City Guard might easily be one of the strongest and more annoying enemies of this game. What are your strategies to face it? Chump blocking and a very low threat seems to be the way to go, but it's not really an option for our usual decks. Even our old friend TaBeregond is going to need to be in its best shape (Gondorian Shield, Hauberk of Mail, Raven Winged Helm, Sternet than Steel and lots of healing) to survive a few turns.

Chumping needs to happen. Even if you tank out a defender, with multiple readies on him, you still aren’t going to get that fast enough to prevent some hero-killing attacks from landing. So this might be a case where the encounter deck looked at what you were bringing to the table and countered you hard. Time to counter back (alter your deck a little or a lot).

There is a strategy to avoid his attacks a bit: try to get repeated use of the Crowded Market location to keep his engagement cost high. Use Distant Stars to fish it out of the encounter deck. West Road Traveler to swap it with another location to prevent it from getting cleared. Avoid its travel cost in the typical ways. Use Shadow of the Past or A Watchful Peace to put it back on top of the encounter deck if you don’t have combat coming up ( or else it would pass as a shadow card). Shadow of the Past can ****** it if it passes as a shadow card.

2 hours ago, GrandSpleen said:

Chumping needs to happen. Even if you tank out a defender, with multiple readies on him, you still aren’t going to get that fast enough to prevent some hero-killing attacks from landing. So this might be a case where the encounter deck looked at what you were bringing to the table and countered you hard. Time to counter back (alter your deck a little or a lot).

There is a strategy to avoid his attacks a bit: try to get repeated use of the Crowded Market location to keep his engagement cost high. Use Distant Stars to fish it out of the encounter deck. West Road Traveler to swap it with another location to prevent it from getting cleared. Avoid its travel cost in the typical ways. Use Shadow of the Past or A Watchful Peace to put it back on top of the encounter deck if you don’t have combat coming up ( or else it would pass as a shadow card). Shadow of the Past can ****** it if it passes as a shadow card.

We were still able to win with our usual decks (at the third try) still mainly managing to defend with a buffed TaBeregond (Hauberk of Mail + Raiment of War + Unexpected Courage combined with Ioreth + Warden of Healing + Elrond). We had to go for some more chump blocking than usual, but the main catch for us for defeating the quest was managing the threat (and by extension the location lock due to the Guarded Archway and Side Street). An early Double Back + Secret Vigil second turn was key to our successful run, as well as a couple of well timed Crowded Market travels and taking advantage of a We've Been Seen Treachery to sacrifice Meneldor to clear a just revelead Guarded Archway. Thror's Key blanketing a Kings's Lawn was also very important.

What I was mainly interested were ideas and strategies on how to handle this level of enemy besides what we are doing with our decks. Like I guess there could be better candidates for an uberdefender than TaBeregond for this quest (or others) and I was curious to see what other people were doing on that regard.

Well, Tom Cotton makes a mean defender when set up. 2 Ring Mails, plus Friend of Friends, plus Rosie Cotton’s boost means 8 defense and 6 HP... didn’t use him for this quest, but I did use him to tank the dragon in Fire in the Night.