Forth Eorlingas! – Testing Report, Part 2

This article will cover the next two quests in our questing regimen – the Morgul Vale and Intruders in Chetwood.

The Morgul Vale

For the first test run on this quest, I reverted back to the decks as of the end of Journey Along the Anduin. The changes I made to tailor the fellowship for a Battle quest with many low engagement cost enemies were not necessarily relevant here. In fact, since my overall goal here is to be refining a base deck, while figuring out what needs to be changed for each individual stressor, I’ll probably end up going back to the base deck at the start of each of the test quests. After that, I’ll sideboard cards as needed to tailor towards the specific quest. And if and when I decide to make changes to the base decks, I’ll make a special note of them.

Unlike Pelargir, the biggest threat the Morgul Vale quest offers is repeated high-powered attacks from boss enemies. There are a few low-engagement cost enemies, including the Morgul Spider, which is possibly my single-most-hated enemy in the game. (I know that there are worse enemies, but none of them evoke the same visceral reaction that the Spider does.) The Forest Bats are also exceptionally annoying, but function somewhat similar to Dol Guldur Orcs from the first cycle of the game’s lifespan. But overall, the really dangerous part comes from the repeated attacks from Murzag, Lord Alcaron, and finally, the Nazgul of Minas Morgul.

I lost the first two times in quick succession, mostly on round 1, as I tried to get a sense of what I needed in an opening hand, and how I wanted to play the quest. The third game was the first playthrough for which I really paid attention to what I wanted to do and how I wanted to accomplish it. The fellowship was successful, but the playthrough revealed a great deal of dross in the decks that ought to be cut. The successful run was almost entirely due to lucky draws in the first two or three turns, and then I spent nearly 6 turns in the middle of the game drawing absolutely nothing useful at all. It turns out that it wasn’t particularly difficult to keep the threat in the staging area under control, and some good luck was also sufficient to get my defenses up and ready early in the game. In addition, early threat control gave me the ability to avoid Murzag for several rounds.

During this quest, I consistently drew either willpower allies or temporary willpower boosts, and I seldom – if ever – needed them. In fact, I ended up using Escorts from Edoras as chump blockers after the enemy situation began spiraling out of control in the late game. These cards, by and large, sat dead in my hand until I needed to use them for purposes for which they were never intended.

In addition, shadow effects gave me a great deal of grief. Even with 3 copies of Armored Destrier, I was the victim of nasty shadow effects on several occasions, delaying my ability to kill enemies, forcing rearrangement of my defensive plans, and eventually costing me a hero.

Finally, although there were not a huge number of low-engagement cost enemies, the ones that did exist were often ones that I really did not want to engage on the round they were revealed. In particular, the only reason that I was able to deal with the various Morgul Spiders was due to luck and an abundance of chump blockers. It turned out to be unrealistic to expect to keep my threat below 25, and so I had to engage them anyways. Without the lucky defensive start I ended up with, I would have been in much more trouble.

So, in order to be more consistent against this scenario, my analysis was that we needed more defensive options, so that we had a higher chance of them showing up in an opening hand. In addition, options to keep enemies in the staging area or otherwise deal with them would also be good candidates for inclusion, and extra tech against shadow effects, if possible, would be a good third vein to explore. More consistent threat reduction would also give extra protection against Murzag specifically.

Based on this experience, I applied the questions that we set up at the start of our testing regimen. Number one – Is our deck too reliant on our opening hand? Yes. This has still been the case. Even after the changes we made post-Anduin, early threat reduction and defense was still key to a successful run. The takeaway from this is probably that we need better defensive options available early, and perhaps more of them available in the deck.

Can the fellowship handle standard combat in circumstances where staging area attack is precluded? So far, this has been the case. As long as there are not swarms of low-engagement cost enemies coming down to engage us on round one or two, we can handle a low-engagement cost enemy. Peril in Pelargir was a special case, both for the enemy swarm potential on round 1, along with every enemy but one having an engagement cost below 30.

Does our lack of healing create significant problems for our deck? Not so far, although we haven’t found ourselves up against a quest that seriously punishes us on that count yet.

Finally, our cost curves have been holding up alright – although the Tactics deck can sometimes end up resource poor – it has a lot of 3-cost cards, perhaps too many. Our card draw, on the other hand, has still been hit-and-miss. The most important question, however, earned itself some new and interesting answers. This quest revealed some more dead cards – cards that I seldom want to put into play and which have followed that pattern over multiple quests. I almost never play Valiant Sacrifice. Even though it’s card draw, I tend to almost always use those leadership resources elsewhere. And if I do have a leadership resource on hand, I don’t have allies leaving play often enough to trigger it. And when the two conditions do come together, it turns out to be a win-more card.

This idea, however, put me on the trail of a fix that I hope will help my early-game opening hand problems along with my card draw issues. Instead of the unreliable card draw of Valiant Sacrifice, I doubled down on the most consistent card draw in the fellowship: the side quest Prepare for Battle. Replacing all three copies of Valiant Sacrifice with Dunedain Message means that we are much more likely to be able to see the side quest, and we have consistently had the willpower available to clear it early. In addition, this opens up the door for including other side quests – the most obvious options are Double Back and Gather Information. Replacing one copy of Prepare for Battle with Double back effectively boosts the reliability of seeing either card draw or threat reduction, as needed, while the Gather Information offers a chance of finding the exact cards we need to pull out combo pieces. And, since Gather Information allows us to fetch anything we need, it’s not a dilution of the deck’s effectiveness to add it in without dropping a card to keep the deck size balanced.

For the defensive issues, I decided to replace Hauberk of Mail with Dunedain Warning. Although the Hauberk is an excellent card in its own right, the ability to stack the Warnings on top of each other fits the needs of the deck more.

For the Morgul Vale specifically, there were other dead cards I noticed during the playthrough. Escort from Edoras, the West Road Traveller, and Astonishing Speed were all mostly dead cards in my hand, at least until the end, when I played the questing allies just to serve as chump blockers. The heroes were generally able to keep the staging area under control, and so many cards in the encounter deck are treacheries that a typical turn doesn’t increase the threat in staging by a large amount.

I didn’t want to cut all of the questing allies, but there certainly wasn’t a need for all of the questing boosts the fellowship included. Cutting 3 copies of Escort from Edoras and both copies of Astonishing Speed left enough room to address some of the other weaknesses. To deal with the boss enemies, I added 2 copies of Hauberk of Mail back into the deck – to be able to quickly boost defense to useful levels, running both Hauberk and Dunedain Warning should be helpful. And to deal with the Morgul Spider specifically, I added 3 copies of Ride Them Down. This is a nice thematic complement to our fellowship’s core idea, and is actually a better sideboard card for quests with lots of low engagement cost enemies (such as Peril in Pelargir) than A Light in the Dark, since it offers a permanent solution to the enemy rather than just putting off dealing with the attack.

With these changes to the core of the deck, and the extra sideboard cards for Morgul Vale specifically, I went back to the quest. The result was a crushing success. The opening hands were not spectacular in any way, and I drew almost none of my card draw until very late in the game. But the fellowship was able to remain beneath Murzag’s engagement cost for quite a few rounds. Due to a turn 1 Dunedain Message, I found, played, and cleared Double Back in the first quest phase, dropping my threat well below Murzag’s engagement cost, where it remained for many rounds. Even with my card draw problems, I drew enough defensive boosts that I was confident enough to advance the quest. When my threat finally hit Murzag’s engagement cost, I killed him quickly, Feinted Lord Alcaron the next round and killed him, and used the response of 2 copies of the Morgul Road to kill the Nazgul much earlier than I would otherwise have been able to. Due to some poor encounter reveals and not being able to find a Song of Travel in order to play any of the Spirit cards in my hand, the mono-Tactics deck ended up at 47 threat, and I eventually played Sneak Attack/Gandalf from Elfhelm’s deck 3 times in a single round, trying to draw a Song of Travel to play across the table, so that the mono-Tactics deck would be able to play the Galadhrim’s Greeting it had in hand.

I finally drew it (from the other deck, no less!), and played the Greeting and successfully whittled the Nazgul down over the course of several turns. Even with the card draw non-functional for so long, the decks held out against the quest, and were able to muster both the defense and the attack to deal with the boss enemies when needed. Theoden turned out to be a star in this quest – I gave him the Golden Shield instead of Fastred, and he was defending for 9 by the end of the quest. He could have consistently defended the Nazgul – I just Feinted it every turn so he didn’t have to.

I went for one more run against the quest, and got overwhelmed on about turn 10, after I made a mistake early on and didn’t quest for enough to clear the active location. As a result, I wasn’t able to clear the Prepare for Battle side quest, which was sitting there waiting for me. Without that extra card draw, I stalled out and ended up engaging Murzag without having any attack available to kill him with. That along with a poorly-timed Power of Mordor shuffling and revealing 7 cards spelled the end of the runthrough. But I could easily look at that particular run and mark specific mistakes which – had I chosen differently – would have significantly changed the outcome. So I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at with these decks.

After watching the decks run through this quest, I’m rather confident that they are working just about as intended, and that the changes we made to the core of the decks were effective at remedying the issues we were seeing. I still have lingering doubts about the Steward of Orthanc, but I’m hesitant to replace it because the past 2 quests have been quests that didn’t require as much willpower to deal with. We’ll keep him around for at least one more test experience.

Watch the video here: The Morgul Vale

Intruders in Chetwood

The fourth quest in our lineup is the first more modern quest we’ll be facing. I’m pretty confident in the deck as we presently have it, and so we will again be starting out with the deck changes we came to at the end of the Morgul Vale (not including the sideboard cards to deal with the boss enemies).

That deck proved to be woefully inadequate to the challenge – I won once and lost many times. Several losses were to a specific treachery – Sudden Assault. When that happened on turn 1, I wasn’t able to do anything about it, and I lost a hero to the Orc War Party. On one occasion I threated out, but the most common cause of defeat other than that specific treachery was location lock. (And even the time I threated out, it was due to a specific location – Outlying Homestead – that prevented me from lowering my threat while it was in the staging area. Since the location is 8 quest points, and requires you to reveal another card from the encounter deck to travel to it, it tends to sit there causing problems for you.)

Since enemies do not make engagement checks at all during this quest, I decided that the various threat reduction cards were much less necessary, which meant I had an obvious place to find room for more location control cards. I started by replacing the three copies of Well-Warned in the Elfhelm deck with Ride to Ruin, and then replacing all three copies of the Galadhrim’s Greeting in the Tactics deck with the Riddermark’s Finest. In addition, I noted that, while the explosive questing boost was nice, the impermanence of the Escort from Edoras had unfortunate ramifications for my long-term board state. I would much rather have an ally that would remain on the board and continue adding its willpower. As such, I decided to replace it with the Rider of the Mark. It is slightly more expensive, but has added utility for shadow cancellation and potential assistance against attacks. This last change may end up being permanent – with Astonishing Speed, I already have a fair amount of one-shot willpower boosting, and I’d rather have the permanent ally. In addition, modern quests have dangerous shadow effects – Armored Destrier helps with this, as does Deorwine, but even with multiple copies of Armored Destrier, the defender has to face at least one card with a shadow effect before starting the chain of discarded shadows. The Rider of the Mark can start that chain, discarding a shadow from the first enemy to be defended against.

The resulting deck felt like it did much better. I lost again to a turn 1 Sudden Assault – I can survive that treachery if I get a chump blocker in my opening hand, but I don’t always get it. The second time I played, I lost due to a misplayed defense – I had Gandalf in play, and decided to defend with an injured Fastred so that Gandalf would be able to attack. Fastred died to the shadow effect at that point. The next game I did very well – I had an incredibly strong board state, had cleared the board of everything except an Angmar Orc in staging, had 2 encounter side quests in play – Orc Rearguard and Orc Ambush. I had survived the Ambush, cleared Rescue Iarion even with Orc Rearguard in play, and was questing for 20 against 3 in the staging area on the Orc Rearguard so that I could clear the Orc Ambush in the next turn. I had even held several characters back for combat, because I thought that 20 vs 3 with no active location and only 3 progress needed to clear it was slightly overkill. The first reveal was Weight of Responsibility, which caused me to reveal 3 cards, which revealed a second copy of the same treachery. The second 3 cards revealed the third copy of the treachery, after which I finally revealed the second card of staging. And then the extra card from the Forced effect on Orc Rearguard. Lost the quest by 13, and threated out immediately. I would almost certainly have won the quest without that chain, so I’ll call it a moral victory. Or at least, the loss doesn’t really tell me much about the decks – I didn’t have A Test of Will in hand, but Prepare for Battle had been cleared and I was drawing cards left and right.

Actually, that run was interesting in other ways. I cleared 2 copies of Outlying Homestead and was able to actually reduce my threat again, using West Road Traveler both times to swap it for an active location without triggering the Travel effect. Ride to Ruin and the Riddermark’s Finest never came into play, but I had questing under control for most of the game, and so I didn’t need it. So, the run actually told me that the deck can get the quest mostly under control, even though a run of really bad luck scuttled that playthrough. I beat the quest on the very next play. All of the factors I noticed from the previous run were involved in this playthrough. I actually used Sneak Attack on the West Road Traveler to get rid of one of the two Outlying Homesteads in the staging area, playing it from my hand the next round to clear the second one. Astonishing Speed was useful – not to create a single crushing quest phase, but instead to let me clear a sidequest with fewer characters, letting me leave more available for combat. And Ride to Ruin ended the game a round earlier for me, letting me clear a location in the staging area and therefore get enough progress on the quest to win after I cleared the last Orc War Party.

The final run against the quest was, in many ways, the least interesting. I never felt like we were in any danger from the encounter deck, even though I wasn’t able to draw the cards that would let Fastred defend without much danger. The biggest annoyance was the reveal of Lost in the Wilderness, followed the next round by Pressing Needs – forcing me to clear Double Back instead of getting my hand back – which was in turn followed by Orc Rearguard on the round after. After another 3 rounds spent clearing Orc Rearguard and Lost in the Wilderness, I finally got my hands back, only to quickly run out of useful cards again. I did clear Prepare for Battle, but that card is much less useful as card draw on turn 8, and I only benefited from it for a few rounds before winning the quest.

So, with that quest finished to my satisfaction, let’s take a look at our big questions:

Is our deck too reliant on our opening hand? I think we may have finally cleared this hurdle – there are enough tools in our toolbox and sideboard that we can generally draw something that can help us out of a turn-one emergency. The last run against Intruders in Chetwood had opening hands that were far from ideal, but we were able to muddle through anyways.

Can the fellowship handle standard combat in circumstances where staging area attack is precluded? Yes. I didn’t draw a single copy of Forth Eorlingas all game, and we still managed to work things out. It would have been really helpful if I had, but that’s the luck of the draw for us. Since we don’t have guaranteed staging area attack from turn 1, we have to be able to muddle through the normal system of defenses and attacks while we wait to get our explosive rounds in.

Does our lack of healing create significant problems for our deck? Again, not so far. And again, none of the quests have been really punishing on that count, with the possible exception of Journey Along the Anduin.

I didn’t find any dead cards in this playthrough – everything I drew I wanted to play at some point. Except for the Dunedain Messages, but that was only because I had already drawn the side quests normally, and so the fetching events were useless. The resource curves seem fine as well, and the only issues come when it takes a while to find the Song attachments. Card draw is still spotty, but I blame that on 6 turns while Prepare for Battle was sitting out of play because of Lost in the Wilderness. That seems to be the ideal – draw that quest or a Dunedain Message to fetch it on turn 1, and clear the side quest on turn 2 or 3. If I can do that, card draw generally isn’t an issue. If I can’t, then card draw becomes a problem. It should also be noted that I have not been especially good at remembering when I have cleared the quest, so many of these runthroughs have involved accidentally forgetting to trigger the extra card draw – so at least some of this pain has been self-inflicted.

Watch the video here: Intruders in Chetwood

As a final note, this testing series has gone on long enough that I’m kind of chafing to get to some of the other deckbuilding ideas burning a hole in my keyboard. Since part of the point of doing this blog is because I enjoy the writing and playing the game, the moment it starts to feel like a chore instead of a joy, I want to take note so that I don’t end up losing momentum and burning out. As a result, I think that I’m going to drop the last two quests of this testing regimen for the moment. Perhaps a little later, I’ll record a playthrough or two against each quest, talking through any sideboard cards I chose to include and how the quest specifically challenges the decks. Also, at some point I will post the final version of this fellowship on RingsDB, explaining all of the changes made and giving a detailed explanation of the sideboard.

Also, for future decks, I’ll probably cut down the testing regimen to just Journey Along the Anduin (maybe upgrading to Nightmare mode to keep up the pressure on the decks) plus 3 quests designed to specifically stress test the decks I’m putting together. In addition, I’ll put together the questing regimen as part of the deckbuilding post and move a lot of the discussion of the specific deckbuilding mechanics to the videos, so future Experimental Deckbuilding experiences should involve 2 blog posts instead of 5 – something much more manageable for my writing pace.