Welcome back to our deck testing for Forth Eorlingas! In today’s installment of the series, we will be looking at our deck’s performance against the first 2 of our examination quests: Journey Along the Anduin and Peril in Pelargir. The original plan, of course, was to cover the first 3 quests in this post, but it has already grown to a monster in size after only 2. In addition, waiting to have recordings of the tests slows the rate of posting down significantly on the blog and on YouTube. So, we’ll be doing 2 quests per article, and having 3 articles on deck testing. We’ll see if we can streamline the process for future entries in this series, because 5 articles per fellowship turns out to be a real slog to get through.
Journey Along the Anduin
Journey Along the Anduin is still one of my favorite quests in the game. As has been noted in a number of places, the quest is significantly easier in the modern card pool. But it still provides enough difficulty for us to put the fellowship through its paces. Before I actually played the decks, I thought that we wouldn’t really be putting a stress-test on the decks, but the actual play was much more complicated than I had expected.
I played these decks through this quest a total of 6 times. I only won twice, which rather surprised me. 2 of the losses happened in the first turn or two – a scoop because setup raised my threat past where I was able to lower it and not engage the Hill Troll, or because an unlucky reveal in the first round ended with me failing the quest and raising threat, again engaging the Hill Troll. In one of these, however, I could have played Grimbold on the first round, expecting to engage the Hill Troll with the mono-Tactics deck, cancel the attack by discarding Grimbold, and then kill the Troll with Eowyn and one of the other heroes.
The other two losses were much more interesting, from a deck piloting perspective. The very first quest I lost was because I significantly misplayed the deck. It took at least 6 rounds for the first copy of Forth Eorlingas showed up, and although I tried to keep the staging area clear, I left the Hill Troll up there, because I didn’t really think I had a way to deal with it, and I expected that I would draw my staging area attack any moment.
An early reveal was the Goblin Sniper, and I chose to let it ping away at me while I waited for staging area attack instead of engaging all of the enemies I could to try and get it down and kill it. That direct damage eventually proved to be my undoing. In addition, waiting as long as I did ended up with me not progressing the quest, and finally the second Hill Troll was revealed, and my threat was just too high to deal with it.
That playthrough, however, taught me a lot about how to pilot the deck. You want to kill the Hill Troll early, using whatever means you have at your disposal. Spend all of your Tactics resources to get Grimbold into play and immediately discard him? It gets rid of the troll, so yes. If I had been more aggressive in getting the Hill Troll out of the staging area, the direct damage might not have done me in so badly.
The second interesting loss came down to a single key moment. On the second quest stage, with several locations and many enemies in the staging area, I chose to engage some Misty Mountain Goblins for some reason (I can’t remember why I did it at this point). My heroes were powered up with their attachments, and I was ready to play Forth Eorlingas and essentially clear the staging area. To preserve Eomer’s actions, I chose to take the Goblin attack undefended – I had enough Honour Guards out to completely cancel the damage, so I wasn’t worried about losing a hero. But the shadow effect forced me to discard every attachment I controlled if the attack was undefended. And so I went from being able to clear the staging area of enemies to only being able to kill one of them. To make matters worse, I had had several rounds of 2 Goblin Snipers in the staging area, and 2 back-to-back Necromancer’s Reach had damaged my heroes to near the breaking point.
When I finally made it to stage 3, I ended up with 9 enemies engaged across the 2 decks, and another Goblin Sniper in the staging area. I muddled on for 2 turns, but couldn’t kill the enemies, and lost to being overwhelmed.
In contrast, the two victories were unremarkable. The decks did exactly what they were intended to do, and I reached the end without much difficulty at all. In retrospect, 3 of the 4 losses were potential victories if I had made different choices, but the runs did reveal a number of stress points in the fellowship that I failed to mitigate during play.
Both times I lost an extended playthrough, direct damage played a major role. Correct play could have kept enough of it off of me that I could have won the quest, but the decks as they stand are significantly vulnerable to direct damage.
Second, the decks are vulnerable to getting swarmed. Many low-engagement cost enemies (or many enemies towards the end of the quest, if I haven’t been able to get the threat reduction online quite so well) can bring in so many attacks that I can’t cope.
That’s the analysis of our losses. Let’s look at our deck-based questions:
Is this deck too reliant on its opening hand?
In this quest, it can be. If we don’t draw something to deal with the Hill Troll on turn 1, either by lowering our threat so we don’t have to engage it, or by cancelling or defending its attack and killing it with Eowyn, we are in significant trouble. But that’s a quirk of this particular quest. Even the cases where the optimal cards didn’t show up for much later into the quest, I was able to win or come close (losing via another method than the right cards not showing up) without them. So I think that I would say that, in general, we aren’t too reliant on the opening hand, unless there’s a Hill Troll in the staging area that will kill us if we don’t draw our counter to it.
Can the deck handle standard combat in circumstances where staging area attack is precluded?
Yes. Most definitely. It can’t handle a swarm of enemies (but see below, where I make tweaks to the setup), but it can reliably defend and kill enemies with some setup time. And the threat reduction has so far given me the time I need.
Does our lack of healing cause problems?
Yes. Most definitely yes. But not as many problems as I expected. Honour Guards do an incredible job at mitigating a great deal of damage, and smart play – removing direct damage enemies as soon as the means to kill them is available – can get around a lot of the problems. This quest was much heavier on direct damage than I remember, but we still managed to get through – or if we didn’t, it was because I made the wrong choices.
I don’t have issues with the resource generation of these decks. There’s no extra resources coming in, but the cost curves on both decks are remarkably small. Especially on the Elfhelm deck, where more than half the cards are cost 1 or lower, and all but 5 cost 2 or less (counting cost reduction on Herugrim). I often have extra resources to pass over to the Tactics deck using Errand-rider.
Card draw is definitely less consistent than I would ideally like. But between all of the available options, I find myself consistently with cards I can play in hand, even if they aren’t necessarily the cards I would prefer.
The last question, however, is an important one. What are the dead cards – the ones that I don’t end up playing? Already, after just one quest, I’ve found one that almost never sees play: Terrible to Behold.
It seemed like it should fit in well enough with the theme of the decks – just another way to send enemies back to the staging area. But I seldom use it. The only time it was important was when I was able to use Theoden to cancel the Hill Troll’s attack and send it back to the staging area, where Hama and Eowyn killed it with Forth Eorlingas.
I had several copies in hand during my final stand against 9 enemies in one of the afore-mentioned losses. But again, I never played it, because I needed Theoden’s action to defend, and playing the card didn’t actually net me any benefit. I was still stuck at the same number of actions.
What I really needed in that circumstance was a Feint. It could have cancelled the Hill Troll just as well, but without needing to play Forth Eorlingas to kill it. And it could have saved me an attack in the final battle against the swarm of enemies, possibly leaving me with the actions I needed to start killing enemies and reducing the number of attacks I would take the next round.
With that noted, I am going to add Feint in to the mono-Tactics deck, replacing A Test of Will. Then, I’ll replace Terrible to Behold in the Elfhelm deck with A Test of Will. After all, it’s good to be able to cancel the treacheries without requiring a Song of Travel first. I expect the fellowship to be much more effective with even these small changes.
Journey Along the Anduin (failed attempt)
Peril In Pelargir
I decided to take the deck as-is for my first run through Peril in Pelargir. I wasn’t expecting to see excellent performance out of it, since it was optimized to beat normal willpower quests. In addition, the low engagement costs of many of the enemies could easily cause problems, since the decks rely heavily on leaving many enemies in the staging area.
My expectations, as it turned out, were on-point. The first run through ended with me facing more attacks than I could defend and more threat in the staging area than I could overcome. 4 enemies engaging turn one was a daunting prospect. Even the Feints we added after the last run down the Anduin wasn’t enough to deal with it. There simply wasn’t enough defensive power, and while we had enough attack power in theory, I couldn’t keep questing and killing enemies. And when I held enough attack back to kill enemies, I got location locked.
So, based on those observations, we needed to tweak the deck to be able to consistently beat this quest. As I said before, I’m fine with that. I want to design the core of a deck here around which I can add tech against different quests – I’m not aiming to be able to beat every quest in the game (or even most quests!) without swapping out cards. This deck will have a rather generous sideboard so that we can take the concept and tailor it to the specific challenges a given quest has to offer. Some quests will require more radical changes than others.
For this quest, the first thing I wanted to do is to replace some of our questing allies. Only the last stage of the quest is willpower-based, and so I needed to have some allies that occupy the same space – quest support – only with attack instead of willpower. Westfold Outrider was a good start, but other 2-cost 2-attack allies were necessary. Riddermark Knight was an obvious fit, but most of the other 2-cost 2-attack allies in the game strayed a little outside the preferred theme, unfortunately. In addition, adding too many tactics allies threw off the sphere balance in the Elfhelm deck, and the high-attack spirit allies were all more expensive and thus harder to get into play in a tri-sphere deck. I did add a couple copies of Riddermark’s Finest – a 2-cost Spirit ally that lets us discard it to add progress to a location in the staging area. Removing threat from the staging area is just as good as questing, and works regardless of what stat we are going to be using to quest with.
Ultimately, though, my goal with adding more of these kinds of allies is to reduce the questing burden on our heroes. The big challenge I noticed was in being able to kill the enemies while questing at the same time. Adding allies was one way to free up our heroes to kill enemies, but it’s not the only way.
Readying is another simple solution to that problem – if we could quest with our high-attack heroes and then ready them for combat, that’s just as good as leaving them ready while the allies quest. Unexpected Courage and Snowmane were already aimed at this, but doubling down on the readying offered some possibilities. I considered Cram and Steed of the Mark, but ultimately decided to go another route.
The other big problem we ran into was not being able to get enough defenses up in time to deal with an early enemy swarm. (And that problem continued through the whole game). Here, I considered adding more defensive allies – probably the Warden of Helms Deep, and increasing Deorwine up to 3x. But again, I ultimately decided to go another route.
I ended up deciding to try and fix both of the problems with the same set of changes. Event-based action advantage is much more consistent with Hama than it might otherwise be – if we need to, we can play the events over and over. And that’s exactly what staging area attack offered – the opportunity to avoid a number of attacks from enemies. Luckily, there were other Tactics events that offered the same type of advantage.
To that end, I added 3xQuick Strike to the mono-Tactics deck. With Firefoot on Eomer, it could be used to kill multiple enemies before their attacks happen. In addition, the event Battle-Fury offered the same type of opportunity, with a more limited window of use, but the added benefit that we don’t need to sacrifice the hero’s questing ability to use it. In ideal circumstances, Eomer could kill an enemy or two, and then commit his considerable attack power to the quest.
In addition, I went with some play changes – I started playing Snowmane onto Eomer instead of Theoden, leaving me with that exceptional attack available for multiple uses. A lot depended on engagement costs, of course, but I found that an extra action out of Eomer – in this case – was more useful than the extra action out of Theoden.
These sorts of changes did help to shore up our deficiencies, but they also left us with a glaring problem – we aren’t going to be likely to attack into the staging area, and we’ve been planning as if we aren’t expecting it. The engagement cost on these enemies is just too low to be able to leave them in staging.This is a slight issue because it was the core of the deck we designed. Staging area attack via Forth Eorlingas was the name of the game here.
However, there are other ways to get enemies into the staging area than just low threat. The Spirit event A Light in the Dark, from the Core Set, actually fit the bill perfectly. It’s a little expensive, but it works as a combination of both Feint and Fastred. It’s actually much like Terrible to Behold, except that we don’t have to exhaust a Noble character to trigger it. In addition, the Leadership event Fresh Tracks lets us ignore a just-revealed enemy for a round. With tricks like these and Fastred, and the ever-present possibility of the Umbar Assassin sitting there in staging with Archery, the quest still offered up enough targets to want to have the option.
That left the open question: what to cut to make room for these new ideas. And, since it seemed that remaining below engagement costs was unfeasible, it appeared to be an obvious answer.
For the mono-Tactics deck, I moved 3xGaladhrim’s Greeting and 3xSteward of Orthanc to the sideboard, replacing them with 3xRiddermark Knight and 3xQuick Strike. For the Elfhelm deck, I dropped 3xWell-warned and 3xWest Road Traveller (the Escorts from Edoras were the more valuable willpower ally to have, since we only need to make one or two big questing pushes to clear the last stage), replacing them with 3xLight in the Dark and 3xFresh Tracks. In addition, I dropped Astonishing Speed, since the need for willpower questing was so reduced, and replaced those 2 cards with 2xRiddermark’s Finest.
Finally, I moved the Rohan Warhorse from the Tactics deck to the Elfhelm deck, replacing Hauberk of Mail. It turns out that the highest attack on an enemy – not counting the Umbar Assassin which we really don’t want to engage – was 3, and the shadow effects could only boost it up to 5 except in a few rare instances of shadow chaining. With that said, Hauberk of Mail was a little superfluous, and so cutting them made room for the Warhorses. That had 2 effects – providing even more targets for the Westfold Horse-breeders and opening up 3 more slots in the Tactics deck for Battle-Fury. The last change was minor – simply swapping out one copy of Grimbold for a 3rd copy of Deorwine. I preferred the consistency on my defender for this quest, rather than a willpower quester who wouldn’t be exceptionally useful until the last stage.
The first run of the quest with the new deck was a complete failure. But I discarded 2 enemies for the Leaping Fish on round 1, and revealed 2 more in staging. And it turned out that 6 enemies on round 1 was just a little bit too much to handle. The next three runthroughs were successful. Interestingly, both of them were uncharacteristically quick for this deck – the second and third ones took only 5 completed rounds. That’s impressive on its own, since I lost Hama to a bad undefended attack on round 1 during one of them. But even with that handicap, we managed to complete the quest. We didn’t attack into the staging area once, unfortunately, but between Quick Strikes and Battle-Fury, it certainly did feel like Rohirrim Warriors in a brawl-turned-street-fight.