I've been playing through the saga campaign with a friend and we have hit a stumbling block at Shelob's Lair. We are playing easy mode and have still found this extremely difficult.

Initially we were getting desroyed by Shelob herself, but once we made it to the third quest stage we found that threat was our issue - Shelob was easily picking up 10+ resource tokens.

Previously our plan was to load up Beregond to tank all the spider attacks but that wasn't reliable enough. Is there any general advice for this quest?

In terms of our decks we have been using a Sam, Merry & Pippin hobbit deck which handles a lot of the questing and a Beregond (Tactics), Eleanor & Faramir (Lore) deck which handles defending and has support cards like Feint and A Test of Will.

I'm very open to deck ideas but we'd like to keep our heroes the same so we don't get the threat penalty. So far we have a +1 penalty we picked up in Moria.

If anyone has any suggestions for decks that would be great. We don't have a full collection. Between us we have:

3x Core, Shadows of Mirkwood cycle, Khazad-dum, Heirs of Numenor, Against the Shadow cycle, The Dunland Trap, Trouble in Tharbad, Celebrimbor's Secret, The Grey Havens, The Dream-chaser cycle, The Wilds of Rhovanion, 2x each of the Hobbit saga expansions, all LotR saga expansions.

Thanks for any help you can give

We had a trap/ranger deck with ranger bows that basically removed all Shelob's resources in a hurry.

At Shelob's 50 threat, staff of lebtheron was awesome at taking out Shadow effects.

Not sure if it helps at all, but ...Sam + Leadership Faramir/Rosie + Pippin has the makings for a powerful deck involving using Rosie to pump Sam / Pippin and readying her a couple times.

Thanks for the tips. I don't think we'll be splitting the hobbits up, but Rosie is definitely a contender for a fast hitch.

I do think we will consider swapping to Leadership Faramir though. We haven't gotten much use out of his Lore version's ability so far, and I don't think that we necessarily need both decks having access to Lore.

I made good use of cancellation in this quest. The Door is Closed was a shiny new card around the time that box was released, and I had it in my campaign decks for a little while, along with Out of the Wild and maybe Scout Ahead. Take out a couple of treacheries and that quest gets easier. MY quest log says I removed 2 copies of Rage & Hunger, along with one more treachery that I couldn't remember, maybe Lurking Malice. We also used Ranger Bows. The basic strategy was never engage her, and finish her off with Haldir, who was one of the heroes we had also.

Staff of Lebtheron + Beregond is pretty strong as well; with Shelob's 50 threat, it will always work.

Faramir is great for allies like Gandalf, Elrond and Saruman: you can quest with them and have them ready to defend.

So we finally got another chance to play this quest again and suffered our 4th easy mode loss (all other quests we have beaten within three attempts).

Despite what seemed like a promising start, the staging area got out of control, even though when we cleared 2B Shelob had no tokens on her at all. We had a terrible encounter deck draw once we made it to the third quest stage, including 4 attacks from Gollum in one round.

Determined to beat it we are going to retool our decks and have another go soon.

The main change we will be making is to swap Tactics Beregond for his Spirit version. This will have a few helpful effects - we were not really benefitting from the cost reduction effect on the Tactics hero, but were having threat issues, so the new effect will be very helpful. Changing to a two sphere deck will also help with resource management, and will allow the inclusion of some more expensive Spirit allies which we will use for location control, one of our main issues. If we can travel consistently to the Deep Dark Passage location, the others will be easy to clear from the staging area.

This is our planned approach, any further suggestions would be much appreciated.

https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/6264/shelob-s-lair-easy-mode

On 1/27/2019 at 1:30 PM, rees263 said:

So we finally got another chance to play this quest again and suffered our 4th easy mode loss (all other quests we have beaten within three attempts).

Despite what seemed like a promising start, the staging area got out of control, even though when we cleared 2B Shelob had no tokens on her at all. We had a terrible encounter deck draw once we made it to the third quest stage, including 4 attacks from Gollum in one round.

Determined to beat it we are going to retool our decks and have another go soon.

The main change we will be making is to swap Tactics Beregond for his Spirit version. This will have a few helpful effects - we were not really benefitting from the cost reduction effect on the Tactics hero, but were having threat issues, so the new effect will be very helpful. Changing to a two sphere deck will also help with resource management, and will allow the inclusion of some more expensive Spirit allies which we will use for location control, one of our main issues. If we can travel consistently to the Deep Dark Passage location, the others will be easy to clear from the staging area.

This is our planned approach, any further suggestions would be much appreciated.

https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/6264/shelob-s-lair-easy-mode

Did you ever beat this quest at all? From what I've read, I don't think you have. I also absolutely cannot beat it on "easy" mode. Did you give up? I'm thinking of giving up myself and just selling everything I have. What I strongly dislike about this forum is that people don't clearly type out all the cards for the decks they're using, or at least provide a link to an adequate decklist that will beat this quest. They just say "I used hero/hero/hero deck". It's unbelievable.

5 hours ago, gpd924 said:

Did you ever beat this quest at all? From what I've read, I don't think you have. I also absolutely cannot beat it on "easy" mode. Did you give up? I'm thinking of giving up myself and just selling everything I have. What I strongly dislike about this forum is that people don't clearly type out all the cards for the decks they're using, or at least provide a link to an adequate decklist that will beat this quest. They just say "I used hero/hero/hero deck". It's unbelievable.

Yes we did in the end, on our sixth attempt. I was using the exact Gondor deck I linked, I was doing my best to remember my friend's hobbit deck from memory so it may not be exact, but the idea is the same.

I think my frustration was mainly down to the fact that we have to wait between play sessions so it was several months overall we were battling with this quest, but once we got a strategy down it went much more smoothly. I have subsequently had a 50% win rate with these decks, although it is admittedly a small sample size.

I have no doubt that these decks could be improved upon, but we were working within the Saga Campaign rules so were restricted to these heros.

I think there are three main challenges to this quest. The first is obviously Shelob herself. You need to be able to defend her attacks because you really don't want her to build up counters. Beregond with A Burning Brand or Staff of Lebethron is ideal for this, since shadow cards dealt to her can be catastrophic. Ideally you also want to be able to deal with the treachery Rage and Hunger because you don't want to be giving Shelob extra attacks if you can help it. In our games Eleanor was pretty much dedicated to cancelling this treachery.

Next is hand management and card draw. There are several effects that force you to discard, or chose between discarding and some other effect. If you can chose to discard the game becomes that much easier, so card draw and redundancy in your deck is helpful. I wouldn't usually run 3x Gleowine, but it was worth it.

Finally the thing that turned things around for us was location management. At first we went in a different direction because most of the locations aren't so bad by themselves, and the Deep Dark Passage location discourages strategies which rely on clearing locations from the staging area. But we found that we were threating out with 5+ locations in the staging area. Originally we only had Thror's map, but we added 3x Northern Tracker, 3x Rhovanion Outrider and 2x Sulien and it worked. Clearing locations means that you'll be seeing them more often in staging after the deck has been shuffled and in this quest we found that they are usually the best draws.