Over the past couple of weekends I've tried to beat the first quest of the Hobbit saga (hint: trolls) 3 times, and each time I lost.

The first time ended up with all my heroes sacked.

The second time I played the rules wrong, accidentally killing a troll in one turn using multiple allies. It was 2 turns later that I realised I wasn't allows to attack with multiple characters, so I conceded that game.

The third time, I deliberately took longer to get to the 2nd stage, and managed to keep removing Sacks. I had 3 Forest Snares poised, but couldn't manage to kill the first troll before threating out. There were just too many locations clogging up the staging areas, and I never saw any of my 3 Northern Trackers. Sigh. It was a long, painful defeat.

So I am wondering: is this quest supposed to be significantly harder than Conflict at the Carrock? Because it definitely seems so! Carrock seemed like a cakewalk compared to this quest.

I've been using 2 dwarf-centric decks (Dain/Throrin/Ori and Thalin/Oin/Nori). Dain's awesome, and I love Nori's threat reduction. But so far they (and the other cards I chose) are just not doing well against these trolls.

So, is there a "trick" to beating these trolls, like secrecy, threat reduction, or encounter deck manipulation or something like that?

And what's up with that treachery which eliminates all my non-objective/treasure attachments. That is so harsh!

Should I just forget about attachments and go all-in with allies and events?

Or are attachments the key, letting us buff a single hero to the point where it can kill a troll in 1 or 2 turns?

What works for you?

It is hard! I have 6 cores in hobbit ajan Also chazad sum expansion for extra dwarf stuff and one expasion with Erebor battlemaster  ... so I did add a quite a lot cards to the pool and the game is still hard, but not impossible to win. We have played the first half of the adventure so far. Not have gone for ollu mountain yet...

If you use the exact same strategy you used for Conflict at the Carrock, there should be no difference in difficulty. The only modification I would make is to buff someone up to one-shot the first troll, and then this quest should be a cakewalk, too.

The quest shouldn't be that much more difficult. It can be a little tricky/annoying to get the treasure (which are by no means nessessary, but are a nice boost).

If killing the trolls seems to hard, try just full on questing through. I think it's even harder to get the treasure with this method though.

As Wandalf said: Prepare a way to one or twoshot the troll preventing multiple attackers. E.g. a wounded Gimli, further buffed with some events (Durin's Song, Heavy Stroke etc.) or an Erebor battlemaster (I'd ignore the errata, when playing progression style). Just be careful with amassing allies, when you have no way to avoid treacheries as roast em or boil em can really weaken the power of batlemasters.

I'm not sure what your card pool is like but another way around the quest is to clear the encounter deck. It's harder to swing with all the trolls in play but if you can get a swarm going and take the hits without losing too much willpower, you can wait it out. I would definitely recommend holding on to one or maybe even two at a time, if you can keep your threat low enough, and just quest through.

Another trick if you have it...

Play sting, the guarded card. Theres only a couple crows in the deck, and it must attach to an enemy. You could theoretically clear out a huge chunk of the deck searching for them.

A trick I haven't seen mentioned yet is the following. Gandalf is immune to all of the sacked cards. So make him your main character and load him up for Troll killing fun. I recommend a low threat build with the new Gandalf Ally that comes in the same box. Throw all of his attachments on him (staff, ring, horse) and he becomes a monster.

Another good option is bringing Eleanor my third favourite hero in the game who single-handedly saves you from that game ending "discard all non-treasure attachments". Especially in solo she is great since it's incredibly rare to draw that card again as the replacement one. She is a lifesaver in quests with bad treacheries.

Also you really want to get and leave troll camp in play and never spend Bilbo's resources so you can free your characters.

Here is the solo deck I beat it with:

https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/12768/arrowsinthedark20-1.0

I've been trying to play the Hobbit saga thematically (dwarves). Do you think it would be easier if I ignore the theme and pick a set of heroes (and allies) that is more flexible?

Access to spirit would be good, at least, even if you stick with Dwarves. Throughout the whole hobbit saga, the treacheries make every quest pretty “swingy” since many of them can be game-ending. If you happen not to draw them, the quests are fairly “puzzle like” and straightforward to defeat. But if you haven’t planned for those treacheries or have bad luck and get hit multiple times with them, you might as well start over.

I'm playing 2 handed (Leadership/Lore and Spirit/Tactics), so have already been including Will of the West (x3) and Dwarven Tomb, but I see how Eleanor would be an even more consistent way to prevent some of those engine-killing treacheries.

However, Eleanor means "breaking" the Dwarf theme, which would probably motivate me to rebuild both decks from scratch. I don't actually mind the idea of moving away from Dwarves for a while (since I played them all the way through Khazad Dum and Dwarrowdelf), but there seem to be 3 reasons to stick with Dwarves:

1) purely thematic (The Hobbit is all about Dwarven heroes)

2) most of the new cards in The Hobbit saga seem to be Dwarf-centric, so it would be nice to try those out

3) I don't know of a better archetype at this point in my card Pool (progression style)

Those 3 reasons have been motivating me to stick with a pair of Dwarf-centric decks.

However, if the rest of the Hobbit saga has lots of other "swingy treacheries", then I don't mind leaving the Dwarves behind, at least for the duration of the saga.

I did have another question: If I stick with Dwarves, but replace most of the attachments with more allies, is it better to use high-cost Dwarf allies (since I'm already using all the cheap ones) or cheap non-Dwarf allies (like Snowborne Scout)? Does a "Dwarf swarm" deck typically also include some non-Dwarven allies, or is the idea to limit it to Dwarves (so that they all benefit from Dain's bonuses)?

7 hours ago, tripecac said:

I've been trying to play the Hobbit saga thematically (dwarves). Do you think it would be easier if I ignore the theme and pick a set of heroes (and allies) that is more flexible?

Gandalf and Legolas are pretty thematic haha

Maybe the best idea is to sleeve Eleanor, draw a beard on her on the sleeve, and rename her Dis.