I got the perfect score on PtM yesterday - 0 threat, Hummerhorns (-5), Chieftan (-4)

The tactic has been discussed before, but was playing with a Lore/Spirit deck of Berevor, Glorfindal and Eowyn.

Using Henmarth Riversong every turn you can perfectly guage your questing so that you don't make progress on the last quest card (I had Beorn's Path) , enabling you to hang around indefinitely.

With Unexpected Courage on Berevor, plus Gleowine, card draw was very high, with nearly all my deck in hand or in play towards the end. Galadrim's Greeting, plus Gandalf to lower threat, Dwarven Tomb to recycle Galadrim's, and finally 3 x Will of the West to recycle the deck indefinitely.

With such a small amount of cards actually left in the discard pile at the end, recycling with Will of the West puts Galadrim's greeting and Gandalf back into your deck nearly straight away.

Hummerhorns was taken care of promptly by Gandalf, but I had to go through the encounter deck three times before drawing the Chieftan as an enemy and not a shadow card. After offing him I quested to victory with 0 threat. :-)

scottindeed said:

Meh, I'd rather take a turn 4 victory over this.

Dam said:

I agree, I've taken to count how many turns it takes me to win a game rather than worry too much about score. Managed to beat Anduin in 9 turns several days ago. I can't imagine that I would have the patience to stall a game in this manner. And no offense, but it's the Mirkwood scenario.

scottindeed said:

I played a deck of this style a couple of times before it got boring and I decided to try other deck times. I think Dunhere is probably better then Glorfindel mainly so that you can avoid the problem you mentioned. By killing everything in staging you don't have to worry about Shadow cards.

The final score when playing like this comes down to cycling through the encounter deck until all Victory cards have been defeated. The number of turns this takes is more or less all random, because you can do very little to determine what cards are drawn for shadow effects. That is one reason why the scoring-system is very bad. If decks like this will win every tournament, then they could just as well forget about tournaments in this game. Introducing a time-limit on games will not help, it will only make it more random on who will get the better score. Then the ones lucky enough to encounter the Victory-cards will have the best score, while those that had the Victory cards as shadow effect will have a worse score. A time limit will also make it more into a dexterity contest. Players that can go through the phases quickly will have time to play more gameturns and are then more likely to have a good score.

I sincerely hope that FFG will rethink the scoring system before tournaments are launched for this game.

Weeks said:

Bryon said:

Well, that's sure simpler than what I thought of, say adding Starting Threat multiplied by the # of turns to make up the final score. So Starting Threat 30 winning in 5 turns with a final score of 45 = 195, while ST 30 winning in 20 turns (probably even more than that in this case) and final score of -9 = 591 .

I just got a score of -9 with Bilbo (printed), Dunhere and Eowyn. In multiplayergames I prefer a good, swift victory, but today I wanted to try the "low-threat" tactic on p. t. mirkwood.

What was your deck, scottindeed?

Weeks said:

I second this. Winning using tactics like mentioned above is silly, and risk making tournaments into never-ending-deck-re-cycling fests.

/wolf

I gave it some more thought and here is an idea; What if you only scored victory points for Encounter Cards if you completed the quest in the same round, or the round immediately after you defeated the Encounter card? Removing the card from game (i.e. not back into the Encounter deck) if you didn't finish the quest "in time".

That way you could not hog down on points like this until you got them all. Instead it would encourage players to finish the Quest as fast as possible right after killing a "scoring" Enemy.

Then again... it does add to the "pure luck" part of it all... but like previously mentioned this cannot be escaped anyhow since the scoring card might just as well be discarded as a Shadow Card.... so I don't know if this would make it worse.

I don't know... just thinking out loud.

/wolf

GhostWolf69 said:

Of course it's silly I, and I'm sure scottindeed too, agree with this. As I mentioned, I see this tactic as a soloplay variant for fun, not for a multiplayer game to drive my companions crazy

one question i would have is how long it took for the -9 victory, 30 mins, 1hr, 2hrs what? any and all tournies i have attended have had time limits on each round and for card game ones they tend to be short, 1hr at the very most and more like 30min normally.

So while stall decks may be the way to get really good score they may be totally impractical in tournies where you have limited time to complete everything.

I'm pretty sure tourneys are going to be 2+ player teams. That usually kills the stall tactic because the amount of total threat increases more quickly. 2 players = +2 every turn, 3 players = +3 every turn, etc. That effectively kills the benefits of stalling to use Galadhrim's Greeting and Gandalf for a lower score unless they already exist in the player's hand. I like wolf's description of it being a tactic for a soloplay variant and for fun.

geristor said:

Not very long, 30minutes at max. But many turns as you can imagine

I also think that tournaments are going to be at least for 2 players. Everybody can perform a solotournament at home^^ It's called "build a deck and then test it"^^