The Battle of the Pelennor Fields and Forth the Three Hunters

By Debaticus, in Rules questions & answers

Stage 2A, Retreat From Osgiliath, reads "Starting with the first player, each player discards cards from the top of his deck until he discards an ally that is not in play".

With the Forth the Three Hunters contract saying "Your deck cannot include ally cards."

If you are playing this scenario with this contract, is your entire deck just given up as lost? Do you have to hope to have Will of the West in order to get your deck back? Or since there are going to be no allies in the deck would you just skip the discarding part?

You just lose your whole deck. Some decks are not suited for every quest in the game... Three Hunters contract decks are definitely decks that are straight out defeated by some quest mechanics.

10 hours ago, GrandSpleen said:

You just lose your whole deck. Some decks are not suited for every quest in the game... Three Hunters contract decks are definitely decks that are straight out defeated by some quest mechanics.

That's what I figured. I've been looking at running a quasi thematic campaign using that contract since most of the time it's just the heroes themselves. Especially the Frodo quests.

If I do end up going this route I'll just make sure the deck can be adjusted to include allies for the bigger battles or just run spirit and mulligan hard for Will of the West lol.

That’s what I did, Will of the West for the win

But when you know that your deck doesn't have any ally, you can not dicard until an ally is discarded. I would just not discard at all.

I mean, you can do that if you want, but the rules are very clear cut here - it's a when revealed, so it's not optional. The fact you know there are no allies in your deck has no bearing on the effect. The encounter deck doesn't care.

Edited by PocketWraith

Yeah, it’s not a matter of interpretation here. You have to discard.

Similarly, if you play a Guarded(enemy) card against an encounter deck that contains no enemies (Battle of Lake-Town), you still have to discard, even though you know you won’t find an enemy. In that situation, we have an official ruling from FFG that you would discard until you go through the entire deck, then reshuffle it and continue play (getting the Guarded card for free). This ruling prevents an infinite loop. In the 3 Hunters/Pelennor situation, there is no infinite loop potential, but you do still have to discard your deck.

Having said all that, this event breaks you deck in a way probably not intended when the quest was designed. So house rule it if you want.

On 8/20/2020 at 5:14 PM, GrandSpleen said:

Having said all that, this event breaks you deck in a way probably not intended when the quest was designed. So house rule it if you want.

Yeah, that's why I house rule this, because it was made a while ago, before the contracts. Because if you play by the rules and you did not rememebr that, then you may have to rebuild your whole deck and maybe even change some heroes... and raise your starting threat? Hmmm..... Not for me!

Also, I think this is the only instance in the whole game that this can hapen, so no harm in house ruling once. 😊