Just curious what types of decks are beating this quest without the use of spirit and Dunhere to pick off the Trolls. Any thoughts? Appreciated!

Well...I use spirit but not Dunhere and win most of the time. Does that count?

Actually I beat CatC 3/4 times using a Leadership/Lore deck with Theodred, Prince Imrahil, and Beravor as my heroes. This quest is all about preparation. Everyone loves Spirit because of its threat management, but there are no bonus points for having low threat. Simply use the Gandalfs to keep threat at a comfortable level and get it below 34 before advancing. Use the card draw abilities of Lore matched with the resource generation of Leadership and you can almost play your deck at will after a few rounds. Also, after some buffing, Theodred can do most questing on his own. When he needs help you can use Imrahil, chump block with a small ally, and then use Imrahil again to attack.

Small combo note: this is the first AP in which I used Forest Snare to grab one of the big unique trolls (10 hit points). I hit him for 9 and then used Infighting to transfer these wounds to Hill Trolls in the staging area and collect the victory points without engaging them.

Puzzle said:

That is awesome. Well done.

I like this quest because Spirit seems like the worst sphere to use against it! I've beaten this with Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli (Awesome!) and Glorfindel, Beravor, Legolas. Try not using spirit, it'll be ok...

I've played Conflict at the Carrock once and it was two player. Oh it went bad. I actually got a quick video clip before the end.

Will Fuqua said:

That looks like how our first play of HFG ended, except doesn't have enough locations and missing 3 Clues + 2 Hunters from Mordor !

Ironically, we then played CatC after HFG, despite it being a higher difficulty quest and breezed through it, utterly controlling the staging area, picking off Hill Trolls during stage 1. In fact, those progress removers are a blessing, buying you more time during the first stage to build up. We cleared all 4x River Langfloods during the first stage, only thing giving concern was threat level, we only really had 2x Gandalf each for reduction. I barely was able to take the extra threat from that one Troll's ability while taking on two Uniques, but we won.

Lot's of good stuff, thanks guys! I especially like the Forest Snare/Infighting trick you pulled off...very awesome!

Yes, all you need to care about is keeping threat below 34 long enough to pick off a few Trolls before they all engage. So Spirit is less important for this scenario, and Eowyn is actually actively detrimental as she will take you through stage 1 far too quickly.

it looks like the spheres have been lined up to have their day in the sun as we go through the APs; Carrock is Tactics-friendly, Lore shines in Rhosgobel and no doubt Spirit will have a field day in the Emyn Muil with its acres of locations to get through.

ClydeCloggie said:

Hehe, we had Eowyn as the lone Spirit Hero(ine) in the game we won CatC. Basically, we would mostly quest with her and Thalin, discarding for her ability if needed, otherwise only matching Threat in staging area + progress needed on the active location, thus clearing a location per turn, travelling to the next one. That up to +2 WP is great for managing threat vs WP, which is very important during stage 1 of CatC.

Narsil0420 said:

Narsil,

Please post your Three Hunters deck. I'm trying to make that group work as well, but the high starting threat and low questing make it difficult unless you can get an early Celebrian's Stone. (And then hopefully a Tracker or two.) Would really appreciate seeing what you're doing.

Bullroarer Took said:

You know it was a while ago and I actually didn't write down what I put in that deck. Until recently I haven't really tried to track a certain deck, but just threw together something each time with 66% of the dominant sphere and 33% of the other. (I only have 1 core set) For the Three Hunters deck I did the same using 66% Tactics cards and the rest Leadership, except I will usually include more Leadership cards with the hope of getting Steward out on Aragorn. I know that I didn't use any Spirit cards but I may have slipped in the two Galadhrim's Greetings to hopefully use with Celebrian's Stone. But really you don't need them, especially with Born Aloft and Gandalf as a combo. Low questing ability doesn't really matter with Carrock. The key is just to take your sweet time building up your allies and attachments to turn the Three Hunters into troll smashers. I don't even worry about the threat level unless it starts getting into the mid forties.

When I used this deck, it was the first time I beat Carrock solo and at the time I didn't know that Louis makes ALL the troll raise your threat by three when they attack, so you want to make sure your threat is not above 36 or so when they attack (unless you have a couple Feints up your sleeve) and also have a couple uses of Gandalf ready to go.

Hope that helps,

Matt