I am a bit afraid of using the player cards with the guarded key word. They are cool and powerful and everything but... basically in a single player game they double the revealed cards you have to handle and in a 4 player game you have already enough trouble to deal with. (To be honest, some of these games you lose, because your decks do not fit well for a certain mission, but most the times you lose, because you either draw 4 locations or 4 enemies in a single round. At least if I sum up my games.) On the other hand, when playing an easy mission you do not need their extra power. So in the end these cards seem to be "win more" cards for me.

What is your experience with these cards?

I guess it depends a lot if you your decks is able to deal with the releaved card. For example if you have a strong Dunedain combat deck revealing another enemy with Sting is actually not so bad, same thing if you have strong questing/location control deck and want to play Mithril Shirt. If you are in multiplayer and can handle both enemy or location the same is true for all the others which say Guarded (enemy or location). With the right timing it can also be a good way to clear out some bad treacheries from the encounter deck.

In my specific case yes we are using it in our fellowship to some good effect (even though since we went for a single copy of each they do not appear quite so often) and they were always a fine addition. I will probably not play them in a hard quest like Mount Doom or Carn Dum, but in general I found out that in almost any game there was a good time to play one of them.

I tend to include one or two (my current deck has Mithril Coat to play on Spirit Frodo), but it's not a 'use at all costs' cards and it's a one-of. It'll be handy if I can get it on Frodo since he's a damage sponge (I play Loragorn so can control the threat rise) but if it doesn't get into play it's not game over.

Powerful cards, and tactical ones. I do not tend to build my decks depending from them but they are all good and gets stronger with scrying if you can use them to tactically discard you do not want to see revealed (treachery, surge, doom, when revealed effect in general). In such case their discard effect is great.

I don't normally look at the guarded cards, especially on harder quests where the last thing I want is another encounter card, but tried Necklace of Girion in my latest assault on The Temple of Doom, with the idea of using the first free round. Much to my surprise, it worked well - drew an enemy, engaged and dispatched in round 1, so the necklace only cost me 1 resource, rapidly refunded, and 1 wound. (If only the rest of the quest had gone that well...).

I see most of them as win more cards. If you can afford to tackle more cards, you are already winning.
(Apart from some specific quests - for example using Mithril shirt in quest, when you must explore specific number of locations).

I love the guarded cards. In my sniper decks of Leomer, Tilbo, smerry, thalin, fastred and Argalad, I have ran all 7 before. Eomer gets the swords, bilbo gets sting, argalad usually gets the necklace, thalin gets the ring, fastred gets the shirt (hardly play that though because the snipers don't like locations) and the arkenstone is mostly gravy.

They're way too much fun. Bilbo drops enemies FAST.

14 hours ago, player3351457 said:

I love the guarded cards. In my sniper decks of Leomer, Tilbo, smerry, thalin, fastred and Argalad, I have ran all 7 before. Eomer gets the swords, bilbo gets sting, argalad usually gets the necklace, thalin gets the ring, fastred gets the shirt (hardly play that though because the snipers don't like locations) and the arkenstone is mostly gravy.

They're way too much fun. Bilbo drops enemies FAST.

Interesting! Why you don’t share your decks on ringsdb?

I've only really tried Thror's Ring in a Gimli-Nuke deck, where Gimli tries to pile on damage and hit as much stuff as he can. It worked... all right. Found more often then I would have expected that I didn't want to put the ring into play and further fill the staging area.


I am looking forward to trying Orcrist though, seems like on someone like Gandalf (Hero) it can be really good, assuming you have ways to ready him a lot (which, if you're playing Gandalf for his 3/3/3 you probably do). Also like that it's a quality weapon (+2) for Leadership, since it's hard to find good weapons outside of Tactics.