CURRENT QUEST

Into Ithilien

CHALLENGE

Do not use Leadership or Tactics cards in your decks (or as heroes)

RULES

Freestyle: Beat the quest with no hero/deck restrictions. This is if you just want to play the scenario for fun and not have to worry about doing challenges you may or may not be able to accomplish.

Challenge: Beat the quest within the parameters of the challenge. This is if you'd like to push yourself and your deck building capabilities to accomplish harder things.

For this challenge, you can use any amount of players/decks, but none may have Leadership or Tactics cards in their decks or as heroes.

You may play in Easy, Normal, or Nightmare mode.

If you'd like to participate, just post your story after you're done!

Past challenges:

August 2015 #1 - Beat Conflict at the Carrock with a Hobbit deck

I gonna do this probably tomorrow. I can't wait

Edit: Sorry i totally forgotted to try this challenge. I build the decks today and i gonna play tomorrow

This is my all time favorite quest so I had to join in. Played Gandalf, Treebeard and Glorfindel.

Final score 95.

Did the other one as well: Sam, Pippin and Merry Final score 85.

I'm about to perform dat challenge myself, but I'm writing for some other reason:

Just had an idea of a "big roller" challenge. Win with a 100-card deck

Why stop at 100? Win any quest with a deck made of every card in your collection.

This would be hard to track, but I'd love to do something like win with a deck made only of cards you haven't used in the last 6 months.

This would be hard to track, but I'd love to do something like win with a deck made only of cards you haven't used in the last 6 months.

That really wouldn't work for me, because I'm pretty sure at any given moment I've probably used every single hero at some point in the last 6 months except for newly released ones. So I guess if we did it right now I could try to build a deck with Faramir/Damrod/Rossiel, but they probably won't remain unused for too long...

This would be hard to track, but I'd love to do something like win with a deck made only of cards you haven't used in the last 6 months.

That really wouldn't work for me, because I'm pretty sure at any given moment I've probably used every single hero at some point in the last 6 months except for newly released ones. So I guess if we did it right now I could try to build a deck with Faramir/Damrod/Rossiel, but they probably won't remain unused for too long...

Really? You've used Brand, Bard, Fatty, Dwalin, Oin, Spirit Pippin, and Bombur in the last 6 months? In that case maybe you would have to use your bottom 1/2 or 1/3 of most played heroes.

6 months is a long time in which many different decks can be played.

Brand, Fatty, Oin and Bombur are decent heroes that can be utilized well.

Here is how my challenge went:

Heroes: Idraen, Glorfindel, Haldir of Lorien

Threat: 29

Rounds: 6

Victory points: 0

Score: 89

Game shortly: Again Zigil Miner deck with some ranger spikes and other lore stuff spiced with some doomed cards. So nothing really interesting happened. I trapped two enemies with ranger spikes. Killed one Southorn Company and quested hard. I might try to do lower score but it will be difficult...

I also would love that next challenge would be that "Big roller" thing what Constantine suggested. What about Journey Along the Anduin for the quest? It would be pretty nice choice i think.

Why stop at 100? Win any quest with a deck made of every card in your collection.

Maybe not

Why stop at 100? Win any quest with a deck made of every card in your collection.

Imagine the shuffling.

The "big roller" challenge sounds fun. One of my favorite formats in Magic: The Gathering is Highlander where you have 100 cards and can have no more than 1 copy of each card. We might not have enough player cards to pull that off (~400 based on a recent post's count), though.

I should get to this week's challenge tomorrow. Just finished a big exam today.

By the way, reporting from the fields, I'm facing 5th defeat in a row and keep counting

I decided to do something unorthodox and my hero setup is: Faramir, Glorfindel, and Denethor - all lore. I'm simply getting swarmed every time by drawing enemies exclusively.

Lost one more time and decided to re-make my deck. This time I used Elrond(no ring in the deck!), Glorfindel and Haldir, and won on my second try with final score of 146

I went for a tried and true trio of Gandalf, Glorfindel (Spirit) and Elrond against Into Ithilien. I tried to avoid combat for the most part, though eventually one Company and one Mercs each slipped by my Saruman and Ranger Spikes.

After landing Vilya early on I was able to set up with Unexpected Courage, Snowmane and Light of Valinor so that my heroes were always at the ready. Treebeard and a few ents rounded out my questing prowess while I ditched some spare uniques to Flame of Anor and Elvish Jeweler.

Rounds completed: 5

Threat: 43

Damage: 7

VP: 1 (Flame of Anor)

Score: 99

I'd also like to say it was nice to have the Cloak of Loriens on Glorfindel and Elrond help with the final Siege push on 4B, though most of the characters I had in play were 2+ defense without any help.

Thanks for the excuse to revisit this quest!

I decided to try a thematic mono-Lore Ranger Trap deck for this one: Faramir (L) / Damrod / Pippin (L). It worked really well! I was blown away by how awesome Lore Faramir is for Battle quests--every time an enemy comes out of the encounter deck, he quests for more! Throw in Wingfoot, and then he can make use of that massive attack value for attacking too.

Henamarth turned out to be really clutch too--knowing exactly what's coming helps to prepare for Blocking Wargs and make sure I'm questing with enough characters.

9 Rounds

40 threat

0 Damage

0 Victory Points

Score 130

Full decklist (and strategy) can be found here.

Snowmane

Have you used the infamous Nor Am I A Stranger for this?

Thanks for catching that. I meant Shadowfax, but apparently I'm just too excited for the next saga box.

I hope I can write more challenges:

Shadow of the Past:Win without failing any Hide test.

A Knife in the Dark:Win either with all Ringwraiths shuffled in the encounter deck before stage 3 or with no Ringwraith in the encounter deck.

Flight to the Ford:Win with Ring-bearer having at least 5 life reamaining.

August 2015 Challenge #2 -

Glorfindel (Spirit), Idraen, Damrod

Normal mode-victory, score = 109

Nightmare mode - victory score = 154

Was a fun challenge, made use out of Damrod for the 1st time who was great. My resources were a little unbalanced when comparing how many lore cards i was running with only one Lore hero, but his ability helped smooth things out a little bit by lowering the cost of the traps i ran which were ranger spikes, ithilien pit (fantastic card for stage 3 to keep things from piling up), and ranger spikes. Had a lot of action advantage as well between light of valinor, Idraen's ability, and wingfoot on Damrod. Getting past stage 1 was really the hardest part as I could generally camp on stage 3 until I was set up enough to pass stage 4 in one turn or two and there was enough location and enemy manipulation to keep things smooth.

Why stop at 100? Win any quest with a deck made of every card in your collection.

Imagine the shuffling.

Is there going to be a new challenge soon?

Thanks for all the responses!

Sorry I haven't been responding to all of you guys, I've just been swamped with work. Anyway, my plan was to have two every month. This is the second one for the month, so the next one would be at the beginning of September. Would you guys like me to change that? I'm just going off of what others said they wanted.