Hello,

So my girlfriend and I are having more trouble with this quest than we have with previous ones. Even the infamous Journey Down the Anduin Hill Troll was easier for us.

It's mainly the wargs and the extra encounter card revealed per player. That 5 attack if a riddle is on the shadow card keeps killing our best defenders (mainly allies); on top of that, the riddles themselves are depleting our decks and discarding stuff we really need. We're even playing on Easy (with the gold ringed cards removed).

My thinking is that, yes, while this is a difficult quest - perhaps we are a bit short-handed because we are missing so many of the adventure packs? We're still waiting on the first and second cycle reprints to become available in the UK.

We have:

- Core Set (x1)

- Journey to Rhosgobel

- Hills of Emyn Muil

- Khazad-Dum

- Heirs of Numenor (Opened for Player Cards only)

- The Hobbit (OHaUH)

- The Black Riders (Unopened)

- Treason of Saruman (Unopened)

- Voice of Isengard

- The Nin-In-Eilph

- The Antlered Crown

So my question is basically; are we getting ahead of ourselves, based on what we have access to? Is it worth pillaging some player cards from the unopened boxes to help out?

I'm running a 30 card Leadership/Lore deck with Aragorn, Theodred & Bifur. Using Ithilien Tracker and Ranger spikes to try to make the staging area less crazy.

She's running a 30 card Tactics/Spirit deck with Beorn, Dwalin & Eowyn. Mostly focusing on getting Escort from Edoras into play for questing and Defender of Rammas for defending.

*If a full card breakdown would help, let me know*

We're relatively new and have only picked up what was available or on discount (hence the gap in our LOTR Saga expansions).

Thoughts?

The riddles are really hard. When I played it solo I basically reworked my deck just so I had a good chance of answering the riddles. Playing two player would make that even harder, but not impossible.

A lot of people don't like this quest for the same reason. It was one of the early quests and the designers were still exploring the game space to see what worked. The riddles didn't.

The main problem I'm seeing here is that deck size is 50, not 30. Try building 50 card decks and see if that doesn't help.

22 minutes ago, Kakita Shiro said:

The main problem I'm seeing here is that deck size is 50, not 30. Try building 50 card decks and see if that doesn't help.

Unless you actually run out your deck (at which point you can no longer answer riddles), a 30 card deck should be better than a 50 card one because it'll be more consistent.

3 minutes ago, PocketWraith said:

Unless you actually run out your deck (at which point you can no longer answer riddles), a 30 card deck should be better than a 50 card one because it'll be more consistent.

Do people actually not build 50 card decks?

50 cards is the minimum for a real, not-practice deck.

4 minutes ago, Edheliad said:

50 cards is the minimum for a real, not-practice deck.

Yeah, that's what I'm wondering.

50 cards is the minimum for a tournament-legal deck, which is the standard play style for most of the online community. It's not uncommon for people with smaller card pools to build smaller decks, though. For instance, Beorn uses 40-something cards in his decks for the first several quests of his Beorn's Path series.

That said, it is possible that with decks that small you don't have enough answers for what the quest is throwing at you, especially since this particular quest mills your deck. If you're having trouble with enemy attacks, perhaps a super-defender like Beregond would be useful? With a little healing help from the Lore deck he should be able to tank those Wargs all day long. Make sure you are including as many Feints as you have, too.

Alternatively, this is one of those quests where it's generally easier to build a deck specifically to beat it than to take a general purpose deck against it. Going mono sphere for both decks, for instance, removes a variable and makes it easier to answer riddles.

I'd definitely grab all the player cards out of the unopened packs and then try building 2 mono-sphere decks that are mostly 2 or 3 cost Allies, whatever seems better for the cards you have. If you are sticking with 30 card decks be sure to make one Spirit and throw in the copies of Will of the West and mulligan for one in your opening hand. Maybe proxy a 3rd one even.

Always worth a check for this quest that you're playing the rules right: when you reveal a card with a riddle, you either answer the riddle or resolve the card as normal, not both.

We spent an evening failing horribly at this quest because we did this wrong.

8 hours ago, NathanH said:

Always worth a check for this quest that you're playing the rules right: when you reveal a card with a riddle, you either answer the riddle or resolve the card as normal, not both.

We spent an evening failing horribly at this quest because we did this wrong.

That's a great call-out, actually. My partner and I made the exact same mistake the first time we played it!