Hey all:

I've been absent for awhile - honestly the delay in getting the first pack out gave me time to completely know the game inside and out and it got fairly boring, so I barely noticed when it came out. Recently I saw there were 3 packs out and picked them all up, which gave me just enough of a card influx to make things interesting again. I updated my deck - The Spirit of Rohan - and played through the Hunt for Gollum quest a few times, and I'm ready to move on and try the others. First I wanted to post the updated version of the deck with some newer cards taken into account.

The primary focus of the deck is threat reduction, with plenty of card draw to back it up and get the combos going. The deck utilizes the more broken combos in the game, Galadhrim's Greeting + Dwarven Tomb and Gandalf + Sneak (or, later, Stand and Fight for a total of 9 uses). It's extremely effective. Comments welcome.

General Comments: I always mulligan if I don't have a Steward of Gondor in my hand (barring a stupidly good start). Get out SoG turn 2 on Eowyn is first priority, getting out a defender is next priority. After that it's drawing cards as quickly as possible and starting to drop your threat reduction. Gandalf should be used for card draw or threat reduction as needed, though obviously the occasional monster snipe can come in handy as well.

Heroes

Eowyn (S)

Dunhere (S)

Theodred (L)

Comments: An incredibly solid lineup with a very low starting threat. Eowyn is the questing workhorse. Dunhere stays behind to attack (preferably sniping). Theodred plays double duty, questing (and generating extra resources of whatever type needed) when able and attacking or defending if need be.

Allies

3x Gandalf

2x Northern Tracker (may up to 3)

3x Lorien Guide (may drop to 2 or eliminate entirely)

3x Wandering Took (Still the best cheap Spirit guy)

2x Westfold Horse Breaker (Testing, I like this guy but his stats are crap)

2x Escort from Edoras (Testing as well, fairly solid but again, his stats are crap. Nice with Valiant Sacrifice)

3x Snowbourn Scout (Still great)

2x Eomund (Decent, but wish he had an extra axe or shield. Nice combo-ability though, so he's in for now)

1x Faramir (Not sure what to do with him, I'd like to have 2 for more consistancy)

Attachments

3x Stewart of Gondor (Best card in the game!)

2x Celebrian's Stone

3x Dunedain Mark (This card is just incredible, especially on Dunhere)

3x Ancient Mathom (Easily the best new card to come out in the 3 new sets for this particular deck, as it really needed more card draw to make it soar. This gives you 3 cards for a low price for doing something you are already doing. In location heavy decks (like the Gollum one) you can Dwarven Tomb it in a pinch for extra card draw.)

Events (No real comments here as it's obvious for the most part)

3x Dwarven Tomb

3x Stand and Fight (Gandalf for the most part, but I've used it for a pinch-defender)

3x Galadrhrim's Greeting

3x Sneak Attack

3x Valiant Sacrifice

3x A Test of Will

I played with a similar Rohan deck and, just on a whim, played against Carrock. I didn't think it would do well because of the lack of Tactics but I actually won! I was really stoked. Hope you have similar luck!

I do something similar and am able to beat Dol Guldur with it. I posted the deck in a post recently.

You have access to Rhogobel, which I haven't gotten yet *shakes fist*

Let us know how it works out. I wanna hear about the newer cards in use in this deck since its similar to one I play.

I've tried a somewhat similar deck today( I do splash in a bit of Lore for extra card draw and I alternate between Theodred and Imrahil) and had good success with it. Needless to say, Leadership/Spirit kills Hunt For Gollum. I'm afraid to take it up against Carrock, though, I don't think there's enough firepower and defense. But Beravor/Gimli/ Eowyn have done well there, thus far.

The trick to Carrock is to not rush through the first part. Get your threat nice and low first, and then only face the trolls one at a time by choosing to encounter them. This type of deck is great at this.

Definitely what he said. If you play it right, Carrock is extremely easy (unless you 'accidentally' complete the first quest early). Take your time and get set up during the first quest, dial your threat way down, beef up Dunhere with Dunedain marks and you should be in great shape. The only real risk is the lone Sacked coming up very early.

On that note, here's how the deck generally performs against the 6 adventure's so far:

Base Set 1, Spiders: Obviously an easy one, this deck will beat it 99% of the time.

Base Set 2, Troll: Also easy: your threat starts low and you have lots of ways to lower it further, so you should never have to engage the Troll directly. This deck beats it about 95% of the time.

Base Set 3, Tower: Completely impossible to solo this with this deck aside from an extremely lucky draw. Simply put, every hero fulfills a unique nitch and eliminating one of them right off the bat results in an impossible battle. Out of all my attempts I've beat it once, and that was purely due to a perfect storm of a god draw from my deck, a terrible draw from the enemy deck and eliminating the right hero. 1%.

Expansion 1, Golem: Extremely easy. The sole difficult part of this mission is the Hunters, so you are a slightly at the mercy of the draw (the painful part of those guys isn't their health, isn't their attack boost, it's their **** threat boost) but as long as you don't get swarmed with multiples you should be fine. So far I'd give this deck an 80% success ratio against this one.

Expansion 2, Trolls: As mentioned above, almost an auto-win as long as you don't 'accidentally' get bumped into the second part of the quest early. Set yourself up, lower your threat, then snipe the trolls from afar. Last game I ended at 4 threat, 1 wound and 15 victory points worth of cards. I've only played a few times, but I anticipate about a 80-90% success ratio.

Expansion 3, Eagle: I really hate this adventure, in my mind it's the perfect example of how NOT to design an adventure for this game. The Base Set 3 adventure is a pain in the ass, but it's actually a lot of fun as long as you don't go against it solo. I'm ok with that. This adventure is a pain in the ass and nearly unbeatable, but becomes a cakewalk if you build a deck designed to beat it. I could be wrong here (I lost 3 times and then put it away as it just wasn't fun). I think if it were better designed (allow you to heal the bird by wounding your own guys or raising your threat or something to give you multiple approaches to victory) it would be a fun race against the clock that challenged 'stall' decks like this one, but as is if you include healing in your deck you win, if you don't you lose. All that being said I think it would be neat if you could use any deck, but basically needed to throw in Radagast to help out, or even had him build into the quest rules like in the troll one...but Radagast is terrible and will barely buy you a turn if you're lucky. Bad quest. Maybe 1-2% (if you draw lots of plants early) but I won't play this one enough to find out.

Great reviews CAlexander. Thank you.

CAlexander said:

I did just that on my first attempt at The Carrock. I figured the only way the trolls were coming in was through the effect of the second card, but careless use of Legolas was my undoing. Having played through it a few times now, I have to say that I prefer the more direct approach of Tactics here. Take your time, beef up my hand, keep my threat low, engage one troll, pound away at another with Gandalf and in 2-3 turns, half of them are gone. Then, it gets easy from there. I guess different strokes for different folks.

On the subject of the pack scenarios, I have to agree with you that if you build a deck to defeat any of them, you stand a good chance of doing just that. That seems, to me, to be the intention of the designers. One pack is quest heavy, the other relies on fighting and timing, and so on. Eventually, though, I think the card pool will be varied enough to allow for one well built deck to tackle just about everything with a good chance of winning. It looks like your deck already does a good job of that, anyway.

CAlexander said:

I do not agree. True, my deck was so far very effective against all scenarios and yet Eagle quest is impossible to win for me, but this is how the game is supposed to work. They need to put challenges in different areas so you have to customize your deck to beat all of them. Sure, you can create a deck designed for particular scenario, but creating a deck which is good against all scenarios should be a major challenge. So, looking back at my deck, I was not covered against damage dealing cards like necromancer, wounds etc. But thanks to this , I had enough space to include cards that are effective particularly against other scenarios. So now I have to modify the deck, cut down some cards which are not effective against Eagle (maybe even change the hero line up or spheres). As a result I will be able to beat Eagle, but previous quests will become harder. At this is where the fun comes from. If I could beat the eagle with my previous deck, where would be a challenge? FFG would need to put "bigger" enemies in every new quest and since my deck will be more powerfull with each new set of player cards, I would have no reason to go back to previous quests (difficulty would go up with every cycle, like core 4, first expansion 4, second 7, third 6, ... first deluxe 12, first deluxe expansion 15, .. second deluxe 20...) . Do you get the point? FFG is showing different challenges so they can balance them in 1-10 scale. If they were putting "bigger" but similar challenges all the time, the balance would be screwed and there would be no replayability value.

CAlexander said:

He is great in a multiplayer game, but I generally don't play him solo since (I assume) the 3 threat bounces right back to me as I am the only other player in the game. Even though is other stats are good, I would rather pay the extra resource for a Lorien Guide.

dberman: I say that only because his stats are incredible. 2/1/1/1/1 is just really good as he can typically take more than one hit and can also attack or quest as needed.

guciomir: I get where you're coming from, but I'd rather the deck give my existing deck a challenge rather than be an easy win for a deck custom built to beat that scenario...in the latter case you might as well be playing a new game rather than an LCG. In an LCG I like to build a couple of decks suited to my playstyle and throw them against various challenges. This scenario does not do that.

All: Played this deck for the first time against the Gen Con scenario and ****, I have to say it's the best scenario yet (including those from the base set). Extremely hard, not watered down by multiple encounter decks, super flavorful. Also the difficulty is evenly divided throughout the deck, it doesn't make things artificially difficult by 'cheating' and taking out heroes, etc. I won the first game, but only by a hair, and was probably 2 turns from losing. Look forward to repeat plays!

Also I just read that Stand and Fight was ruled to not be usable on Gandalf. I'll probably cut it down to 2x and eventually circulate it out entirely. That's a pretty big blow as you could Dwarven Tomb Stand and Fight to get even more Gandalf if you needed, but I don't dislike it, makes things harder, and that's what solo/co-op games are about!

CAlexander said:

My previous deck Gimli - Theodred - Eowin (also using stand/fight) was very good at threat reduction and very good at questing. I was not able to complete Eagle quest. But then I made a change , I switched Gimli to Legolas and I insterted 3x Radagast. And suddenly, the quest was still very hard, but I started achieving some victories. 2nd turn radagast gives you a chance. Still, I was not happy with the result, as some of the wins were very Athelas dependant.

So I started another deck building experience. This time Denether - Glorfindel - Legolas (with leadership splash) and the deck rocks! I scored some wins against the Eagle and the game was very nice. Obviously there were some failures too, but I haven't started tweaking the deck yet. So far healing effects are not very numerous, I just have Glorfindel (who can heal just 1 point from the eagle, so not a big deal, and 3x radagast which help a lot). I am very psyched about the possibilites that the deck can offer, I can cycle Born Aloft using green dwarf , I can multiply some nice effects. Hell, I pulled a great victory thanks to the following combo: Legolas was Caught in Web and not really active. Hummerhorns were guarding Athelas which I needed to grab and they were in the staging area. I sneak attacked Wilyador, engaged Hummerhorns, Legolas died , got rescued (with no Caught in the web attached). Denether grabbed athelas and legolas killed hummerhorns. Turn later the game was won.

The point is, I was completely into Gimli - Theodred - Eowin and I was sure that NO other deck can compete against it so far. I learned this not to be true. Other decks can give you much more fun. Now I have to try my Denethor - Glorfindel - Legolas against other adventures.

The best thing? I won against Gollum quest but it was close. With no trackers and with worse questing initially, the locations started to overhelm me. With worse threat reduction, I hit 35 in the mid game and the experience was much much better. This quest can be fun. And frankly, most people who complain against Gollum quest are using decks which are dedicated to win against it.