Just Sam is the textbook answer but can it win?

The only other hero I could see is maybe Galadriel to reflect her support via the vial.

Or maybe Bilbo to reflect his moral support but that seems a stretch.

Welcome others thoughts!

I will have to wait very long before getting the adventures so I can't speak about his power level. But if you are looking for a mono sam I have a pretty good version (can be played against half of the nightmare): http://ringsdb.com/deck/view/60874

I think you could have an argument for adding Galadiel. There are a couple times, ones during the fight with Shelob and again at the orc tower, that Sam seems to channel some elveness. I don't think it happens at Mount Doom specifically though. Galadriels abilities also represent her not being there in person.

As far as winning I find them to be a perfect pair. Sam's readying ability mitigates her penalty of not questing, attacking or defending. Galadriel's constant threat reduction protects his ability. They come in under the secrecy threshold, and you can use Nenya to get access to fast hitch and card draw/search to find other attachments for Sam. I have some good results with these two with one exception. The biggest weakness I have found is a lack of hit points. Direct damage such as archery often overwhelm them. At least that has been my experience.

The Mount Doom quest really punishes you for every extra character you bring along, so Galadriel + Sam seems like a good choice. In fact, that's the pair my partner has settled on after giving the quest a couple of tries. Plus Galadriel and Sam are both pretty great for Fortitude tests.

We haven't beat it yet, though--it's really hard for me to survive The Black Gate long enough to allow Team Frodo to make enough progress to close out the other quest. My current record is 6 rounds, which just isn't enough time to beat four whole quest stages.

Again I don't know the mechanics of this quest but if you are looking to play with few heroes and few allies it gonna be rude anyway. If you think that playing a lot of allies is too hard you should play three heroes (plus Frodo of course). You can't even enjoy strider because of this additional hobbit hero that you must carry.

But as far I know there is actually not a single adventure who punish THAT hard you to have a lot of allies. So either this one go really far with this non-ally thing or you could play ally anyway to be able to do all that lotr ask us to do and try to pass through the punishing too many character thing (or die trying ^^).

Good luck. I become more and more excited to play this quest anytime I read something like this post ^^.

Rouxxor: How does you mono-Sam deck do against Journey to the Crossroads? Is it possible? I want to beat this one thematically playing solo, but I keep thinking I will need two hands.

TIA

19 hours ago, Rouxxor said:

Again I don't know the mechanics of this quest but if you are looking to play with few heroes and few allies it gonna be rude anyway. If you think that playing a lot of allies is too hard you should play three heroes (plus Frodo of course). You can't even enjoy strider because of this additional hobbit hero that you must carry.

But as far I know there is actually not a single adventure who punish THAT hard you to have a lot of allies. So either this one go really far with this non-ally thing or you could play ally anyway to be able to do all that lotr ask us to do and try to pass through the punishing too many character thing (or die trying ^^).

Good luck. I become more and more excited to play this quest anytime I read something like this post ^^.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there existed an ally swarm deck capable of beating this quest with a few good draws and a mad rush, but I don't think it's the ideal strategy--I suspect the ideal strategy is going to involve a bunch of temporary Allies and a few powerful Allies that you can get a lot of mileage out of (like Treebeard or the Harad Allies, for instance).

Threat works pretty differently in this quest:

• You threat out at 99 instead of 50
• You're only allowed to reduce your threat by 1 per round
• You raise your threat by the number of non-Fellowship characters you control each round instead of 1

So they doubled the threat-out threshold, but they more than doubled the rate at which your threat increases too, so it goes by much faster than you might expect.

Furthermore, the difficulty of Fortitude tests is set by the tens digit of your threat, so the quest gets harder the higher you let your threat climb. Add to that several different card effects that raise your threat by the number of characters you control, and it becomes pretty darn attractive to try to keep your character count to a minimum.

15 hours ago, Bullroarer Took said:

Rouxxor: How does you mono-Sam deck do against Journey to the Crossroads? Is it possible? I want to beat this one thematically playing solo, but I keep thinking I will need two hands.

TIA

Haven't played it yet. But with an ennemy each turn AND a card revealed by the encounter deck I am not confident about his ability to handle well this scenario. He can win but it need a great beginning hand.

Thanks Authraw. I will return when I have the occasion to play it to deliver my own conclusion :).