Made some recent changes to my decks and published a new fellowship.
Extremely excited for the quest log feature we should get in the near future for ringsdb and ready to log many new quests with these decks on it!
There is a full breakdown for the decks on the fellowship page:
http://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/362
Just moving my Saga Campaign details to this thread for my own reference and to continue on when we get Flame of the West.
Losses: None, beat this one first go
Losses: None, beat this one first go
QUEST 5 - Journey in the Dark
Losses: Yet again beat this on the first go, it did get extremely close towards the end though and there were several moments that multiple heroes were 1 hitpoint off death (mainly due to non stop archery...) and healing with an early Warden was just non stop every round, often double healing by using lore resources to ready him. Only just managed to keep up with archery and just a few more points on any given turn could have sank me completely.. I almost got enemy locked on stage 1 as well (yep enemy locked instead of location locked cause you can't engage or attack enemies on stage 1 and this quest has heaps of enemies... so you get so many in staging by the end of stage 1 if you don't beat it quickly). I also got lucky and managed to explore Seat of Seeing so got to remove a burden from the campaign pool as well!
*By exploring Seat of Seeing I was able to remove Overcome by Grief from the campaign pool.
*Elladan and Arwen are taken captive for the purposes of the next quest
Losses: Three losses! This one was pretty **** hard for my decks as Elrohir suffered without Elladan around and without Arwen and Elven Light on the other side there was no extra resource acceleration (except Steward and quest effects) and the card draw engine was more or less shut down for the Half Elven deck. When I finally won I had to destroy Grisnahk and Ugluk and it was a very long hard slog to the end.... many Gandalfs (sneak attack and hardcast) and vilya + stargazer helped immensely but I still suffered many set backs. There are actually some truly devastating effects in this quest and some of the direct damage effects combined with archery result in some serious damage across the board. I had to literally spend a turn exploring Gather Information to get a healer in hand when things got seriously dire.
Managed to beat it with 24 pursuit value allowing me to earn two boons.
Losses: At least 8 losses probably more.. this one absolutely romped me. It took absolutely everything both decks had and then some.. many concedes both early and a fair way in.. when I did beat it however after the initial 3 or 4 rounds I had a ridiculous board state (StwB was boosting willpower by loads, vilya and gildor were playing many powerful cards for free) that ramped up into a ridiculous amount of allies. I also cleared both Gather Information and Send for Aid allowing me to fetch further key pieces of each deck. Towards the end it became a complete walk in the park which has never ever happened for me in this quest. The new decks are certainly the most powerful ones so far once they get started that is. They can be a little slow to start and so many times they just couldn't cut it for the first few rounds while combo pieces like vilya or stargazer were played. Slew a ridiculous amount of Orcs... definitely missing the -1 defense ability of Tactics Aragorn but Fellowship Aragorn with Stwb and Leader of Men questing every round and readying heroes almost every turn was just amazing.
*Beat it starting on stage 2A so avoided Poisoned Counsels
QUEST 9 - Road to Isengard
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons: Palantir of Orthanc (attached to Fellowship Aragorn during setup)
Burdens: -
Losses: One, beat it on the second attempt. Didn't have sentinel set up on Elrohir for facing Saruman and got to stage 3 too quickly. Lost a hero to Saruman and conceded. Absolutely rolled him the second time and not only had all 4 ents under my control but didn't let any of them die either. Line of the Half Elven had 4 cards in hand and The Grey Company had 7 cards in hand at the end earning me the Palantir of Orthanc and avoiding the burden Saruman's Voice.
QUEST 10 - The Passage of the Marshes
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons: -
Burdens: +2 starting threat for each deck for the rest of the campaign
Losses: None, hammered this one first attempt. Enemies were no problem and I didn't let Smeagol flip back to Gollum at all after his initial defeat. Managed Mire effects carefully and never let the one that damages all characters or the one that raises threat trigger. Nazgul were a bit nasty (very high stats and immune to feint, rivendell blade etc when the one ring is exhausted which is quite often in this quest to stop Smeagol flipping to Gollum etc) but overall it was fairly smooth sailing.
Decided to take the +2 starting threat for each deck rather than take the copies of The Searching Eye
*Copies of Stwb were simply taken out of the decks before starting this quest. Added one extra copy of Arod to get the deck back up to 50 cards.
QUEST 11 - Journey to the Cross-Roads
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons: -
Burdens: -
Enemies placed under The Black Gate: x2 Total: 1x Haradrim Archer, 1x Haradrim Soldier
Losses: Three crushing defeats! I conceded three times before beating this quest. I tried to beat it with one deck taking Brace of Conies instead of the extra resources to start it and was just getting decimated with way too many enemies appearing very quickly and either hero deaths or too many being placed under The Black Gate too quickly. I was actually shocked at how hard this quest is and was expecting it to be far easier. Boy did I get a nasty shock, this quest has some serious teeth, certain treacheries are killer, multiple enemies enter play pretty much every single round, so many shadow effects are quite bad and the enemies themselves are nothing to laugh about either. The game I did win I JUST got a Warden out with Elrohir on 5 damage (Elven mail taking him to 6 hitpoints and various other cards bringing him up to 5 defense) after defending against Oliphants for most of the game and narrowly avoided him dying, two or three allies and 2 copies of feint were also used to delay the Oliphants. I manged to kill 2 of the 3 by the end and slaughtered MANY other enemies as they poured out of the encounter deck. Once I got my decks up and running towards the end of the game in the last few rounds I was more or less unstoppable but the slow build up to that point was filled with tense decisions and reveals and many close calls.
Managed to beat it and only let two enemies get placed under The Black Gate which I am pretty proud of and none of them were Oliphants! Just a Soldier and an Archer! So happy about this as I have a very strong suspicion I will be seeing these two enemies again in a later scenario! I would have preferred to play this quest until I was able to let only one or even better yet no enemies at all get placed under the black gate but after seeing how hard this quest actually is I was not game to do this as I assume it would take a long long time and some serious luck. One of the trickiest parts is that even when you can take on every enemy in play because of such high engagement costs you actually might not be able to optionally engage every enemy in staging (when there are 3 in staging in a 2 player game for example) on a particular turn which means unless you can find some other way to engage that enemy it will go under The Black Gate. Because you can't use tactics Aragorn for this quest you need to rely on older cards like Son of Arnor to overcome issues like these. I got away with just 2 fairly nonthreatening enemies however so no need to sub any of these cards in to try again. Time to move on to Shelob's Lair!
*Used Phial of Galadriel to reduce two Oliphants attack to 2 instead of 6 to stop Elrohir dying when defending against them and was able to get a healer out in play the following turn to heal him back to full heath as he was one hitpoint off death and only had 5 defense so would have fallen to the first Oliphant's attack and a second hero would have fallen to the other one.
QUES T 12 - Shelob's Lair
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons: -
Burdens: A Heavy Burden (attached to the Ring Bearer during Setup)
Losses: One, didn't get Sentinel set up on Elrohir in time and a hero fell to Shelob. Smashed it the second time but it was a long long long slog and the Line of the Half Elven almost got to the bottom of its deck through insane card draw and Vilya. Had an army of allies out by the end and utterly demolished Shelob once I FINALLY got all the resource tokens off of her. Had to fight like 3 or 4 Nazgul as well. Great quest but couldn't stand up to the awesome power of my decks!
-CURRENT QUEST-
QUES T 13 - The Passing of the Grey Company
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons:
Burdens:
Losses:
QUES T 14 - The Siege of Gondor
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons:
Burdens:
Losses:
QUES T 15 - The Battle of the Pelennor Fields
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons:
Burdens:
Losses:
QUES T 16 - ???
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons:
Burdens:
Losses:
QUES T 17 - ???
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons:
Burdens:
Losses:
QUES T 18 - ???
Campaign Pool Choices:
Boons:
Burdens:
Losses:
Campaign Pool:
*Used Seat of Seeing to remove Overcome by Grief from the campaign pool
Edited by PsychoRockaI've been playing around with the same heroes except using Galadriel instead of Glorfindel. You have Aragorn with the boys now, but didn't you try it with Arwen there? I was thinking of trying it that way and then using Loragorn on the Elrond side. Adds an extra Lore resource early before Nenya comes on line and theoretically gives you an extra 3 Tests of Will.
What do you think?
Hey Psycho, when are we gonna get on OCTGN and play with these decks together?
If you guys hook up, let me watch at least!
Oh wait...
I've been playing around with the same heroes except using Galadriel instead of Glorfindel. You have Aragorn with the boys now, but didn't you try it with Arwen there? I was thinking of trying it that way and then using Loragorn on the Elrond side. Adds an extra Lore resource early before Nenya comes on line and theoretically gives you an extra 3 Tests of Will.
What do you think?
I did have it that way before, Arwen was in the same deck as her brothers and on the other side it was Elrond, Glorfindel and Haldir. I could imagine Loragorn working quite well with Elrond and Glorfindel/Galadriel on the other side but you would have a fairly high starting threat so it would not be quite as easy to manipulate engagement so that most enemies engage the combat deck. At the same time however you have the threat reset from Aragorn which is pretty amazing and obviously helps with threat or engagement issues.
It probably would help with resource smoothing for lore cards as you would have 2 heroes able to pay for lore cards from the get go however you would only have 2 able to pay for spirit cards (Galadriel and Elrond with Vilya) whereas with the lineup of Arwen, Elrond and Glorfindel you have three who can pay for spirit when you get Vilya set up and the current deck I use is pretty spirit heavy. Depends what the rest of your deck is like I suppose!
One of the first things I thought of when adding Arwen to the brothers deck was that I could run x3 test of will in each deck but because I play with physical cards I would have to proxy them more or less forever and I am only really a fan of proxies when I know that I will be able to replace them with the real cards within a few weeks. Ultimately I decided not to.
Now that I use Dwarven Tomb in the new decks however the most frequent card I return from my discard pile with it is Test of Will so the tombs sort of gives me another copy of two in their own slightly more costly way.
If you play online or have 6 copies of test of will though I would definitely give it a go. Another minor issue is that Arwen (in my case anyway) was consistently giving her resource to one of her brothers by discarding Elven Light then returning it to hand to draw a card. This was because I did not include very many spirit cards at all (in fact just elven light and Lords of the Eldar if I remember correctly...) so Arwen was primarily in there just to boost her brothers and provide card draw for that deck.
I didn't really build around her as much as I should have... if you are including more spirit cards than I did I reckon for sure go with test of will in each deck.
So yeah pros and cons for either way you line up the heroes I guess! I just found tri sphere for my combat deck less consistent and powerful and Tactics Aragorn really compliments the brothers perfectly in my opinion in several ways.
His -1 to defense helps Elladan carve through enemies, he provides a strong back up defender if need be, he can take a 4 damage undefended attack in emergencies and finally makes a perfect attacking companion to Elladan. Together at 6 attack and -1 defense without any attachments they make a fantastic offensive team and can destroy the vast majority of foes very quickly. Having lore Aragorn on the other side of the board can be somewhat wasteful (for my playstyle/deck builds) as his attack and even defense are often wasted and he primarily quests.
Hey Psycho, when are we gonna get on OCTGN and play with these decks together?
I'm going to make a serious effort to try get my computer up and running so I can get OCTGN set up as I would love to play some games with someone (and hopefully record them!). My partners computer is a Mac and this page: https://github.com/octgn/OCTGN/wiki/OCTGN-on-non-Windows-systems
Is making me think that setting up OCTGN on Mac is going to be beyond my abilities and/or patience...
Edited by PsychoRockaIf you guys hook up, let me watch at least!
Phrasing.If you guys hook up, let me watch at least!
"Seriously, are we not doing phrasing anymore?"
Jokes aside, you can definitely spectate Bullroarer. I would want to hopefully record the games as well (at least once I get the hang of OCTGN) for later viewing!
Edited by PsychoRocka
I'll definitely be recording it and putting it on my channel so everyone can watch. It'll be nice to see these decks in action rather than reading and reading and reading about them
