I'm still not convinced that it would work. Not reliably. It requires drawing some very specific cards in your opening hand and even with them you''ve got to be spending some time setting yourself up and hoping to draw those Gandalfs. I play with Bilbo a lot, he's great but there is no guarantee that you'll be getting the card you need (at least not in the right order). Plus while you're focused on being able to pull off multiple Gandalfs, you won't be playing other allies and the encounter deck will keep pouring on enemies and the like.

Lenbo said:

We will house rule that if Gollum is not in the staging area and you are required to make an escape test (because of a treachery etc) we can search the encounter deck and the discard pile for Gollum and put him into the staging area. Otherwise the chance for him to get discarded as a shadow card or escape test card is too high and the game session degenerates into frustration. Else there is no sense to force players to take an escape test...

Additionally we will reset the quest to stage 1b if Gollum is not in the staging area during 2b

Somehow this quest feels that it has a couple of major game mechanic flaws...

Or, the easiest solution: If Gollum leaves the staging area at any point of the game, you lose.

gatharion said:

First of all, if you have 3 Gandalfs in your deck, it's roughly a 60% chance that you draw him in your starting hand (assuming you mulligan if you don't draw him on the first draw). Luckily, "Stand and Fight" is no longer an issue thanks to the errata, but I don't think it is that difficult to have both Gandalf and Sneak Attacks -- have you seen any of the draw decks (hello Beravor + UC)? I'm not saying that in every situation and with every deck that you'll always be able to play multiple Gandalfs, and I'm not saying that you should or have to play a certain way in order to win. Personally, I don't find playing Gandalf every turn that exciting (and it also ruins the thematic idea of Gandalf appearing, doing something great, then disappearing, which others have stated they liked =P). Rather, my point is that if your deck is structured in a certain manner it is possible to greatly increase the likelihood of abuse, and if we're talking about balance then we have to consider the most extreme cases and the most efficient decks. I am also not claiming that the Gandalf card in and of itself is the root of the cause of the problem, because it isn't -- but it is possible to consistently play him multiple times in a game.

Is sneak attack more a problem than Gandalf?How about banning sneak and releasing similar card with higher cost.. (or errata 2 cost sneak or 3 cost sneak would be much less likely to be include in the deck...) Even 3 cost sneak is better that 5 cost gandalf, but so little that it would newer be playd (one extra card, for 2 point price reduction...) Is cost 2 too little to make any difference... Maybe... One would be that Gandalf would be immune to player card effect so you can not use sneak or any other player cards to Gandalf... He is a Maia after all :-) (like nazgul is immune to conditions)

The idea of having steward costin 1 and producing 1 is actually guite good. It would still be very powerful, but not ultimately so.

Hannibal_pjv said:

Well, Sneak Attack has particularly good synergy with Gandalf because Gandalf normally costs 5 resources AND he has ridiculous after "entering play" options and benefits. But yeah, UC, SoG... game breaking cards.

Hannibal_pjv said:

Having either card in a deck without the other isn't a problem or is it?

Sneak attack is the broken card out of the two, not Gandalf.

DurinIII said:

yes, that is true. it should have the same limitation as "Stand and Fight" regarding the sphere of influence.

Regarding the difficulty:

Recieved DM yesterday played round of that new pack. It was a piece of cake..honestly. Ok, we were lucky. I played with Eowen and all rohan cards, Gloin (who did not earn even one ressource due to lack of enemies) and Dunhere. I drew the Steward and protector at the beginning and got some good allies out as well. My partner got a ton of allies in her Lore (Bilbo, Elanor,) and tactics (Boromir) deck. We did not struggle one time and beat the quest without even resetting the quest stage or loosing Gollum.

A bit dissapointing, but good luck really on the the other hand. We also got a lot of cards out because of Bilbo and Elanor. I still like then new escape mechanic

We were trying to beat Osigiath i guess 4 times or so until we finally manged to! It is horribly difficult and so far it was the one we struggled the most. You have to draw a Gandalf for instance to win and or other wise be extremely lucky with card draw and encouter deck. So far, Osgiliath and Carrock and maybe Dol Gundor are imo the most challenging quests and the ones that i feeled that my 13€ were worth paying for the quest. Ok, fair enough, you still get player cards with the super easy quests like Hills or DM now, but still. a bit dissapointing. I belong to the ones that really play for a the challenge and not just for "theme" or so. Sure, i love LotR and Tolkien, but if I want to have great story, i ready a book normally. So far, the "story" told in the adventure packs has really been very simple and not epic at all as well.

Now, lets just hope that from the next expansion on the game will really start to get more and more difficult.

I don't want to take side and divert this into a black and while discussion. For instance what we do is to use only one Gandalf normally and we play with one core, two players. In the future, if an adventure pack will have a difficulty less than 6 or 7, I will not use UC or Steward in my deck for sure from the first play on.

We were have enough easy quests and soon a complete easy adventure cycle (I speak about 1 core, 2 players, 1 Gandalf...) so please let the next ones be really tough!

Iver said:

Glaurung said:

Start to wake up more and more. I can sign under any words what you type!!! I laready talk about it for last 6 months. Im glad more and more players come to certain skill level start to realize there is no challenge any more!!! Let face the true almost all Shadow of Mirkwood Cycle is quite boring. Carrock, Rhosgobel and look like Return is ok. All other is just easy to say: LAIZY, BAD WORK OF DESIGNERS.

Ok hope next cycle will be better or it can be beginning of the end. We need Better Quests!!!!

Glaurung said:

Hey, no need to be offensive even if you share my opinion. just because they make it easy doesn't mean they are lazy Glaudrung

Also people understand: i am not playing this for tournaments at all or so, just for fun really. but fun for me also implies at least a bit of challenge

Just got my Dead Marshes today as well as Massing... yes, it was on the shelf at my FLGS! Thank you Uncle's Games in Bellevue! You rock!

Now to muster some more folk to play here.

Shelfwear said:

I'll agree with Shelfwear here... It's not that I don't like a challenge, and it IS a challenge to get Gollum out in Staging again, believe me. It's just that I don't like a BORING challenge.

Cycling through the Encouterdeck over and over again, dragging the game out for HOURS! is not my idea of fun.

So we have opted to use your last alternative here Shelfwear, i.e. If Gollum goes back into the Deck, we stop playing and count it as a loss, because no one in our group want to sit there waiting for the slim chance of him coming back up again.

/wolf

GhostWolf69 said:

I've played Dead Marshes three times (all solo). I had two wins and a loss. The loss was me just giving up after Gollum went back into the Encounter Deck; I had things to do and wasn't just going to hang around waiting for the little bugger to turn up again.

friend and i go splits on lord of rings and thrones lcg. don't smoke or gamble. there's a whole bunch of money saved right there.

So.

I was playing a three person game against the Dead Marshes last night. Between questing and escape tests, with three players we were going through the encounter deck pretty fast. We were close to completing the first stage of the quest and there were only three cards left in the encounter deck. Gollum had 4 resource tokens and we just drew the Treachery card that puts two more on him (reduced to 1 if a Lore character gets exhausted) and we hit upon the realization...if we let Gollum take the two tokens and then purposefully lose the escape test then he'll get put back into the scant encounter deck and then get drawn next turn and be devoid of resource tokens.

I couldn't see anything that prevented this from being a valid loophole.

I suppose there was some risk that on the next turn we could have drawn a Treachery card asking for an Escape test, but since I was using Elenore, even the risk of that occurring was mitigated.