I received a phone call from one of the other players, it turns out he's only played Dwarves since the game started and he was wanting to know if I would swap races with him. Since I've built a few Dwarf decks over the years (with, admittedly, low levels of success) so I agreed. As a result I'm building a Gondor-based deck (A deck type I haven't tried since the Dwarrowdelf cycle). With a little luck I should play a game at some point tonight.

If you want a lot of game a suggestion is to do Into Ithilien with a deck that is not ready to battle quest... Your games will take 2-3 minutes and you can get 30-40 games in in just a few hours... seriously good luck.

After building a Gandor-themed deck I decided to go back to the Core Set quests and play them through solo.

GAME - PASSAGE THROUGH MIRKWOOD (NIGHTMARE) TRY ONE
Heroes: Beregond, Boromir (Tactics), Eleanor.

I had the major problem that I was not generating enough Willpower to counter the locations coming into play. I was swamped and hit 50 threats on turn 7. After this I went back to the drawing board.

GAME - PASSAGE THROUGH MIRKWOOD (NIGHTMARE) TRY TWO
Heroes: Boromir (Leadership), Eleanor, Prince Imrahil.
MVP: Prince Imrahil (I managed to maintain a steady string of dead allies so that he could quest and attack in most rounds).

This deck went a lot better than the Tactics/Spirit deck. I was generating a lot of resources and managed to beat Ungoliant's Spawn for the win on turn seven.

Threat Level: 35
Dead Hero Threat: 0
Damage: 4
VP: 0
Turns (7): 70
Total: 109

GAME 25 - JOURNEY DOWN THE ANDUIN (NIGHTMARE) TRY ONE

Heroes: Boromir (Leadership), Eleanor, Prince Imrahil

A complete failure. The Troll was adding so much Threat by killing chump blockers that my threat hit 49 by the time I killed the troll.

GAME 26 - JOURNEY DOWN THE ANDUIN (NIGHTMARE) TRY TWO

Heroes: Boromir (Leadership), Hirluin the Fair, Prince Imrahil.

This, not strictly all-Gondor deck went better than the last effort. Thanks to putting Steward of Gondor on Hirluin on turn one I was putting a large number of Outlands characters into play and using Lord of Murthond to get extra card draws. Regardless I ran out of threat on Phase 3B.

I can see the reason of your failures here. You take two extremely high threat heroes on Anduin - Boromir and Imrahil. You want to keep your threat as low as possible to prevent early engagements.

As I said, I'm playing less games (and getting really sick of trying to build a working Gondor deck).

GAME 27 - JOURNEY DOWN THE ANDUIN (NIGHTMARE) TRY THREE

Heroes: Beregond, Denethor, Faramir

Suffered from being unable to kill the Troll fast enough due to drawing six straight enemies in a row. I decided to go with a two-tactics, one lore deck next time.

GAME 28 - JOURNEY DOWN THE ANDUIN (NIGHTMARE) TRY FOUR

Heroes: Beregond, Bifur, Boromir

This deck worked better than the other decks (probably due to the fact that I had turn or two more to prepare for the Hill Troll), although I lost due to a bad set of draws from my deck.

Try to build the deck around quick resource acceleration and card draw with a low threat. Strong heroes are good, but you need an army to win this. And strong heroes attract too much attention too early.

Have you gone back two handed solo? Pure solo is

Boring and you don't see the full effect for the encounter deck and make use of works like ranges and sentinel

After another meeting with the other players we had to go back to the drawing board as far as who was building which decks. The plan is to play through all the Lord of the Rings Saga quests as a group with each deck having at least one member of the Fellowship in it (one Hobbit deck (with Sam, Merry & Pippin), one Dwarf deck, one Silvan/Noldor deck, one Dunedain/Noldor deck with Aragorn, Elladan & Elrohir and a Gondor-based deck).

We decided to wotk out which types of deck we had rarely or never played before. As a result, due to the fact that I spent a whole lot of time building decks instead of playing, I agreed to build a Hobbit based deck (as soon as I work out how to do a tri-sphere Leadership-Spirit-Tactics deck). Due to the fact that they are well, how can I put this, Hobbits I'm going to build a all-Lore deck to work with it and go back to playing two-handed.

GAME 29 - PASSAGE THROUGH MIRKWOOD

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

This worked better than I expected, I loaded the Hobbit deck with mostly 0 or 1 cost cards and let Beorn defend most of the damage heading the Hobbits way. With Sam and Eowyn questing for 7 on turn one the game went fairly smoothly. After turn six the game ended with the Hobbits scoring 89 and the non-hobbits scoring 98.

GAME 30 - JOURNEY DOWN THE ANDUIN

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

Again, the decks worked well together, the extra three turns which Pippin gave against the Troll gave me time to equip Legolas with a Black Arrow and Hand Upon The Bow allowing me to do massive amounts of damage to the Troll before he could attack anyone). Again the Hobbits came out ahead, 87 to 103.

GAME 31 - ESCAPE FROM DOL GOLDUR

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

Merry was the prisoner and the game was a much harder struggle than the first two quests. Beorn was killed by the Nazgul in order for Merry, Pippin, Sam and Legolas to team up to kill him. The Hobbits came out ahead again 119 to 137 (the 20 starting threat is much more useful than I would have thought)

GAME 32 - THE WATCHER IN THE WATER (I got sick of playing quests I've just been through so I decided to jump to untried quests, bypassing Road to Rivendell because that's the only pack I don't have).

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

This went remarkably well, I don't think I've ever had such a good pair of starting hands in the same game before. Due to a low-danger set of Encounter draws (apart from an unfortunate turn one Disturbed Waters) the quest was completed by turn five with the Hobbits scoring 76 and the non-hobbits 90.

GAME 33 - A SHADOW OF THE PAST

Again, leaving my standard plan for a five-player run through The Black Riders. My notes are a little less studious than normal since I was a little overwhelmed by playing five-player LOTR.

Heroes

Team Hobbit (also known as me): Merry, Pippin (Lore), Sam Gamgee.

Team Aragorn: Aragorn (Lore), Beravor, Glorfindel (Spirit).

Team Boromir: Beregond, Boromir (Leadership), Prince Imrahil.

Team Gimli: Gimli, Nori, Thalin,

Team Legolas: Elladan, Elrohir, Legolas.

The game was, to say the least, chaotic. There was a few close calls for my characters but the assembled heroes managed to get Frodo to the ferry. The one thing I noticed was that a few of my fellows were glad that I took the Pippin who increases Engagement Costs due to high starting threats.

GAME 34 - A KNIFE IN THE DARK

Heroes same as before.

Again, everything went by in a blur due to my lack of experience of playing with more than two players. Regardless everyone survived and Merry became a warrior.

GAME 35 - FLIGHT TO THE FORD

Heroes same as before.

This was a challenge, While my hobbits made it to Rivendell unscathed, Thalin and Beravor fell in the effort. As such, things will be more complicated whenever The Road Darkens gets released (I'm starting to think that starting threat levels could increase to a stupid extent in five player run-throughs just due to the sheer amount of characters in play at one time).

Upon returning from the group I had enough time to squeeze in a less insane game:

GAME 36 - THE LONG DARK

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

This was, again, less of a challenge than I was expecting. The hero combination seems to be working well together. The hobbits won 74 points to 85.

GAME 37 - FOUNDATIONS OF STONE

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

This was tough, Merry & Pippin were lost and every other hero was low on Hit Points by the time I finished the quest.

GAME 38 - SHADOW AND FLAME

Heroes - The Hobbits:Merry, Pippin (Lore), Samwise Gamgee.

Heroes - The Non-Hobbits: Beorn, Eowyn, Legolas.

If the last quest was tough, this was a blood bath. By the time I managed to use the Dark Pit's ability to get rid of the Balrog, the only heroes left standing were Merry and Beorn (on one hit point).

I'm going to have to rebuild my decks since it turns out I've been playing Beorn all kinds of wrong and I think the all-Hobbit deck may be kept for when I'm playing the LOTR Saga scenarios (since the Spirit/Tactics deck does all the work).

After much consideration I decided to change my decks to a Spirit/Tactics deck consisting of Beregond, Eowyn & Legolas and a Leadership & Lore deck comprising Elrond, Hirluin the Fair & Mirlonde.

I also keep a spreadsheet of all my games and I just passed the One Thousand mark! In three years of playing that's 335 per year!

Since I've finally got the time to get some industrial scale questing in I've got some more questing under my belt.

GAME 39 - PERIL IN PELAGIR

Heroes: Elrond, Hirluin & Mirlonde and Berogond, Eowyn & Legolas.

This game went well. The new decks seemed to gel together well and between Elrond and Hirluin I was bringing out a ridiculous amount of Outlands guys. The quest was won after six turns with Elrond and company scoring 109 (after losing Mirlonde) and Legolas's team scoring 105.

GAME 40 - INTO ITHILIEN

Heroes: Elrond, Hirluin & Mirlonde and Berogond, Eowyn & Legolas.

If the last game went well, this one went even better. By turn two Elrond had Vilya & Unexpected Courage on him meaning that I was litterally running out of space for Elrond's company's allies. Added to Eagles entering play at the right time everything was good. The game took eight turns with Elrond's company scorring 119 to Legolas's company's 122.

GAME 41 - SIEGE OF CAIR ANDROS

Heroes: Elrond, Hirluin & Mirlonde and Berogond, Eowyn & Legolas.

If anything this game went better than the last two, either the decks are really working or I'm due a major case of bad luck. None of the heroes came out of the game uninjured but the quest was accomplished in eight turns with Elrond's company scoring 111 to Legolas's company's 112.

GAME 42 - THE STEWARD'S FEAR

Heroes: Elrond, Hirluin & Mirlonde and Berogond, Eowyn & Legolas.

My luck continued to hold as this quest again went well (despite Hirluin dying early on). The quest was completed on turn five with Legolas's company scoring 85 to Elrond's company's 97.

I've finally got a lot more time to spend on trying to reclaim the time I've lost over the last few weeks. I decided to change the deck to a solo deck consisting of Aragorn (Lore), Faramir and Glorfindel (Spirit).

GAME 43 - PASSAGE THROUGH MIRKWOOD (NIGHTMARE)

Heroes: Aragorn (Lore), Faramir and Glorfindel (Spirit).

Result: Win (Threat Level: 28 (I was on 9 progress on stage 3B so I used Loragorn's ability. Dead Hero Threat: 0. Damage: 0 (I had four healers out by the end of the game. Victory Points: 4 (Chieftain Ufthank). Turns: 12. Total Points: 144).

My progress was hampered by drawing a ridiculous amount of locations and the fact that I only drew 4 Spirit cards all game (2 Lights of Valinor, thankfully one in my starting hand, and 2 Escorts from Edoras). All in all a interesting, if slow start with the new deck.

GAME 44 TO 46 - JOURNEY DOWN THE ANDUIN (NIGHTMARE) ATTEMPTS ONE THROUGH THREE

Heroes: Aragorn (Lore), Faramir and Glorfindel (Spirit).

Result: Three straight losses, the combination of heroes and allies can't kill the Troll so I'm going back to basics.

Tonight or tomorrow morning I'm going to really nail some quests, I've spend too much money vs not enough time for this game so far. But I'm going to make a deck and just have fun with it.

That was the basic idea behind the 200 games in a year challenge, I spent 95% of my time building decks and 5% playing the game. I'll be able to get back to playing games on Wednesday or Thursday since a friend of mine ordered Road to Rivendell (the only non-POD set I managed to miss) off a prominent internet auction site for me so I'll be building a deck using Elladan and Elrohir as soon as that arrives.

Not interesting or challenging when playing out lands so much

As a update, Road to Rivendell arrived this morning so I should be getting some gaming in soonish.

GAME 47 - PASSAGE THROUGH MIRKWOOD (NIGHTMARE)... again.

Heroes: Aragorn (Lore), Beravor & Glorfindel. Elladan, Elrohir & Legolas.

The two decks worked well first time out despite losing the first quest phase by 5. The cards in Road To Rivendell were a revelation (Putting Blade of Gondolin and Rivendell Blade on Legolas made him a absolute monster) and the twins synergised well together. The game was completed on turn 6 and Aragorn's team only just beat Legolas's team 96 to 97.