Hi all!

I am a new player having started playing with my brother in December 2016, and am greatly enjoying the game. We are having a spot of bother completing the Dunland Trap scenario and I was wondering if anyone could suggest either decks, deck tweaks, or tactics to help overcome the quest. We currently have the core set, VOI, TDT, and CS.

I've tried a pair of decks, both of which worked reasonably well (2-player, sometimes 3), but not well enough:

https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/5217/elven-essence-1.0

https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/5216/dunlending-death-1.0

I am also questioning whether to try to burn through the first stage, or to build up a nice collection of attachments (Self Preservation!). Typically we die shortly after moving to the next stage, due to having too many enemies and not enough damage sinks, but occasionally we end up in location lock, and there have been games which ended badly on turn 3...

Tough quest for such a limited card pool, I'd consider dropping to semi-easy or easy mode. Extra starting resources means getting more of your starting cards down early, which can help a lot with the Dunlending card-hate.

Do your brother and yourself each have a core set? I see 3x Daughter of Nimrodel in each deck. If you have two cores between you, maybe you can go to 3x in cards like Sneak Attack and Test of Will.

My first inclination is to be suspicious of a tri-sphere deck with two spheres in it, without Nenya you can't play lore cards and the scenario doesn't like cards in hand. If it were pure solo, I'd put in a lore hero (Grima or Denethor) and definitely put in Steward of Gondor to put on Galadriel. If you add Steward of Gondor, also throw in a copy of Heir of Mardil to make SoG an Unexpected Courage.

With the two together, you've got double lore in the other deck, though you could alter the other deck's sphere composition. It's enemy heavy, so double tactics may not be a bad thing. I think you also want at least one copy of Firefoot and Rohan Warhorse in the deck, the enemies are numerous and reasonably substantial, so getting bleed-over damage or readying for a buffed-up Eomer could be very handy. If you went with double tactics, Rohan Warhorse works great for a ranged hero like Legolas.

In a scenario with card hate, I think that Legacy of Numenor would be more useful than Deep Knowledge.

Good suggestions, thanks!

We only have a single core set; the two decks are just the two I've been trying to make work. Having played the tri-sphere deck I will admit that it is a bit unreliable, but great fun when things work!

I agree that double tactics would be nice, however I was concerned about the lack of lore resources. Grima + Keys of Orthanc looks like it could work, though.

Definitely a tough scenario to be using a limited card pool there. I tend to pair Eomer with a Spirit hero, in order to be able to use Westfold Horse-Breeded, to fetch Firefoot. As @dalestephenson suggested, your leadership deck should definitely be running Steward of Gondor in order to be able to get more of your spirit cards on the table in the Galadriel deck. Just know that this is a pretty hard scenario (maybe the hardest in that particular cycle) and it may take some deck and strategy adjustment in order to be able to beat it.

We finally defeated it with a Eomer-Legolas-Grima and Aragorn-Celeborn-Eowyn deck pairing, combined with a (very) generous helping of good luck!

The double-tactics deck turned out to be pretty important, along with getting resource gen of some sort out to dump our initial hands (Legacy of Númenor seemed to work quite well). Careful usage of doomed combined with picking the moment to tip past the first stage helped enormously - Legolas was quite handy to have around in the first stage. Keeping some ranged attackers in our decks also helped avoid the backlog of enemies on one player that normally takes us down.

Thanks for the input!