higher threat than we’ve seen before, and there are more of them. In particular, one of our largest worries is the Old Ford. With threat equal to the number of allies in play, it can easily turn what would have been a marginally successful quest phase into a threat-raising disaster.

But the West Bank and East Bank locations are little better. While they are only 3 threat apiece, the effects they bring if you travel to them can be ruinous. If the East Bank is the active location, allies cost an extra matching resource, while the West Bank adds the same cost increase to attachments and events. With these effects, it is often tempting to just leave them in the staging area and never travel there, while the threat mounts up. In addition, the boosted threat of Hunters from Mordor can swing a quest phase nearly as badly as the Old Ford, and you are left with a powered up enemy to boot.

With all of this said, the quest is generally an easy one, and bringing a large amount of willpower will overcome the most pressing of the difficulties. It presents no particular obstacles to a turtling strategy, and so you can often easily turtle on the first stage, where the extra revealed cards aren’t as punishing (since they are revealed only after questing successfully) while you build up a board state that will rush through the next two stages with little difficulty.

The last piece we need to consider is the block of treacheries that this quest pits against us. Many of them are returning favorites from Journey Along the Anduin, and our assessment of their danger (or the lack thereof) here is going to be remarkably similar. The most dangerous card in potential is probably Evil Storm. However, if we can keep our threat down, it will become essentially an empty card during staging. Pursued by Shadow will militate against that, though. Finally, Old Wives Tales can be disastrous if it appears during setup, or during a round that is going to be critical for combat. In general, though, it will not be a game-ending threat. Our priority should likely be to use Eleanor to cancel Pursued by Night or Old Wives Tales preferentially, unless we get into threat trouble, in which case we’ll save her to cancel Evil Storm. As a whole, these treacheries are not threatening enough to need to include further cancellation, and the quest does not feature other When Revealed effects that need cancelling via A Test of Will and the like.

Combat

This quest features remarkably few enemies, and most of them are easy to engage and dispatch. Goblintown Scavengers have increased threat on the round they enter play, but our questing machine should be designed to handle worse scenarios than that. Misty Mountain Goblins remove quest progress, but that can easily be turned to our advantage, allowing us to turtle on Stage 1 of the quest longer. And the Eastern Crows just fill the deck with dead cards so long as Thalin is questing.

There is one enemy that could potentially be formidable – the Hunters from Mordor. While their 2 threat and 2 attack does not seem more than a minor annoyance at first, their much more substantial 2 defense and 6 hit points means that they are likely to stay around. More worrisome is the 2 threat and 2 attack they gain for every Clue card on the table. They can easily become 6-attack monsters that require a significant investment to kill. On the other hand, the Forced effect on Stage 1 gives us some control over when and if they show up, so while it will be important to bring some significant combat capability to handle these enemies, we can still afford to dedicate a lot of our deck space to questing.

Well, that concludes our brief look at this quest, so tune in soon to join me as we deckbuild – right now I’m thinking about bringing a Galadriel – Celeborn – Aragorn (Le) deck to accompany Eleanor and her friends. We’ll see how it shakes out.