Hi !

Last week I built the Hama’s Bag of Tricks deck, which I believe is great if supported with a good questing deck, in this case, my girlfriend was playing the Háma deck, and I was switching between a noldor deck with Cirdan, Arwen, and Galdor and a Caldara deck.

We crushed all the quests from the Grey Havens, Morgul vale in just 3 rounds, and some other quests that we used to find challenging were really easy with that pair of decks.

But sunday we decided to play "The dunland trap". Since then... we've lost every attempt on it.

It has become now a personal matter, we want to defeat the quest, but we feel that this deck isn't specially good for that (too reliant on weapons, which get discarded when passing to 2nd stage...). Also, the treacheries on this scenario are so devastating, and shadow effects are really nasty... I've switched to an Elrond, Treebeard, Glorfindel deck, with a lot of healing, treachery control, and attachment discard, and with it we are closer to win, but I think we should do some tweaks to the Háma deck. By now, as the Elrond deck is a little weaker in questing than the Noldor or Caldara decks, we've switched Háma for Théoden (T), just to allow this deck to a little contribution in questing.

Any suggestions to defeat the quest in a 2 players game?

PS: Also it bothers me that playing sole, both the Elrond deck and the Monotactics (with théoden) decks, were able to beat the quest.

yeah, this quest is sort of a beast. One thing you can do is just simply not play your stuff until after you clear the trap, and then dump hordes of cards and resources down once you do. It requires that you survive until then though while playing very little. To be honest I don't have a ton of success with this quest either.

and it shouldn't bother you that you can win solo with either deck. There are a lot of quests that are much harder to play multiplayer than they are solo. Most of them, in fact.

Play only the minimum necessary to get through Stage 1, then drop your hand on Stage 2.

The entire hand is fully discarded every 2 rounds, I don't see so much benefit in keep cards in hand, maybe try to rush it and pass to stage 2 in the second round ?

By now all our failures were by trying to clean the table before passing to stage 2 (and it had not much sense to keep cards in hand that anyway would be discarded...), maybe this was a mistake.

Personally, I think it helps quite a bit to use non-item, non-mount attachments. You slowly get stronger, stabilize and then advance to stage 2 without much threat. If you plan to do this, you will need a deck that has Northern Trackers and/or Glorfindel/Asfaloth so you don't get location locked before advancing to stage 2. Sure, you'll lose Asfaloth when you advance, but it has already done its job.

The entire hand is fully discarded every 2 rounds, I don't see so much benefit in keep cards in hand, maybe try to rush it and pass to stage 2 in the second round ?

Ah, I didn't realize that.

I agree with cmabr002. The ringmaker cycle was specifically designed to punish slow decks. I would look to empty your hand as quickly as possible. The best way to do that is with cheap attachments.

Finally we did it. The monotactics deck played with Aragorn, Beorn and Mablung, while in the questing deck I kept the Treebeard, Glorfindel and Elrond line-up, adding 3 ranger spikes, and 3 Protectors of Lórien to help both decks do something with cards that anyway would be discarded.

Also, I took your advice @cmabr002, and it really worked.

Now, with Horn's cry, beorn is really a beast, specially in quests like this, with shadow effects that punish undefended attacks.

Thanks to all for your help !