Shadows of the Wild – Deck Testing

Welcome back to Experimental Deckbuilding! Today, we are going to go over the first round of deck testing results for the Shadows of the Wild fellowship. I had originally intended to do this as a single post, but I constantly worry about walls of text, and this post got long enough with only 2 quests.

In our last installment, we examined the decks and made the changes necessary to get them working together as a fellowship. We also picked the four quests against which we are going to test this fellowship: Nightmare Journey Along the Anduin, A Knife in the Dark, The Wastes of Eriador, and Escape from Umbar. Today, we’ll talk about our experiences with the first two of those.

What we haven’t done yet is clearly spell out exactly what we are looking for as we go through our quests. Of course, we’ll be watching the resource curves and the card draw, to see how often we stall out due to lack of one or the other. But we also want to be looking out for specific worry points with the decks themselves.

One thing I am worried about in particular is the vulnerability to direct damage that these decks could show. With few hit points, and only limited healing – in the form of the Imladris Caregiver – these decks could be exceptionally vulnerable to Archery damage, direct damage treacheries, and other such things. That is one of the reasons why the Wastes of Eriador is on the list of quests to test against.

So the first question is: Does our lack of healing and low hit point pools cause problems for these decks?

Another potential worry is our lack of early-game combat strength. Although the whole point of these decks is to try and quest past as many enemies as possible, it can sometimes be necessary to engage enemies just to clear the staging area, before our willpower has reached a critical mass.

But that really doesn’t get at the core worry either. It’s not just “I’m worried about early game combat,” but more of a “I’m worried about the early game in general.” If I can muster enough willpower, I don’t need to fight in the early game. If I can muster enough combat strength, I don’t need to worry about my willpower as much, because I can keep the staging area clear.

So, I suppose that the second question is: Can the deck survive the first few turns of the game in order to get established?

The final thing I’m really worried about is how dependent the decks are on getting certain attachments out early. So, my third and final question is going to be the same as a question from our last fellowship: Is this deck too reliant on the opening hand? In other words, do I end up with enough options to get rolling, or can I turtle until I get what I need?

The last two questions end up focused around the issue of surviving the early turns of the game, which is essentially the core question of any deck. I’ve found that, with very few exceptions, if you can survive the first 3 or 4 turns of the game with your board state intact, you have a very good chance of beating the quest. Not always, of course, and there are just some encounter deck combinations or must-cancel treacheries that can completely upend your expectations, but as a general rule, I think it holds.

So, now that we’ve identified the core questions for the deck, let’s take the deck for a spin.

Nightmare Journey Along the Anduin – Playthrough

As I’ve said before, I really enjoy Journey Along the Anduin as a quest, even if it can sometimes be a little too easy. I think that the most annoying part is the third stage, which can sometimes turn into an epic battle, and sometimes fizzle out with nothing revealed after advancing.

The Nightmare mode doesn’t fix that specific issue, but it does make the quest much more difficult in other ways, like 10 threat locations and ridiculous treacheries or shadow effects that force undefended attacks from the Hill Troll against every other player in the game. Even with that, though, I found it exceptionally fun. It helped that this fellowship was teched against the quest fairly well, but even accounting for that, the changes were interesting, and enhanced the theme of the quest. This was my first ever experience playing Nightmare mode, and I think that I’ll likely end up playing more of it in the future, so I look forward to that. Kudos to the designers for making a fun game.

I played the quest 4 times, and won twice. The first loss was just bad luck off of the encounter deck – between setup and the first round of staging, I ended up with both Gladden Marshlands and the East Bight, failed questing, was forced to travel to the East Bight, quested all-out and failed to clear it. Even if I had used the Action on the Gladden Marshlands to reduce it’s threat, the best I could have managed was 4 progress after putting all the damage possible onto all of my heroes. Not much to learn from that loss, unfortunately.

The second attempt went much better. I did flip a Gladden Marshlands turn 1, but without the passive effect on the East Bight, I could just travel to it immediately and clear it over a turn or two without much trouble. The Hobbit Pipe and threat reduction engine was working very well, and the other deck managed to get its card draw online as well, meaning that we built up effectively, defeated all of the early-game side quests, and then systematically killed both Hill Trolls to advance the quest. After that, the game was simple.

The next 2 times I played were interesting. In the first one, I lost because of the Brown Water Rats. I ended up with 2 of them engaged early in the game, decided to take a risk and take an undefended attack, and got the shadow that boosted attack if it was undefended. Because I’d taken a point or two of damage on Thurindir earlier, I would have had to lose Sam or Folco, and that early in the game, I couldn’t handle a hero loss.

The last playthrough was another win. It took forever to do, largely because I went into the third stage with 6 or 8 enemies in the staging area and threat below 20 for both decks. So, since I had to kill every enemy in play, and none of them were engaging automatically, I had to wait until I could optionally engage each one and kill it, and that took a while.

So – on to the learning experiences. I didn’t see many dead cards during these playthroughs. Both of the events I worried might be marginal – Take No Notice and In the Shadows – were actually key at some points. The whole Elevenses + Wandering Took + Curious Brandybuck might be just a little bit win-more, though. Getting Resourceful out meant that I didn’t have resource issues throughout the whole game, and an early Fast Hitch + Peace and Thought gave me the options I needed.

This quest doesn’t hit too hard on the direct damage, so we don’t have a dispositive answer to the first question we worked out above. We did end up with some Goblin Snipers suck in the staging area forever, so we took some direct damage over the course of the game, but nothing significant enough to actually make the difference between winning and losing. I’m concerned about how we’ll perform against quests that are more demanding in this area, though, and I’m brainstorming possibilities.

For the second question, our losses were all issues with the early game, but they all seemed outliers, rather than indicating structural problems with the decks. I lost the first one because the encounter deck got a nasty combo during setup, and I couldn’t get control. The second issue was that we got swarmed with 1-attack enemies with an engagement cost of 1. Frankly, it was probably a little bit of a misplay to engage both of them with the Lore/Leadership deck – with 1 attack, at least one of them should have been engaged with the Spirit deck where I could take the attacks undefended for threat. I don’t know if I would have gotten the encounter deck under control if that hadn’t happened, but given the convincing nature of both of the wins, I feel confident that it would have happened.

And for the last question, about whether we are too dependent on our opening hands, I’m not sure. Getting Hobbit Pipes out in the early game so that I can start drawing cards is important, and Fast Hitch is important to the other deck. I guess that part of the problem with nailing down an answer to this question is that I’m still not certain what the most important cards to look for in an opening hand are for the Lore/Leadership deck. I often tend to want Fast Hitch and Peace and Thought, because 5 extra cards to start the second turn with opens up so many possibilities, but I wonder if that might not be the ideal in all situations. It’s a question to look out for as we proceed onward.

A Knife in the Dark – Playthrough

This was another fun quest – I hadn’t ever played it before, but I enjoyed myself immensely. I only played the quest once, but I felt like it was an excellent showcase of how this fellowship functions. Due to the threat-raising effect on Bill Ferny, neither deck spent a lot of time at a very low threat value, and I sometimes even had to engage enemies that I would have rather left in the staging area. But with judicious use of engagement-cost-raising effects, I was able to handle combat even though it took some time for Sam’s defensive boosts to come online.

Because this quest uses Frodo Baggins as the Ring-bearer, I made a swap in the heroes for the mono-Spirit Hobbit deck, with Fatty Bolger filling in. In addition to being the only Hobbit hero left in the Spirit sphere for me to choose, he also can play with our threat in order to do something useful – in this case, lowering the threat in the staging area. It’s almost like questing, but we can adjust the value more effectively, and it can be done after staging, when we know the ideal target.

Replacing Frodo with Fatty was an interesting experience. I seldom used Frodo’s ability, and he and Pippin seem to be working at cross purposes. If things are working well, I won’t need either ability at all. If things aren’t, I end up needing one or the other, but seldom both. Fatty, on the other hand, lets me adjust questing significantly, which is exceptionally useful for clearing side quests early. A hero swap between Frodo and Fatty might be something very much worth considering.

One of the other highlights of this playthrough was being able to use the effect on the Prancing Pony to bring Thalion into play for free and then to use Send for Aid to bring Halbarad in. By the second or third turn of the game, I had both of my really powerful Dunedain allies out and ready to go without paying a single resource, which was extremely helpful in getting other cards out in a timely fashion.

That on its own does raise interesting questions, however. Halbarad is an expensive ally. So far, I have often been able to get him into play for free via quest effects. But if we don’t find him via Send for Aid, 4 cost is quite a lot to come up with with a single Leadership hero. And, as we saw in this quest, his passive effect is pretty essential to the way that the deck is functioning. He does have his own cost reduction, but since we are trying not to engage too many enemies, I’m not sure just how effective it will be at getting him into play via normal means.

In addition, Bill Ferny was a thorn in my side the whole game. The combination of my desire to keep my threat low and his inability to be optionally engaged left him in the staging area until the end, raising my threat every time I committed a hero to the quest. This is far from the only quest which has enemies like this, so I’m considering the wisdom of adding some sort of engagement effect to the sideboard – the Son of Arnor is both thematically appropriate and in-sphere. That again raises the spectre of resource constraints – if it’s hard to raise 4 to pay for Halbarad, it’s also hard to raise 3 to bring in the Son of Arnor, and even more so when the resources are highly competetive.

I’ve actually been noticing that it can be easy to become resource-locked in the Leadership sphere for the side quest deck. With almost no resource generation (Halfast Gamgee as a one-off exception, and Thalion becoming an extra hero does work eventually), getting the necessary cards out is often tricky. As a solution, I propose adding in two copies of Elf-stone. That gives us an alternate means to bring in Halbarad for free, but is still useful even if Send for Aid or some combination of resource build-up and his innate cost reduction let us get him into play normally. There are enough expensive allies in the deck to be worthwhile: Thalion, the East Road Ranger, Halfast Gamgee, the Son of Arnor (in quests that warrant us bringing him in from the sideboard), and even Gandalf. To free up the space, we’ll look at cards that aren’t pulling their weight.

The first one to notice is actually a side quest. In an odd turn of events for a deck built around side quests, one of them just isn’t contributing. Scout Ahead is generally only marginally useful – we used it to set up a turn or two in the quests we’ve run, but it has never been a clutch card. In fact, it’s almost always been win-more than anything else. It does give Thalion a Lore resource icon, but since the sphere I’m having the most trouble with is generally Leadership, I’m not losing too much there, I think. In addition, Thalion’s Spirit icon (from Double Back) can be used to pay for Robin Smallburrow’s ability, so I still have useful things to do with his resources. The second card to drop is one of the copies of Legacy Blade. This card is incredibly important to the deck, but I don’t think I need all 3 copies. With the amount of card draw we have available in this deck, we should see one in a reasonable amount of time. And while we’re waiting, we have a number of 2-attack allies who can generally provide us with the combat power we need.

With that change, I’m comfortable adding the Son of Arnor to the sideboard – he’ll likely replace one of the copies of the East Road Ranger and the lone copy of Halfast Gamgee against quests where we need to be able to pull enemies out of the staging area.
Now, to our broader questions: like last time, this quest did not feature a whole lot of direct damage, so we haven’t really gotten a test in that regard, so we’ll pass over the question for now. But even with higher-attack enemies, we didn’t need any healing, so that might be a good sign.

For the second question, I think the answer is an unmitigated yes. Even though it was difficult to stay underneath the engagement cost of these enemies, we managed to pull ourselves through the early rounds in a stunning fashion.

The third question is a little less clear – we had really good opening hands in some ways, and we were able to get a lot of cards out quickly. However, it took some time to be able to find our threat reduction, and even longer to find the Hobbit Pipes – to the point where I used Send for Aid to bring in Bilbo Baggins just so that I could search the deck and find a Hobbit Pipe rather than using it on Glorfindel.

We seem to be really dependent on getting the Hobbit Pipe engine up and running early in the Spirit deck. If that doesn’t happen, we can struggle. For the side quest deck, I still haven’t identified a single core need for the opening hand, which might be a good sign. If I’m not 100% sure what to mulligan for, then that probably means that we’re much less dependent on having certain cards in our opening hand. Frankly, I mostly just mulligan for card draw.

So, at the halfway point in our deck testing, we’ve made a few changes to the deck, added the Son of Arnor to the sideboard, and are contemplating making the temporary change from Frodo to Fatty that the Saga quest required us to run into a permanent hero swap. Only time – and the last two quests on our agenda – will tell if these changes are worthwhile or not.

In the meantime, tune in next time for the narrative writeup for Conflict at the Carrock!