Shadows of the Wild – Deck Testing, Part 2

Welcome back to Experimental Deckbuilding! It should be noted that I had planned to release the narrative of the Conflict at the Carrock before this post went live, but it isn’t ready yet, and this one was.

In our last installment, we went through the first two quests of our testing regimen for the Shadows of the Wild fellowship. Nightmare Journey Along the Anduin and A Knife in the Dark gave us some good insights into these decks, and we were able to make some changes to give the decks a little more flexibility and consistency. We also pondered the possibility of making a hero change to the mono-Spirit Hobbit [deck], replacing Frodo Baggins with Fatty Bolger, after A Knife in the Dark forced us to use the latter hero for that quest.

Today, we are going to run through the last two quests of our deck-testing. Throughout this whole process, I’ve had a lot of ideas about these decks percolating through my mind, and the weight of all of the deck testing is finally going to break through and inspire some changes to the build. It’ll be an exciting ride, so let’s get straight to it!

Wastes of Eriador – Playthrough

This quest is going to be the first quest in the regimen to seriously challenge these decks with direct damage. Between Cold from Angmar, White Wargs, and Biting Wind, there is the potential for a lot of damage to go directly to our characters. Biting Wind in particular is going to be a particularly obnoxious card – we can survive one copy of it, but two in quick succession will make short work of our decks, even with everything we can do to avoid it.

In addition to the direct damage, the quest features a number of low-engagement-cost enemies, which can throw a wrench into our plans if they are revealed at the wrong time. The final serious challenge this quest throws at us is the Day/Night mechanic. On the first quest stage, we raise our threat every time the token flips to Nightfall, during which we cannot cancel encounter cards (which neutralizes our primary defense against direct damage treacheries) and cannot make progress on the quest (which forces us to turtle even longer to get the benefits out of our side quests). In addition, the encounter side quests and their deleterious effects put pressure on our choices during the limited windows we have to actually clear side quests.

I really like this quest, though, especially for testing decks. As a result, I think I played through it a little bit more than was healthy for me. A few times with Frodo, and then a few more with Fatty Bolger instead, just to see the difference in how the plays functioned. And then I made some experimental changes to the decks in order to try and see how things played out with some different cards.

I first tried this quest with the decklist exactly as it stood after A Knife in the Dark. To be frank, I fully expected to lose. These decks have very little in the way of healing, and the low engagement cost enemies promise the potential of overwhelming the fellowship before we can get our feet underneath us. To my surprise, I won on the second try (the second legitimate try, at least – there was a game in between that got scuttled halfway through due to a serious rules error that invalidated the playthrough). The first was just a ridiculous setup, adding so much threat to the staging area on the first turn of the game that we very shortly were overwhelmed by enemies. We were also completely unable to clear a single side quest, which contributed greatly to our demise.

On the second try, however, the fellowship beat the quest in a marathon run nearly 2 hours long. After an early struggle to clear Lost in the Wilderness and regain my opening hand, I finally cleared all of the side quests on the board, advanced to the final stage, and almost off-handedly killed the pack leader. My board state was built up enough that I killed every single enemy as it came off the encounter deck, which is a little bit counter to what the design of the decks was to do, but I won the quest handily.

I actually got a little caught up in clearing side quests – I could easily have won the quest several rounds earlier if I hadn’t been so focused on clearing every last one. That’s something to keep an eye on in future games, and it highlights that it’s often not enough to build a good deck, we have to know how to run it.

Since I’ve been considering replacing Frodo with Fatty Bolger, I decided to run through the quest again with just the hero substitution. The first quest fell apart on a single turn – I had one of my own side quests out, revealed an encounter side quest which surged into Weight of Responsibility, which revealed a copy of Biting Wind. Since I’d already made it through a copy of Biting Wind already, I was tapped out on hit points for both heroes and allies. The second playthrough ran smoothly again, however, and even with some bad luck in the beginning I got my board state established and was able to advance to stage 3 and kill the Pack Leader with minimal effort.

During this set of playthroughs, I noticed some cards that I’m just not enthusiastic about putting into play, and some that just bothered me on thematic grounds. A lot of this was experience built up from previous games that just hadn’t built up to actionable levels, but the cumulative weight had me wanted to make some changes. I’ve also noticed a larger issue about the functionality of the decks – the side quest deck has a number of threat control options, but I’ve still ended up wanting to play some of the Spirit deck’s copies of Galadhrim’s Greeting onto the other deck to lower its threat, even though I need it to counteract using Pippin’s ability or to trigger the Hobbit Pipes.

The Spirit sphere offers a unique opportunity to resolve this problem with the Song of Earendil, a 1-cost attachment that allows me to transfer at least a portion of another player’s threat gain to the controlling player’s deck. It also self-replaces when played, so it doesn’t increase the effective size of the deck at all, and if we cut some cards to replace it, we can even end up with a thinner deck.

The first of the more problematic cards was the Steed of Imladris. I originally included it to give me an alternate way to discard Elven-light for emergency card draw, but I’m just not playing it a lot. Perhaps that was a play error, and I should be trying to draw more with Elven-light to run through the deck. But I find that I get Glorfindel often enough, either via regular card draw or via Send for Aid, that needing the extra method doesn’t really feel necessary. On the other hand, I can easily imagine a situation where I end up stuck after a bad mulligan with a Steed of Imladris, and drawing Elven-light in such a scenario is a way that I can start to get myself out of it. I’m kind of conflicted on this card, frankly, but the inclusion of Song of Earendil I think gives me as many cards as I got out of this option in an average game, and doesn’t require a combo piece, either.

The other really disappointing card was Curious Brandybuck. Part of the reason I included it was theme, but the more allies I have, the less it feels like a proper sneaking deck. So, it’s unsatisfying on thematic grounds, and as a temporary ally – even a free one! – it’s even more underwhelming. Really, the only justification to keep it was as another ally to remove from the quest via Elevenses, just to maximise threat reduction on that card. But actually getting that to work is more than a little bit difficult.

The final card I looked at was Galadriel’s Handmaiden. As an ally, she works perfectly with the mechanics of the deck, and we managed to construct a justification for her presence in the deck, as one of the Sindarin living at Rivendell. But I still feel unsatisfied on a thematic level including her, in part due to the same issues I noted above. It can still feel like you’re assembling a small army of allies when playing this deck, and that just feels counter-intuitive to the idea of sneaking around.

So, I dropped a total of 8 cards from the deck, and added 3 – the Songs of Earendil. To keep willpower up, I added 3 copies of the Fireside Song, which boosts the willpower of our Hobbit heroes, and synergizes with the Song of Earendil. In order to facilitate getting a Song of Earendil on both sides of the table, I added a single Song of Travel so that I could play it on Sam, thus making him a Spirit hero and therefore eligible for the Song of Earendil in addition to bringing another boost for the Fireside Song. Because I was worried about threat management in light of adding the Song of Earendil, the final card was a copy of Will of the West in order to recycle all of the used threat reduction events. (It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that’s the point of deck testing after all. The refiner’s fire of difficult quests has a tendency to brutally reveal the worth of any given idea.)

For the side quest deck, I added 2 copies of Waters of Nimrodel into the sideboard – most quests won’t have enough direct damage to cause problems, but if they do, I can use Waters to reset the board. The Doomed 3 shouldn’t be a problem with all of the threat reduction I’m running.

The result was rather depressing. Four runs, four losses. All of them from gaining threat too quickly and not being able to deal with the enemies in the staging area. This could have just been a run of bad luck – this quest is a difficult one under the best of circumstances; revealing that extra encounter card every other round is a challenge, as is the total lockdown on encounter deck cancellation on the same timeframes. But I took it as a sign that some of the changes had been much more thematically minded than they were mechanically sound.

I quickly threw out the Fireside Songs and replaced them with Galadriel’s Handmaidens again – that extra little bit of threat control might not seem like much, but when every point counts, it’s hard to argue with. And, if they do bring enough strength to the deck, we have already constructed a thematic justification for them. Even if it still does feel awkward to have a sneaking deck that musters a small army of allies in order to sneak past enemies in the staging area.

With the Fireside Song out, there was no reason to keep the Song of Travel in the deck – Thalion will more than likely have the Spirit resource icon by the time he becomes a hero; the Song was there only because of the potential synergy with Fireside Song on Sam Gamgee. And Will of the West should have been obvious as a bad idea from the start. In my defense, each of my playthroughs of Wastes has been a long game – at least 12 turns. On average, that’s about the point when the Spirit deck tends to draw itself out, so Will of the West as a means of additional threat reduction could make sense in that setting. But most games don’t end up lasting that long, and what the decks need isn’t more threat reduction at the back end, when things are going just fine. They need more chances to get threat reduction at the front, when things are potentially dicey and I’m not set up to handle the enemies I would otherwise engage.

So, even though it seemed like kind of a weird choice, I chose to take the two deck slots from the Song of Travel and Will of the West and replace them with 2 copies of Island Amid Perils. Like Elrond’s Counsel, it requires me to have a specific ally in play, but with the amount of draw this deck can muster (and with the help of the companion deck), I think that these decks see the Handmaiden often enough to make it worth it. And, returning the Handmaiden to hand gets the extra threat reduction when I play her down again. And the fact that it’s a free threat reduction event to trigger Hobbit-Pipes is never a bad thing.

These reversions and more changes seemed to be more effective. It still took me four tries to beat the quest again, but the last two games felt much more under control. The first game, an unfortunate shadow forced a Bloodthirsty Warg (which I was just about to kill!) to engage the other player. I remembered later that I could have used Pippin’s ability to send it to the staging area instead of taking the attack (which engaged the next player and made another attack again, leading to a dead hero and me scooping the game), and I have no idea how the game would have gone if I had done that. But regardless, I lost that game.

The second game was a traditional enemy-fest in the staging area. Too many copies of Predatory Wolves revealed too early for me to catch up and get things under control. It’s a familiar tale, and one I couldn’t do much about, unfortunately. The third game seemed perfect. I had an opening hand with Bilbo Baggins and a copy of Hobbit Pipe, which meant that I could start the game with 2 Pipes in play. I engaged and killed an early enemy, and I lost my hand to Lost in the Wilderness and got it back in the early game. I had eaten the damage from a copy of Biting Wind, and I had a copy of Waters of Nimrodel in hand, ready to play next round as soon as I got the resources to do it. And then I defended an enemy with Amarthiul, boosted by Arwen, and it got a shadow card that boosted the attack of the enemy by the number of damaged characters I controlled, which happened to be exactly enough to kill Amarthiul, and so the game was over. Just like that. Bad luck (and not drawing my shadow control or defense boosts for Sam) sunk that round, unfortunately.

The fourth game went in the same vein as my previous wins. This time, I got 2 locations for setup, which made the game much easier to start with. Waters of Nimrodel proved its quality in this game, letting me reset my board state after a copy of Biting Wind combined with Cold from Angmar lost me the abilities of most of my characters. Song of Earendil turned out to be a very useful addition to the deck as well.

So, I’m not sure exactly how to measure this – I won a number of times, and was overwhelmed a number of times. But, for the most recent version of the fellowship, 1 of the 3 losses would have been a win if it had been any other shadow effect, while another was due to a misplay on my part. In addition, the win was very convincing, so I think that I’m going to leave things the way they are. The recorded playthroughs with Fatty can be seen here.

Looking back, I think that Frodo was a better hero for this particular quest – the ability to soak the damage-upon-engagement from the White Warg or the damage from Cold from Angmar at any given moment was very useful. But the fact that, of all of our losses in any version of the fellowship, only one of them was due to direct damage overload probably indicates that Frodo wasn’t the difference between victory and defeat.

In addition, I didn’t really feel the loss of Frodo as an emergency defender. Losing Frodo certainly puts more pressure on Pippin to keep enemies from attacking us, but the result is roughly comparable in terms of threat gain. And of course, in the late game, Fatty can become a decent defender, especially when supported by Arwen and some of the leftover defensive tech for Sam. And Fatty is much more likely to remain ready at the start of the combat phase to use the Sentinel keyword he can gain from Arwen.

On the other hand, having the ability to manipulate the threat in the staging area is incredibly helpful in making sure that we can clear the side quests during the first few rounds of the game, and that is one of the single most important predictors of success. If we can clear all 3 side quests early, then we end up with a very powerful board state – Thurindir with 5 willpower, 2 high-cost allies in play, and a starting threat significantly lower than we would otherwise have, and Fatty can really help that board state happen.

So, now that we’ve gone through all of that, let’s take a look at our questions:

We now have a definitive answer for the first question – Does our lack of healing and low hit point pools cause problems for these decks?

Surprisingly, the answer seems to be no. Simply adding in those 2 copies of Waters of Nimrodel to the sideboard was enough to handle even the notoriously nasty direct damage of Wastes of Eriador. And the Imladris Caregiver is more than sufficient to heal damage from our defenders.

Next, Can the fellowship survive the first few turns of the game in order to get established?

Here, we end up with a solid ‘sometimes.’ Now, Wastes of Eriador requires a faster start than many of the quests we have faced before, and it has enemies with engagement costs much lower than many of them, and treacheries and quest mechanics that conspire to keep the staging area full of them.

Finally, Is this fellowship too reliant on the opening hand?

In some ways, the answer to this is yes. For the Hobbit deck, we are definitely dependent on getting our threat reduction engine out early, which means that we really want to see a Hobbit-Pipe or Bilbo in our opening hand. It’s interesting that the cards we are mulliganing for are the pieces to our card draw engine, but in many ways, that makes sense. Card draw ensures that the deck can get what it needs. If we don’t get it, we have to stall for time. Luckily, between Songs of Earendil, Ancient Mathoms, Elven-light, and Deep Knowledge from the other deck, there are other sources of card draw to get us through a bad opening start. But still, things can get dicey if we can’t get the deck up and running. If we can’t keep the threat reduction coming, then we can end up in trouble. Without Frodo, we don’t have an emergency valve for engaged enemies, and can end up in a threatening spiral where we end up using Pippin until we threat out.

For the side quest deck, it depends on the quest we are running against. But in this quest, if we didn’t end up with defensive attachments of some sort for Sam, we were going to end up in trouble one way or another. For this deck, the card draw was a little less consistent. Deep Knowledge is good, and the addition of Song of Earendil to the other deck was useful for opening up the option to use Gandalf to draw cards instead of reduce threat. Peace and Thought is powerful, but not very consistent – it’s not worth it if it means failing the quest because I didn’t have those hero actions available. In an odd turn of events, if the Spirit deck is doing well, then it can give this deck the time and room it needs to overcome a poor opening hand.

So I guess it turns out that both decks are dependent on their draw, more than anything else. They need options in hand to deal with the challenges the encounter deck has to offer. But most of the time, the draw I’ve included has been sufficient. So the final answer to the question is that yes, we are very dependent on our opening hands and first few draws, but that in the majority of cases, the draw we have included is sufficient to get us to what we need.

Escape from Umbar – Playthrough

The final quest on our testing regimen is Escape from Umbar. This is a difficult modern quest, requiring us to be able to hit the ground running and not let up until the end. There is also a lot of Archery, which will again test our resilience to direct damage and our ability to win in spite of it. In addition, the quest has a loss condition – if there is ever no progress on the main quest at the end of the round (and you didn’t advance the quest this round), you lose. This can be punishing, especially because we depend so heavily on our side quests. This will at the least delay our ability to complete them, and may force us to alternate between clearing side quests (either from the encounter deck or our own) and ensuring that we have sufficient progress on the main quest. The last challenge that this quest offers is a number of effects that will put enemies into play directly engaged with us. This is annoying specifically because our decks are not designed to handle combat with multiple enemies at once, at least in the early game. So this will test just how effective we are at dealing with enemies that we can’t avoid.

If that list sounds like a very convincing reason not to take these decks against this quest, you would certainly be correct. My very first playthrough was extremely successful. I placed a fair amount of progress on the main quest on turn 1, easily cleared all of my own side quests, and left enemies in the staging area, cancelling treacheries that could have demolished my board state. It was derailed by a mistake that invalidated the playthrough – I was supposed to add an extra enemy to the staging area at the start of the quest phase if any player was not engaged with an enemy, and I failed to do so for two turns in a row. I attempted to save the game and come back to it later to retrace my steps and play on from the place where I made the mistake, but technical issues with the OCTGN save table mechanic made that approach non-functional. I decided that, rather than watch the video through and try to recreate the board state as it existed at that moment, I would just play it through again. After all, if it was so easy this time, it should be simple to do it again, right?

I was so optimistic back then.

10 playthroughs later, and I still hadn’t won a single game. Not even close. I hadn’t even advanced to the second quest stage. Most games were lost by turn 2 or 3, after the encounter deck poured enemies into play engaged with decks that weren’t prepared to handle more than one per turn, if that.

I only lost due to losing all of the progress on the main quest once or twice – if these decks can do anything, it’s quest. I was again surprised at their resilience to direct damage effects – I only lost one game due to accumulated Archery damage, even when I was sometimes taking 6 damage per turn. Instead, the preferred method of execution was the classic enemy swarm. Enemy after enemy, forcing undefended attacks on weak hobbits and eviscerating my board state.

I finally played a successful game, and it shared many features with the first one. The side quests both went as shadow effects.I drew cancellation early on, and had lots of recursion to play it as much as I needed. The first two or three turns were consistently high-engagement cost enemies and locations, so I could quest past them and clear side quests/put progress on the main quest as needed, and I was able to get allies into play early that let me leave some higher-attack characters ready to kill the initial enemies in a consistent manner.

But even though I finally eked out a win, this quest is almost perfectly tailored to demolish these decks. Most of the time, after losing badly, I would sit down, discover why I lost, and make changes to the decks to strengthen up the weak areas that caused it. After playing this quest with these decks, there are no tweaks I could make that would make the decks able to beat this quest consistently – the quest is teched against these decks at the basic idea level. The amount of changes I would have to put these quests through would make them no longer recognizable as the same decks. I could, in theory, shuffle some heroes around, but that would very quickly end up with decks that are different at an essential level.

So, I’m giving this one up as a lost cause. These decks are incredibly powerful, as we’ve seen in previous playthroughs. However, they are vulnerable to a certain type of quest, and Escape from Umbar hits every single potential vulnerability and never lets up.

The mismatch between the quest and these decks makes it so that our experience about being able to live through early rounds or our dependence on opening hands is not applicable to other scenarios. But we did get another data point for the first essential question we were examining with these decks: Does our lack of healing and low hit point pools cause problems for these decks?

And again, surprisingly, the answer seems to be no. I kept Water of Nimrodel in these decks, due to the archery damage. I even played it once or twice. Certainly, the archery put pressure on these decks, but somehow these decks seem to be able to manage pretty well despite it all. Waters of Nimrodel is sufficient as a sideboard card against any quest that punishes us with heavy direct damage effects. The Imladris Caregiver has actually been rather less-than-useful, even against quests with heavy direct damage effects. I sometimes have cards in hand to discard – duplicate uniques, and such-like, but not consistently enough for the card to be a viable solution. I think I’m just going to drop the Caregiver entirely – bringing the deck down to 54 cards. With the amount of card draw it can muster, 56 cards isn’t an insurmountable issue, but without repeatable, hero-based draw, I really could use a more consistent deck. Healing isn’t important enough to dilute my deck in most quests. And where it is, I can just add 2 copies of Waters of Nimrodel without replacing anything, and I will still have a deck capable of handling damage-heavy quests.

Our resource curves and card draw situations have been stable since the beginning, but (in addition to the Imladris Caregiver) I have found one more final nearly-dead card – the Guardian of Rivendell. it was originally included to give the Spirit deck a combat punch sufficient to deal with enemies that ended up engaged with it, but I find myself almost never playing it. And when I do play it, it’s almost always after I’ve ended up with a board state that doesn’t need it, so I almost never use it even when I do play it.

Since there are very rare occasions in which its combat statistics are useful, I will replace it with cards that could serve a similar function at need – a third Northern Tracker gives me more attack to kill enemies I am forced to engage with, and a third copy of Arwen Undomiel ensures that I will see her essential defense-boosting ability more consistently.

This concludes our deck testing regimen for the Shadows of the Wild fellowship. The final versions of the decks are now posted here on RingsDB, with updated descriptions. I feel like this deck testing has significantly improved the quality of these decks, and I am very pleased with the final results. I hope you’ve enjoyed going along this journey with me. Our next adventure will be a new Experimental Deckbuilding post focused around the Dunedain of the North, followed by the narrative writeup for Carrock. Until then, enjoy your questing!