I've gone back to the core set, playing progression style. I've done this 2-handed solo in the past. Now I'm trying it 1-handed solo (although I'll probably make an exception for Escape from Dol Guldur). I've built 2 decks, which I'll play one at a time against each quest. One deck is Leadership/Lore and the other is Spirit/Tactics.

I managed to beat Passage Through Mirkwood with each deck, no major problems. It took me a couple times to beat Journey Down the Anduin with Leadership/Lore, but, thanks to Sneak Attack and Forest Snare, I managed to beat it twice.

I'm now trying to beat Journey Down the Anduin with the Spirit/Tactics and have failed 10 times in a row! My starting threat is 27 (Eowyn, Eleanor, Gimli) so I have 3 turns before the Hill Troll starts swinging. Feints and Gandalf help, as does Gimli with Unexpected Courage (and, ideally, the Citadel Plate) but things never seem to come together for me, so I end up either threating out or losing heroes.

Part of me wants to "try, try again" until I figure out the "puzzle" of beating Journey Down the Anduin with a Spirit/Tactics deck. In theory, it's doable. So I should be able to do it. Right?

Well, the other part of me wonders if Spirit/Tactics (with core set cards) is a fundamentally "difficult" combination for this particular quest. If that's the case, then is it better to "cut my losses" and move on to the next quest, so that I don't get frustrated and lose my momentum?

And that ambivalence makes me wonder: for those of you who like to beat a quest with multiple decks before progressing to the next one, at what point do you "call it a day" with a particular set of spheres? When do you decide that a beating a quest with a particular set of spheres is not just a matter of deck tuning and persevering through bad luck, but is instead a fundamentally more difficult exercise than with your other decks? And how difficult does it have to seem in order for you feel that sinking more and more hours into it is just not worth it?

In other words:

1) How and when do you feel you get an accurate gauge on how difficult a quest is with a particular sphere set?

2) At what point do you decide it is "too difficult" and decide to give up?

3) When you do decide to "give up", do you then switch to easy or sleazy mode, or do you simply move on to the next quest?

I used to play stuff that wasn't power decks so it would take a while to beat most quests. I'd beat it before moving on to the next quest. If it was easier like amon din I would play it a bunch until I got tired of it, then go to the next quest.

Then when I get to the end of the cycle and I've beaten all the quests and played 60 or so games I'd build new decks and go back and play the cycle I just played and the one before it. When I played through another 20 or 30 games I'd move on to the new to me cycle. When I'm done with that I'll go through all the nightmare stuff.

My approach is fairly unique to me personally. And every else has their own approach too.

To me there are so many decks and so many different variations of those decks I don't keep track of what deck beat what. If I get stomped way to many times I'll bust out a power type deck to get by it. There are so many variables on what to play against, what to play with, what cards you "can" access to play with, I feel like if you get stomped too much with one style of deck then play another. Not every deck is suited to every quest or things would get boring. Obviously one deck to rule them challenges aside.

I flirted for a while with building a deck specific to each quest. That was too time consuming to pull decks apart all the time though.

I guess my point is only you can judge that. If it's a fun challenge, keep going. If it's not fun anymore move on. To me it's silly to give yourself an arbitrary challenge to do and not enjoy yourself. Not every deck can beat a given scenario. Your approach to how you tackle this game will always be different than someone else's.

Have fun!

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Not every deck can beat a given scenario.

My goal was to try to beat each quest using cards from each sphere (so that I have a chance to try out each play card as it's introduced).

When I last went through the quests (4 years ago), I played 2 handed (with 2 spheres per deck), so that I could use each sphere. This time, I thought I'd try it single-handed (2 spheres per deck).

I then had to decide which spheres to pair. I chose Leadership/Lore and Spirit/Tactics because it was easy to filter by those spheres in the OCGTN deck builder ("L" for Leadership/Lore/neutraL, and "T" for spiriT/Tactics/neuTral).

Both decks did okay against Passage Through Mirkwoord, and Leadership/Lore did pretty well against Journey Down the Anduin, but Spirit/Tactics is not making any progress against Journey Down the Anduin. I'm wondering if the problem comes down to deck building, tactics, or luck... or if the very nature of that quest makes Spirit/Tactics a poor fit.

This brings to another question, which I'm sure has been discussed before, and that is: what spheres pair best together, at least for the Core Set and the Mirkwood Cycle? (I presume that by the time I reach Khazad Dum again, I'll have enough momentum and confidence to be able to answer some of these questions myself).

Thanks!

1) How and when do you feel you get an accurate gauge on how difficult a quest is with a particular sphere set?

I've been playing the game since the beginning and can tell almost instantly these days if a deck won't cut it.

2) At what point do you decide it is "too difficult" and decide to give up?

Usually within 2 - 3 plays if I want confirmation that a deck is no good.

3) When you do decide to "give up", do you then switch to easy or sleazy mode, or do you simply move on to the next quest?

I keep lots of decks on the go, so I just switch to another one and beat the quest with that one instead.

6 hours ago, tripecac said:

1) How and when do you feel you get an accurate gauge on how difficult a quest is with a particular sphere set?

2) At what point do you decide it is "too difficult" and decide to give up?

3) When you do decide to "give up", do you then switch to easy or sleazy mode, or do you simply move on to the next quest?

1) I don't do this for particular spheres, but I can gauge a quest's difficulty pretty well in general.

2) I've never had to do this, and if I ever do get stuck on a quest, I will only move on until I beat it (non-nightmare quests, that is).

3) ^

Perhaps spirit/tactics/tactics might work better than spirit/spirit/tactics? Anduin can be rather combat heavy.

If memory serves, I was able to defeat Anduin with the Eowyn/Thalin/Gimli deck from Beorn's Path, even though that wasn't introduced until Dol Goldur in the path. You have two planning phases before the troll engages, assuming you don't fail questing the first turn (and you shouldn't). If you find Citadel Plate, you can play it, take the attack undefended, and counterattack for 8+. Next turn chump and finish off. If you don't, defending with Gimli on the first turn gets him to max damage (or kills him, in which case you scoop), and you should've come up with something else by turn 3 that will increase your attack, or prevent the troll attacking (Feint), and let you take it down quickly.

Ideally you haven't finished stage one yet, so you can build up your allies before rushing stage two.

I have successfully used Eowyn/Legolas/Eleanor and Eowyn/Legolas/Gimli as well. You could also try Dunhere to snipe Wargs and other enemies on stage two.

If you're playing spirit/tactics progression style, you'll have no card draw, and resource generation is just Horn of Gondor. There isn't a way to cheat stuff into play either. That makes you really dependent on a starting hand of good but cheap cards. Leadership/Lore has the resource generation AND draw so I'm not surprised it was better. I kind of just think it's a bad combo to play solo until you are using more of the card pool.

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Perhaps spirit/tactics/tactics might work better than spirit/spirit/tactics? [...] Eowyn/Thalin/Gimli de

ck

Yep, that did it! It took my about 5 more attempts, including a couple minor deck tweaks, but with Eowyn, Thalin, and Gimli I was able to beat it. Thalin was very useful at weakening enemies and getting rid of the crows before the surge. And the ability to get citadel plate (and potentially unexpected courage) on turn 2 was a huge help.

After beating Journey Down the Anduin with Spirit/Tactics, I played 2 handed a couple times, and won both times. I think that particular quest is a lot easier 2-handed than single handed. Perhaps that's because it doesn't scale up aggressively; there's only 1 hill troll at the start (no matter how many players), and on the second quest phase we only add 1 more encounter card instead of 1 for each player. The scaling up is pretty gentle there. And I know from previous experience that Dol Guldur is much easier with 2 players than 1.

So this is making me think that maybe the easiest way to go is 2-handed. It didn't seem to take me twice as long to play with 2 hands than 1. And my loss ratio seems a lot less. But my sample set it pretty small!

So here are some questions for those of you who have progressed beyond the first couple expansions:

1) Overall, how much does your win ratio improve when you go from 1-handed to 2-handed? (e.g., do you win 1/4 of your 1-handed games, and 1/3 of your 2-handed games)?

2) What percent longer is each game when you play 2-handed vs 1-handed?

3) How much more time does it take to build and tweak decks to beat a quest 2-handed vs beating it 1-handed? (And do you try to beat it with 2 opposing-sphere decks like I've been doing?)

Do you see what I'm getting at here? I'm trying to find out:

Can you progress faster through the progression series playing 2-handed or 1-handed?

And how does you answer change if, when playing 1-handed, you "force" yourself to beat each quest with decks drawing from each spear (e.g., beat it once with a leadership/lore deck and then once with a tactics/spirit) deck?

I think most quests are going to take longer to beat separately with two dual-sphere decks than to beat once with a pair of dual-sphere decks. I think you can get a higher power level out of a fellowship than a one-handed deck as well -- however, don't be misled by Dol Goldur and even Anduin, as you get into later cycles the scaling is generally better. But even looking at Mirkwood, I would rate only Return to Mirkwood as dramatically harder with one-deck (honestly, I would just go straight to two-handed on that one), and Emyn Muil will be dramatically harder with two-decks (location lock is the only real threat with that quest).

When progressing through quests for the first time, I followed Beorn's Path through Mirkwood and then used the same LeAragorn/Theodred/LoDenethor and SpEowyn/TaGimli/Thalin lineups against later cycles. My general procedure was to try them each separately against each quest up to three times, and if *neither* succeeded I would have them play together against the quest up to three times -- this was sufficient for the vast majority of quests. When that didn't work, I'd repeat with semi-easy (extra resource at setup), and if that didn't work I'd go all the way to easy. Morgul Vale is the only quest so far to take me to the 27th try, but the decks haven't faced Mountain of Fire yet (Sam replaced LeAragorn for the LOTR saga). I didn't do much tweaking for each quest, just adding in new cards that I thought would fit and only rarely doing major reconstruction. I wouldn't worry much about building to the quest, aside from adding a few cards for conditions or location control as needed. But follow the procedure you enjoy the most. There's no right way or wrong way to play progression style; there's no requirement to even play progression style.

14 hours ago, Schrodinger's Hat said:

There isn't a way to cheat stuff into play either.

Well, Stand and Fight, but that's from the discard pile.

9 hours ago, tripecac said:

Can you progress faster through the progression series playing 2-handed or 1-handed? 

And how does you answer change if, when playing 1-handed, you "force" yourself to beat each quest with decks drawing from each spear (e.g., beat it once with a leadership/lore deck and then once with a tactics/spirit) deck?

Pure solo games take much less time to play, but most likely result in more attempts (barring the occasional wonky scaling). It's easier to tech against quests two-handed as well.

I don't do what you do with opposing spheres, but I do try to beat the quest solo and two-handed.

On 22 July 2018 at 5:18 AM, Wandalf the Gizzard said:

Well, Stand and Fight, but that's from the discard pile.

Sorry, by "cheat into play" I was meaning cards that can mitigate the resource cost- A Very Good Tale, Elf-stone, etc. Stand and Fight helps when your best allies get discarded, but don't fix the resource problem.

5 hours ago, Schrodinger's Hat said:

Sorry, by "cheat into play" I was meaning cards that can mitigate the resource cost- A Very Good Tale, Elf-stone, etc. Stand and Fight helps when your best allies get discarded, but don't fix the resource problem.

Ah, I see.