Lights in the Marshes

I’ve spoken before about how I feel about the way that the premise of this entire cycle stands on shaky canonical ground. Aragorn’s hunt for Gollum happens only shortly before the events of the War of the Ring, and the earlier hunt was abandoned nearly a decade before. To make sense of things, we’ve had to establish an alternate universe, in which Gollum was not found so early by Sauron, and in which Aragorn captures him initially much earlier and only later is he found by the Dark Lord.

While we ended up working out a suitable timeline of events that allows us to fit in the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle into the history without doing too much violence to the events of the books as they stand, we are still left with the question of what to do about Aragorn and the final capture of Gollum. Gandalf tells Frodo that Aragorn captured Gollum alone, after all the other searchers had given up.

With the timeline we have, I’m not sure if that fits completely, but I would like to hew as closely as possible to that, if I can. Aragorn, with few or no companions, ventures into the Dead Marshes, captures Gollum, and meets Gandalf at the edge of the marshes. However, that leaves us the question of what to do with Eleanor and company. I think there’s an easy way out – that is, we just leave them in the Emyn Muil for the duration of the hunt. From a narrative perspective, it is easy enough to justify: Aragorn, while hunting solo, finds a fresh trail heading down out of the Emyn Muil and towards the Dead Marshes. With no time to rally the scattered searchers, he follows it, hoping to run the creature down before he can lose himself forever in the marshes. The narrative, then, will be Eleanor and her company meeting back up with Aragorn after he captures Gollum and hearing his story.

Of course, this kind of breaks a fundamental rule that we started out with in this series – using the same set of heroes along for the ride that each quest offers. But I think that the thematic awesomeness of Aragorn and Arwen doing a solo quest through the Dead Marshes offsets that. I suppose, at the end of the day, that this series is (and always has been) more about the narrative than the strict campaign rules. There were two rules that I set for myself – the first was that we were going to be following something close to the Saga campaign rules, and the second was that I was going to be hewing strictly to theme. Those two rules came into conflict here, and theme won. As far as I am aware, this is the only quest in the FFG-created series that will cause us this problem, with the exception of some of the GenCon and Fellowship event quests. If one of those poses a similar problem, I will deal with it in the same way – slot it in as a story one of the characters is telling the group.

The only other upcoming quests that I can foresee narrative difficulties for are the 3 quests in the Khazad-dum box, and only there because the first quest of the adventure pack cycle strongly implies that those heroes died on the slopes of Caradhras after escaping from the mines. As a fair warning, I will probably create 2 paired dwarf decks to take through those boxes, before returning to Eleanor’s story for The Redhorn Gate and the remainder of the cycle. After that, I think we are free and clear, as far as the narrative is concerned.

That still leaves us with the problem of building a deck for this quest, of course. Unfortunately for the integrity of the canon storyline (but perhaps fortunately for our narrative), a single hero deck is rather unfeasible. However, there are some rather interesting cards designed around the two-hero deck. And, of all the companion heroes which Aragorn could take along with him in his quest, I’m rather partial to Arwen – in part because of a really interesting and fun deck created by Authraw for their Thematic Nightmare series at the blog Darkling Door. That deck was created to deal with the Nightmare Hunt for Gollum quest, but it was drawing on almost the same thematic elements we are going to be looking at.

We’ve already met the Evenstar in our series, when she accompanied us to free Lanwyn from the dungeons of Dol Guldur. I really enjoyed giving her a more direct role in things compared to the role she holds in the books – especially given her powerful heritage. Bringing her in to help hunt down Gollum seems right in-line with that.

This Aragorn/Arwen solo adventure idea brings up a few more issues, however – most notably, bringing allies along for the ride would seem to dilute that theme. We could try to make some concessions, but I think that this deck has to be focused around attachments and events that will power up our heroes.

We can bring along a few allies, though – especially those allies that don’t stick around. The Core Set version of Gandalf will be perfect for this, as will Galadriel and Elrond. These can be explained in the narrative by these powerful individuals influencing events from afar, bolstering our heroes willpower, and otherwise being helpful without actually being present. With the possible exception of Gandalf, that is – he’s the only character who would actually make sense to show up during this quest.

Now that we’ve decided on a narrative direction for the deck, let’s take a look at what this quest requires of us. Here is our obligatory link to our favorite analysis blog: Vision of the Palantir.

The big focus of this quest is the Escape Test – basically, after questing, we have to commit even more willpower to make sure that Gollum isn’t getting further and further away from us. These tests can also occur during staging, as a result of treacheries, so we will want to focus on willpower boosting and action advantage.

Combat in this quest is generally light, but there are a few really tough enemies – a couple Hill Trolls, a Marsh Adder, and the brand new Giant Marsh Worm. Treacheries are going to be very light – mostly they just force extra escape tests, with a little bit of direct damage thrown in. Other than the possibility of Hill Trolls, and the need to get a lot of willpower and actions to handle escape tests, there really isn’t anything special we need to be prepared for.

So, on to deckbuilding in a systematic way. We’ve already chosen all of our allies – and luckily, they are all high-willpower, so that they can help with either questing or escape tests, as needed. But that’s not likely to be enough on its own, so we need to take a look at willpower-boosting attachments to give us some long-term staying power.

The most bang for our buck will come from a few attachments. Celebrian’s Stone is 2 cost for 2 willpower, and will grant Aragorn a Spirit resource icon, allowing us to be more flexible with our resources. It will also determine which of Aragorn’s many versions we are going to use in this quest – we need Leadership access to get these willpower boosts and readying effects, as well as the ally version of Galadriel. While Aragorn can get a Leadership icon from Sword that was Broken, that already requires access to the Leadership sphere, which rules out using a different variant and splashing in Leadership cards by that method. In addition, there will not be enough combat in this quest to make the Tactics variant an efficient choice, and the threat reduction from the Lore version, while useful, is not as helpful to our goals as the innate readying ability on the Leadership variant.

Strider is going to be an excellent attachment here – it’s 1 cost to give us 2 extra willpower, in addition to action advantage. Not exhausting to quest will be necessary to make sure we have enough actions to pass escape tests as well as quest and handle combat. If we play it on Aragorn, it will render his readying ability useless, but if we don’t have it in our opening hand, we can still use his ability to have him quest and still have a character available for escape tests. The final useful attachment is going to be the Necklace of Girion. Again, 1 cost for 2 willpower and extra resource generation. Even though the extra resources would be more flexible on Aragorn, smoothing out the willpower boosts will be a more important priority – we need to be able to have either of our heroes able to pass Escape tests, and the willpower boost might be important for some of our events.

Thematically, that could be a little bit of an issue, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about using these powerful Guarded attachments when they are high-profile in-world artifacts with known locations. But, on the other hand, we have already allowed some deviation from the canon. Is it possible that, in this universe, Thorin Oakenshield survived his severe wounds at the Battle of Five Armies? And that therefore Dain did not give the Necklace of Girion to the Elven-king, Thranduil? And even if that gift still did occur, as a wiser and more humble Thorin – recovered from the effects of the dragon-sickness – offered it as a thank-gift to the king, it could easily have been waylaid along the way. Either way, there are narrative options available to us, and I don’t have to commit to any of them until we’ve seen how the playthrough goes.

The next card we will want to add to help with willpower is Protector of Lorien. It will provide boosts to either willpower or defense as needed (and with Hill Trolls out there, needing it for defense is definitely possible). Now, we’ve got a couple of Lore cards in the deck already – to be able to play them, we should include 3 copies of the Ring of Barahir to give Aragorn a Lore resource icon. With Galadriel in the deck, I’m willing to slip a single copy of Sword that Was Broken into the deck on the off-chance that we can get it into play for free – if we draw it naturally, we can play it if we want to, but it’s a resource-inefficient means of generating willpower in this particular deck.

For the moment, that is where we’ll leave our willpower. Now, let’s turn our attention towards action advantage. Strider will already give us one extra action out of Aragorn. For Arwen, we can also include Light of Valinor, which means that both of our heroes can quest without exhausting, and then have actions for escape tests at any part of the quest phase. But that still leaves the combat phase open, which could cause some significant problems if we don’t have the actions available for that. We can’t rely on questing past the enemies, because our starting threat is 21, and there are enemies in this quest with engagement costs as low as 10.

Two copies of Unexpected Courage will help us towards that goal, as will a copy of Steed of the North for Aragorn (it’s cheaper, but more limited, so we’ll include it as a de-facto third Courage and avoid another useless draw – with all of the unique attachments in our deck, that is a real worry). The last action advantage card we want to include is Roheryn, Aragorn’s warhorse. That will allow him to exhaust and kill an enemy before we ever need to defend, assuming we can get some decent attack boosts out.

Moving on to combat – we will definitely need 3 copies of Dunedain Mark to boost that attack power. That should be sufficient for most of the weak goblins and orcs in the deck, but against Hill Trolls or Marsh Worms, we are going to need more punch.

The Spirit event Tale of Tinuviel will be a decent start. It allows us to exhaust Arwen to add ready Aragron and add 3 to all of his stats. In addition to being another way to boost willpower in an emergency, it can boost Aragorn’s defense against a Hill Troll and his attack back. Further attack power can come from the event Fair and Perilous, which will add Arwen’s willpower to her attack. That will give us at least 3 more attack, and is the other reason I really wanted to play the Necklace of Girion on Arwen for the willpower boost. This additional attack can be boosted by Protector of Lorien, allowing us to take care of the nastiest enemies in the quest. Because these events are going to be the primary method this deck has of dealing with enemies, we will also include 3 copies of Dwarven Tomb in order to recycle them.

With 4 card slots left in the deck, let’s take a look at fundamentals. Elven-light is a must with Arwen, so that we can get enough card draw to get important cards into our hands. I want to use the last slot for deck thinning. Since we can easily get a Lore icon onto Aragorn, I’m going to add 3 copies of Deep Knowledge. Although it puts us up to 52 cards, because each copy will give us 2 more cards, we end up with a thinner deck this way than we would have with a 50 card deck without the extra 2 copies.

This looks like a really fun deck to play – all that’s left now is to play it! See it on RingsDB here! Watch the recorded playthrough of the quest here!

Next up on The White Tower, we’ll look at the decktesting for our most recent Experimental Deckbuilding entry – Shadows of the Wild.