Welcome back to the blog, everybody. Things have been crazy around here for the past few months. The US government finally opened back up again, which means that my job is now racing to deal with 30-some-odd days of backed up work. And that means overtime hours in copious quantities. While that is nice for the wallet, it makes little things like writing rather significantly more difficult; hence, the long silence on the blog. When combined with adjustment to yet another shift change, it’s rather impressive that I even managed to record the YouTube videos I did.
But we’re back, and hopefully back with a vengeance. Overtime is still going on, but I think that my body has finally adapted to night shift again. This should be the last change for several years, and I’m excited to have evening writing opportunities again.
So, first, an update on various projects. Eleanor’s narrative campaign has stalled a little bit, but I’ll pick that back up as my next writing project. I’ve started a new YouTube series with Ecthelion from the COTR Discord, entitled Lorefindel Walks to Mordor. It’s a Saga campaign run – my first attempt ever – and I’m rather excited for it. As of this writing, we have published videos through the end of the Treason of Saruman box, and all but the last two quests with janky decks focused around the Lore version of Glorfindel. (For the record, we could totally have handled things with a Lorefindel deck at Helm’s Deep or Road to Isengard, too. We just wanted to keep the story somewhat thematic and have new decks while Lorefindel is off walking to Mordor with Frodo).
On the experimental deckbuilding front, I finally finished my last deck test for the Scions of Arnor fellowship, against Journey Up the Anduin. The video can be found here. There were no final adjustments to make to the decks, so the updated decks have been published and are ready for public consumption.
In the final bit of news for the moment, I have now completed deck testing for the Friendship of Saruman fellowship, and we’ll focus the remainder of today’s post on that. Unlike previous posts, I’m not going to go through the play-by-play, change-by-change deckbuilding, just because I’ve forgotten a great deal of it already due to falling behind in the writing. I’ll do a brief overview of what I changed, though, and discussion of more specific changes can be found in the video playthroughs linked in this article.
Before we begin the report on our regimen, we’ll first note that Joseph Forster featured this fellowship on his blog LOTR Deck Testing Ground. His excellent advice was instrumental in tuning these decks, and I incorporated many of his suggestions even before testing started.
The first part of any experimental deckbuilding series is identifying the fellowship’s potential weaknesses. This fellowship relies rather heavily on the Doomed keyword, so that is the obvious first place to look at. We have a great deal of repeatable threat reduction between the 2 decks, and even more single-shot reduction. Is it enough to keep us alive even if the quest is putting a lot of pressure on our threat dials?
Another place to look at was identified by bgamerjoe – the lack of a strong early-game defender. Can we handle difficult enemies, either through threat management to stay below engagement costs or by getting allies or attachments into play fast enough to defend successfully?
Finally, we don’t have a lot of attack power early on either. Just Eomer, for the most part, and that 3 attack doesn’t go far. We’ll want to watch out for how well we can actually build up attack power to kill the enemies we are engaging.
Nightmare Along the Anduin (playthrough): The first quest in our testing regimen is, of course, the nightmare version of Journey Along the Anduin. It does a good job of testing a number of things which we are worried about – although it doesn’t put a lot of pressure on our threat, it does punish higher threat levels by having a Hill Troll ready to engage us on turn 1 if we go above 30, which inhibits our use of Grima. Also, the Hill Troll tests both our ability to muster defense and attack power, and the other enemies in the quest are no slouches either. The ability of the decks to quest hard is tested by the second stage, and the last stage really tests whether we can handle a lot of enemies all at once.
Against this quest, I was really impressed on a number of levels by the way these decks performed. This was, of course, despite the fact that it took 3 attempts to actually win. The first run was scuttled by a bad shadow that I didn’t have cancellation for. Forcing an undefended Troll attack against all other players in the game is really a game ender unless you have some really specific tech for that (Citadel Plate and a lot of healing comes to mind). That was just a matter of not having drawn the shadow cancelling cards, unfortunately. In the second quest, we drew all 3 copies of Necromancer’s Reach in the first 4 stagings, which killed 2 heroes and ended the run. I hadn’t drawn Test of Will, and I hadn’t drawn any healing yet either. So there went that run as well.
The interesting thing is that, in both runs, I was actually doing quite well at dealing with the threats I was really worried about – threat and the enemy attacks. For both games, I had strategies that were working out for dealing with the hard enemies, and if the specific game-ending cards hadn’t come out exactly when they did, I could easily see myself having a successful run of it. Interestingly, the decks were able to stay underneath 30 threat for long enough to build up, even with occasional use of Grima’s ability.
That gives an optimistic portrait here, I think. The shadow effect on Troll Attack ends most fellowships if they can’t cancel it, and there are very few fellowships that wouldn’t be brutalized by 3 consecutive Nectomancer’s Reach cards. The decks could probably use more card draw to get to their cancellation, but I feel that we have a good core to this fellowship.
Return to Mirkwood (failed test, playthrough, redo): My next goal was to try out a quest that really puts a lot of pressure on the threat dial. There are many quests which do that, but one stands out above all the rest: Return to Mirkwood. It’s an old quest, and quite swingy and inconsistent compared to later quests, but it puts more relentless pressure on the threat dial than almost any newer quest does, and has a number of challenges which tested these decks at their weak points as well – Attercop, Attercop being the most notable example; finding a defender that can handle 8 attack (or a chump plus being able to attack back for 10) is going to be even more difficult for these decks than other fellowships, given their often slow starts.
The first test used the same decks as Nightmare Anduin, just to get a further baseline. I expected to fall rather quickly, but even with copious use of Grima’s ability, the decks made it all the way to the last stage. Some nasty shadow effects ended up killing off 2 of the Rohan deck’s heroes, but we were a single turn away from pushing through to victory. And then Gollum was killed off by the shadow effect on the Hummerhorns. Another run, scuttled by shadow effects. In an ironic turn of events, I even had a Hasty Stroke in hand to handle it, I just didn’t have a Spirit hero left to play it because of earlier bad shadow effects.
These results are satisfying in some ways. I am now certain that my threat control is consistent and powerful enough to handle even very difficult quests. I also feel rather comfortable with how the decks handle questing and late-game combat. The big weakness is still having an early-game defender as squishy as Fastred is.
One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed to this point is the lack of resources on Eomer. Since he uses his ability most rounds to attack an enemy in the staging area, the Rohan deck ends up with a rather stark shortage of Leadership resources. Since the defense boosts on Fastred (and all the attack boosts on Eomer) are Leadership cards, this can be rough unless you draw an Errand Rider early, and even then, you are siphoning resources away from your Spirit cards. One possibility is using Theodred to pass resources across the table to Eomer every other round, but that’s still a slow process, and often you just need a jump-start in order to be able to handle the encounter deck’s initial rush.
To that end, I added 2 copies of Legacy of Numenor to the Grima deck, dropping one copy of the Steward of Orthanc and the copy of Unexpected Courage. 4 threat is a small price to pay for an extra turn’s worth of resources without the extra encounter cards to deal with, and the extra resources on Eomer in particular are important.
In the Eomer deck, there are a number of cards that just aren’t pulling their weight. Mustering the Rohirrim, Valiant Sacrifice, Ceorl, and the Westfold Horse-breaker are all sub-par in this deck. While Valiant Sacrifice and Ceorl are decent-to-good cards in their own right, they put too much stress on the Leadership resources, and the other 2 cards are just not pulling their weight at all – they need a far more specialized deck than this to function well.
In place of these cards, I decided to first run 3 copies of the side-quest Prepare for Battle. This helps on two fronts – first it gives me more side quests to power up the Riders of Rohan, and second it helps the card draw situation with much less resource pressure than Valiant Sacrifice. In place of the Westfold Horse-breaker, 3 copies of Unexpected Courage (dropping one of the 3x copies of Guthwine to make room for the third card). Letting Fastred defend twice, or Eomer use his ability and attack other enemies in the same round is essential to these decks. To help the Leadership resource situation even more, I replaced Mustering the Rohirrim with Captain’s Wisdom. Eomer’s 3 attack is unlikely to be able to kill something on the first turn, so exhausting him for 2 resources is not a bad trade.
The other big issue had been having enough defenders. Unexpected Courage on Fastred should help, and once the Orthanc Guard is set up, it is a powerful help in this area, but still we lack cards that can handle defenses before we have the boosts for Fastred or the Orthanc Guard out. I knew that I wanted 2 copies of the Warden of Helm’s Deep in the fellowship, but I wavered a long time on where to put them. I ended up replacing Ceorl with them, although I was tempted to put them in the Grima deck to replace the Riders of Rohan. At 3 cost, they are still difficult to get out, but the extra resource generation we included aimed to offset that cost.
The next run against Return to Mirkwood went much better. Despite 2 Attercop, Attercops and a Hill Troll in the first few turns of the game, we had a successful run against the quest, marred only by my forgetting the second line of text on one of the Tantrum treacheries. And it turned out that if I had played it correctly, I would have threated out the turn before we won. A third playthrough was completely successful.
King’s Quest (test, success): For the next test, I just took the Quest of the Fortnight from the Facebook group (an excellent community resource, and I highly recommend it.
But it turns out that the third quest from the Wilds of Rhovanion box is exceptionally difficult in general, and hits these decks right where they are weakest. Which of course makes it a perfect quest to test against. And, of course, we lost. Many times. Many, many times. Sometimes it was threat, sometimes it was location lock, often it was getting swarmed with enemies. This quest hits these decks hard at every single one of our weak points, and it was hard to deal with the varied threats.
I experimented with a number of minor tweaks to the decks – replacing the Riders of Rohan in the Grima deck with Gleowine for extra card draw, replacing Captain’s Wisdom with Ride them Down to the Rohan deck for additional enemy control, or Stand and Fight in order to get the Wardens of Helm’s Deep into play. I even attempted dropping Legacy of Numenor in exchange for Mariner’s Compass, for use in discarding locations attached to guarded cards.
Nothing was really effective, until I hit on a simple change. Move Guthwine to the Grima deck. A way to get Eomer to 5 attack on turn 1, without putting pressure on his resources, turned out to be a vast improvement to the decks. Theodred ends up with a lot of extra resources anyways, as it turns out, so he can easily afford to play the sword. And not needing to choose between boosting Eomer’s attack and saving a resource to attack into the staging area is really good. The other major change was a slight thematic concession, but it had a huge effect. Dropping the Riders of the Mark in exchange for 3 copies of Galadriel’s Handmaiden gave the Rohan deck another source of high-impact questing allies without the prohibitive cost, and the extra threat reduction was really helpful. I also made some adjustments to the side quests – adding in a copy of Gather Information and another of Send for Aid, and dropping one of the copies of Prepare for Battle. This made the deck more flexible, while also further boosting the odds that I could find an early side quest.
To make room for these changes, I dropped Legacy of Numenor from the Grima deck, replacing it with Guthwine. I ended up keeping the Riders of Rohan there, despite the fact that it meant the fellowship couldn’t be built out of a single collection. They are another useful target for Wild Stallion, and the questing power and extra attack can be critical.
In the Rohan deck, I dropped Captain’s Wisdom again – it was a useful early game card but dead in the mid-to-late game, when Eomer’s actions were critically in-demand. Between Captain’s Wisdom and the Rider of the Mark, that made room for 3 Handmaidens and the extra side quest, leaving 2 slots empty. After much experimentation, I eventually came back to Legacy of Numenor. In essence, we just did a single swap between the decks – Legacy of Numenor moved to the Eomer deck, which could play it without straining Leadership resources, and Guthwine moved to the Grima deck, which could get it into play turn one with little-to-no opportunity cost.
Armed with this newly restructured deck, I took on the King’s Quest and defeated it. It was a marathon quest, but we got through it. The decks came together, and the changes we had made turned out to be exactly what we needed. And, in the end, it turned out that we could take down a dragon.
Black Serpent (first attempt, success): For our final deck test, we again went with the quest of the Fortnight. The Black Serpent has a reputation for being a very difficult quest, and boy, does it deserve it.
Our first attempt had a very rough start, but we were finally just starting to get our feet under ourselves when a Southron Champion appeared. We muddled on for another round or two, then failed the quest and ended up engaged with more enemies than we could possibly handle in our wildest dreams. So much for that run.
Another abortive run or two were thwarted by Southron Champion or a really awful combination of opening objectives and guarding cards. In each case, the encounter deck got its worst combos off on the first couple turns, and our decks had bad draws. It wasn’t weak decks (although it might be a less-than-ideal matchup), the encounter deck just got lucky.
The final playthrough was not a lucky win, though. The encounter deck had a pretty strong start (although it didn’t reveal any enemies for setup or the first turn of staging, it did seriously threaten location lock for a while). But this time, the decks had a decent opening hand, and we drew exactly what we needed to.
Conclusion: These decks have been extremely fun to play. I could spend a long while tinkering with them, but I think that the strenuous testing procedure we have sent them through has turned them into streamlined decks capable of defeating a wide variety of quests. The final versions can be found here. Thanks for following along with this journey, and I look forward to our next installment.
Until then, happy questing!