Experimental Deckbuilding – Scions of Arnor Testing Report

With our Dunedain decks all ready for testing (even if the published link doesn’t represent the current version – for that, see the end of this article), it’s time to ask ourselves the important questions about these decks. What are the potential weak points?

The first and most obvious issue is shadow effects. The combat deck will be keeping multiple enemies engaged with it every round, and that leaves us in a position to just be murdered by shadow effects. Obviously, we have included a fair amount of shadow control – Armored Destriers to discard effects, Dark Knowledge and Eldahir to know which ones to discard, and a few cancellation effects to deal with the ‘cancel-or-die’ moments that shadow effects can sometimes bring. So the biggest question we need to be asking ourselves is – do we have enough to deal with the shadow effects?

A second and related question is: do we have enough healing? It is almost inevitable that some damage is going to sneak through. Do we have enough healing to deal with it? In addition, direct damage and archery effects are going to be a potential difficulty for us – can we win before they overcome us? This will also be a critical issue to look at.

Our final question has to do with boss enemies. Can we muster up enough combat power to deal with boss enemies? One of the weaknesses of the fellowship is that we don’t have access to consistent attack power from turn 1, and it can take quite some time to muster enough to actually dispatch a tough enemy. Watching to see if that causes a problem is going to be important.

So, the first quest we are going to go up against is the Nightmare mode of Journey Along the Anduin.

Nightmare Journey Along the Anduin – playthrough

This quest is fast becoming my standard go-to test quest. I play through it just to get a feel for how the decks function and to look at basic card draw and resource curve testing. And this fellowship performed exceptionally well. Admittedly, we got a little bit lucky with threat reduction right out of the gate to give us a few extra rounds to build up to deal with the Hill Troll, but the decks never felt like we were really in danger. In some ways that’s encouraging, but it’s also a little annoying because when we dominate the quest so easily, we don’t find out about the weak points in the decks we’re running. I suppose that’s why there are still 3 quests left in the testing gauntlet to reveal those.

However, despite not getting any real stress-test data out of the run, I did still learn some important things. We can manage a whole lot of defences, turn after turn after turn, and that’s good to know. We can also handle defending against boss-level enemies repeatedly, if we are given a little bit of setup time. I also noted a few dead cards – the location control deck had no good reason to play Elladan or Elrohir except for 2 willpower, and that’s a poor deal for the cost. Even in quests with a fair amount of Orc enemies, I just won’t be using them to their full capabilities, and the limited use I get isn’t worth either the resource cost or the deckspace. To replace them, I’ll push the Dunedain Lookout back up to 3 copies and add 3 copies of the West Road Traveler. She will give me a reliable source of willpower, in addition to another means to avoid travel costs. This probably means that I can drop Thror’s Map from the sideboard entirely – I can’t think of a quest that has so many travel costs that the Travellers and South Away combined can’t overcome them. Thematically, the Rohan trait is a little suspect, but she just feels so generic. Frankly, I think that she’s a fine thematic inclusion for almost any deck that needs a 2-cost/2-willpower ally. There are very few decks for which a generic West Road Traveller feels out-of-place, even if she is technically from Rohan.

Now to our questions. The deck was only just able to deal with the shadow effects – and this quest has some truly terrible ones. But still, between our outright one-off cancellation and the repeated shadow discards via Armored Destriers, we managed to pull it off alright. And I don’t really know what more I can do to deal with shadow effects – there is no way to make the Vigilant Dunadan a Lore character, so that we could give him Burning Brand, and short of that, I think we have as much shadow management as we can fit.

This quest doesn’t really put a lot of pressure on the damage front, although the indiscriminate hits from Necromancer’s Reach are always potentially terrifying. And our healing is certainly not up to dealing with that repeatedly. But we do have enough healing to keep our defenders healthy, and against most quests that’s all we need.

Finally, we were able to manage the Hill Trolls eventually, but it took a while to muster up enough attack to kill them. I don’t have any specific deck changes in mind yet, but it’s something to keep an eye on during our upcoming tests.

Escape from Umbar – playthrough

Escape from Umbar has instantly become one of my favorite quests – the feel is exactly right for a harrowing escape from a hostile city. In terms of difficulty, I think that this quest is representative of the modern pool – there are harder quests than this, but it’s a good well-rounded quest to test a deck against. I chose this quest for deck testing because it would test our ability to deal with direct damage – there is a fair amount of Archery in this quest – as well as our reliance on side quests, which this quest makes much more fraught than normal.

Given all of that, I was rather surprised when we won on the very first playthrough. (Well, technically, the first playthrough got stopped when I made an invalidating mistake partway through, but we were doing pretty well on that one too.) Despite all of the direct damage it had to offer, and despite the constant removal of progress from the main quest, I never really felt in danger. The Dunedain handled combat with their usual aplomb, and it probably helped that there aren’t any extremely powerful boss enemies in the quest (although I did get a Southron Captain out as the Champion, and that came close to being a boss fight). But the location control turned out to be extremely effective in this quest, and it made it so that clearing side quests was almost a simple task.

I don’t have much to say about this quest – like we found in Journey Along the Anduin, when you win quickly and convincingly, it’s hard to find the weak points in your decks. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that the side quests are sometimes hard to get through every time. Adding Gather Information to ensure that I can get to them has been useful, but I’m finding myself in the position I find in every side quest deck I make these days, and by the 3rd or 4th turn it just ends up feeling like overkill. I’ve also dropped a number of the really expensive off-sphere cards already, so the resource smoothing of The Storm Comes is already much less useful than it has been. The only allies that still require it now are the Wardens of Annuminas. I’m also dropping the 3xElf-stones, as I can easily pay for almost any ally I want to now, and deck space is beginning to become more important than overall usefulness.

In the space of those Elf-stones, I think I’m going to add 3 copies of Heirs of Earendil. Sometimes what you need is to nuke a location immediately, and taking a turn or two to clear it with location control will be too much. In addition, some locations punish you for exploring them, and having an alternate way to get rid of them is another tool in our toolbox. It also increases the density of location control cards in the deck, making it more likely to see at least one of them before we get overwhelmed. That said, it will also be the default card to swap out with Distant Stars against quests that have locations with deleterious travel costs as well as the dreaded ‘immune to player card effects,’ or against quests with particular locations that we really want to find.

And now to our questions – we seem to have had few problems with shadow effects – by and large, we can live with the ones we face. When the shadow effect is truly cancel-or-die, we have enough cancellation and other management to deal with it.

With regards to healing, our Athelas seemed to be enough for us – we had enough hit points to spare for archery, and the other direct damage we were able to weather or cancel. On the other hand, this quest doesn’t have the same level of direct damage as something like Weather Hills/Wastes of Eriador, or an archery-fest like Druadan Forest. So I’m not quite comfortable yet about our healing situation, but I am confident that against any quest with low-to-moderate direct damage effects, especially where we have significant control over where the damage can be placed, our healing and high hit point pools will be enough to get us through.

Finally, this quest didn’t really have boss enemies per se, but the Southron Captain certainly approached that level, especially when powered up by the side quest Southron Champion. We were able to deal with that (even if it was our late game juggernaut), but mustering up enough attack power to kill him was not a trivial matter. It might be worth considering something as a sideboard card to deal with even larger enemies.

Intruders in Chetwood – playthrough

Like Escape from Umbar, this quest punishes the use of sidequests rather heavily. Instead of a loss mechanic where you are required to keep sidequest on the main quest, however, this quest punishes you for the number of quest stages you have in play. In addition, this quest features a lot of “return enemies to the staging area” effects, which make the Dunedain approach to combat much more tricky. The last really challenging bit about this quest is the pressure it puts on your threat dial.

None of this, in isolation, seems like a really difficult thing to deal with. Which is why it was really surprising to me when this quest beat me. Over, and over, and over again. After 10 attempts, including a few minor adjustments along the way, I came to the conclusion that I was missing something important. Something about this quest was just hitting right at weak points I didn’t realize these decks had. By far the vast majority of the failed run-throughs came from threating out, and a fair number of those were caused by location lock.

Ironic, I know, since I have a deck wholly dedicated to managing locations in the fellowship. There were some tactical missteps involved, I’m sure – I kept pulling out locations that were…less than ideal during setup.

Given the amount of location management in the deck, I thought I could handle, say, the Outlying Homestead turn 1. With a South Away! or West Road Traveller, I could skip the travel effect and just get it and its nasty effect out of the staging area and then have one of the three copies out of the way for the rest of the game.

That was the idea, of course. It seldom worked like that. Instead, it just sat there, preventing me from reducing my threat. And when I finally drew South Away!, there was often a second copy in the staging area, still preventing me from reducing that threat.

This quest sparked a whole slew of changes to the fellowship – mostly to the location management deck. The first targets were cards that were beginning to feel like dead weight. Elf-stone seldom had good targets, and when it did, there were other considerations to be met. Dunedain Pipe was good filtering tech, but taking up space that I felt I desperately needed for other cards. Quick Ears was an option for dropping, but this quest has one of the best use cases for it – it can be used to straight up cancel an Orc War Party, which you would otherwise have to engage and kill before you could win.

In the place of Elf-stone was the new 0-cost attachment Woodmen’s Clearing. It essentially solves the threat problem in a single go, giving extra targets for South Away! and dropping threat by its own effect as well. The usefulness of having 3 more cards that can be used to trigger South Away cannot be understated – if you want to use that card for consistent threat reduction, then you need to have enough location attachments in your deck to ensure that you can draw one.

The other important card to include was Heirs of Earendil – it replaced 1 copy of Guarded Ceaselessly and the two copies of the Dunedain Pipe. This card should let me get rid of problematic locations instantly. At the cost of threat, of course, but Woodmen’s Clearing mitigates that a great deal, as long as you are judicious about how you use the card. More importantly, it gets rid of cards that have deleterious effects while they are the active location without ever needing to go through the travel phase, and can even be used on locations which cannot have progress placed on them in the staging area.

The last change to the location control deck was in the sideboard – 2 copies of a sideboard card that I would specifically bring on-board for Intruders in Chetwood, but which are much less likely to be generally useful. Woodman’s Path is another location attachment from the current cycle, which reduces the quest points of the active location by 1. It kind of anti-synergizes with cards that place progress in the staging area, because it can’t be played on a location that has progress tokens on it, but it is going to be important in this quest to neuter the 8 quest point Outlying Homestead. For this quest, 2 copies will replace the 2 remaining copies of Guarded Ceaselessly.

That attachment will remain in the deck for other quests, of course – it’s at least a way for Idraen to contribute even further to the quest phase after we ready her, and there are only a few quests with locations that have high enough quest points to justify the Woodman’s Path (although those Gladden Marshlands in Nightmare Anduin make another compelling argument).

The combat deck dropped its two copies of Squire’s Helm – they were just not providing enough value. Without repeatable healing, the hit point boost is not worth a huge amount. I replaced the Helm with the 2 copies of the Dunedain Pipe which I dropped from the location control deck. The filtering seemed more valuable, so even if I didn’t have room in the original deck, I could still pare away dead wood elsewhere in the fellowship to make room for it there.

The results were astounding. I won the first game I played with the new versions of the decks, rather convincingly. The additional threat reduction turned out to be exactly what I needed to pull it off, while the Woodmen’s Path turned out to be useful but not essential.

The first question about shadow cards again turned out to be relevant – a number of the early losses were to bad shadow flips. Once we had out one or two shadow management cards, it was simple to deal with the effects, but we are still vulnerable to early game shadows. I don’t really know that we need more shadow cancellation – it’s hard to get more than we have already – but we might need to recognize that against some quests, there are certain cards that you just save your cancellation for and that you just eat whatever effects come out because it’s not worth using up your cancellation on non-game-ending effects.

The question about healing was not as important – this quest doesn’t really test our ability to soak damage. A little bit of damage getting through to a defender now and again is about the extent of it, but that is easily manageable with the Athelas we already have.

The final question – about boss enemies – has mixed answers. The Orc War Party is hardly a boss enemy. It does strike as hard as a Hill Troll, and it takes 9 attack to kill in a single blow. But it doesn’t really measure up against the harder bosses of the game. And even with that, it was difficult to muster up enough attack power to kill multiple copies quickly and therefore end the game. It might be worth sideboarding in a couple of copies of the Fornost Bowman, just to handle the even bigger bosses in certain quests.

I wasn’t done tinkering with the decks after this quest, either. I first played around with options to boost the Vigilant Dunadan even further – Wild Stallion, Vigilant Guard for Glorfindel to soak excess damage, and so on. But those felt like they took up too much deck space for not enough return on investment – the Dunadan is doing his job just fine, even if he can only safely defend against 4-attack enemies. That still covers most of the enemies in the game, leaving few enough for Guardians of Arnor or Amarthiul to take care of.

The biggest change I made was finally dropping The Storm Comes. The slow revisions I’ve made over the course of this testing process have made it almost tangential to the core deck functions. Almost the only thing that it helps with is bringing the Warden of Annuminas into play. And with these decks, the Warden is just overkill. That’s not to say that the Warden doesn’t have its uses, but as I’ve added more questing ability to the location control deck, the need for massive willpower numbers has just kind of disappeared. That left me 3 slots open in the combat deck, and I added 2 copies of Master of the Forge. Extra card draw, more consistency, and an ally I can throw under the bus if I end up with one too many attacks. Thematically, it also fits with the sort of ‘Noldor aid’ subtheme I’ve got going on here. I didn’t end up filling the 3rd slot, bringing the deck down to 50 cards total (which means that I can’t publish it on RingsDB with Gather Information in the sideboard for ease of access, unfortunately). There are other cards I could add to reach my traditional 52-card size limit, but most of them fit better in the sideboard, anyways. Son of Arnor for quests which need you to pull enemies out of the staging area, Fornost Bowman (or Legacy Blade, although the Bowman can get you much more insane attack power) to kill really powerful boss enemies – these additions are fine, but they aren’t useful against a broad variety of quests.

For the location control deck, I finally decided to pull the trigger and get rid of the Greyflood Wanderers. There is probably a good way to use them somewhere out there, but these decks aren’t it. Actually, with the way building these decks has turned out, even the Northern Trackers are sometimes more of a liability than a help – if I’m building up for an epic South Away! play, then I don’t want indiscriminate progress across every location in the staging area. I want targeted location control, and the Greyflood Wanderers are just more blanket progress in the same vein as the Trackers. In place of the Wanderers (and 1 of the Northern Trackers), I added 3 copies of the Rhovanion Outrider.

This card has my vote as one of the best allies in the game. It’s versatile, and its ability is exactly the type of location control we need. Between Asfaloth and this card, we can nuke the locations we don’t want while leaving the locations we are fine with or are saving to get optimal use out of location attachments. Thematically, though, it is a little bit of a stretch. Dale and the fallen North-kingdom of Arnor are a long ways away from each other. On the other hand, Rhovanion is a wide place, and this outrider could just as easily represent a wide-ranging scout from the northern vales of Anduin as he could one of the riders of Dale. And we do know that some of the Dunedain crossed the Misty Mountains from time to time – or, at least, that Aragorn did. It’s not unimaginable that some of them might gain friends or allies from the river vales just East of the Mountains that they could call on at need.

This is really a stretch, I know, but the Outrider is just so effective in this deck that it’s worth giving those creativity muscles a workout to justify the inclusion. And if you are still uncomfortable with their inclusion from a thematic standpoint, then feel free to keep the Greyflood Wanderers – there are just as effective as quest support (in fact, better, because they always have 2 willpower instead of only having 2 willpower if they don’t clear a location) and it will take at least a few turns for the Outrider to match the number of total progress laid down by the Wanderer – all you lose is the ability to target that progress more effectively. (And you have to pay the Doomed 2 cost, but we have enough threat reduction to make that trivial now, I think).

We’ll also sideboard in 3 copies of the Warden of Healing, for those quests where the damage is just too much for our Athelas to handle, along with 2 copies of Power of Orthanc, for quests where the Condition attachments end up attached to the quest or to enemies or locations, where Athelas is again insufficient to get rid of them.

That leaves us with a very streamlined set of decks, capable of taking a wide variety of challenges in stride and overcoming them. Version 2.0 is available on RingsDB here. Astute observers might notice that there is still one more quest from our gauntlet that we have not yet tested this against – and they would be correct – but I have not yet gotten the images of the Wilds of Rhovanion cards scanned into my instance of OCTGN, and I’d like to postpone recording it until I have the images for the encounter deck, at least. I am confident with the decks as they are, and do not see any additional alterations being required.

So, look forward to an upcoming video and blog post describing how these decks deal with Journey Up the Anduin. I might even throw in a bonus quest that has a real boss enemy for us to deal with, just to see if we can handle it.

Until then, happy questing!