Yes, Radaghast plus I removed Glorfindel from the game to use his 1 heal ability. That is one of the reasons why the score for this game was higher than the rest. I just could not for the life of me draw an LoI card during the Hills quest and was stalling for a long time to try to get one, but finally had Radaghast in play with 5 resource on him that I just moved on.

Well, finally another win. Threat, 43; 13 rounds (130); no damage or dead Heros; 29vps (hen, lhaw, hill troll; 2x rauros falls; east wall of rohan; outer ridge; Rhosgobel.). Final score: 144. Wow, my weighted average is going to be bad!!!

Lost my last attempt. I learned it the hard way why they didn't use the Wilderland encounters in Emyn Muil - you have almost zero chance to get rid of those Wargs. I got two of them and never had a single chance to attack them (the only shadow effect being "put the enemy back into the staging area"). This game left me quite frustrated as I did draw only useless cards both from the player and the enocunter deck - and still stood my ground for a long time. Then I got the Marsh Adder. Then Brown Lands. Loosing two games of five against this setup is quite disappointing, as I chose my heroes for a good win/loss ratio (and for not having that cursed spirit sphere).

The soring game itself is still very luck depending, as playing five games only is by far not enough to get a balanced score.

leptokurt said:

So, would it (not this weekend, but another time) be better to simply show wins and losses with average score next to it? And which trumps which? Say with my results, I went 2-3, average 144 per win. So I would be .400 while sick boy was 4-1 (i think) and don't have his scores in front of me, but let's say 130 average. So he'd be .800 with a win average of 130. If you kept cumulative over tournament cycles, these numbers would change enough to start separating players and wins as well as score totals would matter wouldn't they? (or is my head deluded kuz of my cold?)

Zjb12 said:

I think the system works fine, but the more games you play, the less luck is involved. If you look at my five games, I was pretty lucky in one of them and was very very very unlucky in another. Five more games, with the option of not counting the worst and the best result would be better, but that's probably too time intensive. That's why I am looking forward to a living tournament (but then it's more tense when you play only for a couple of days).

All in all I think I had a lot of fun, the only thing I'd change is to remove the Wargs, but that's a minor detail in an overall ggerat looking picture.

In my warm up games yesterday I had the same problem with the wargs and also had some games where the hill troll kept getting the return to the staging area as well. I still like your idea of trying a quest where you look to score points by going places and killing enemies.

Zjb12 said:

My aim is to build a scoring system in which the spirit sphere becomes completly useless.

Perhaps in your next tournament you could follow the suggestion that someone made not to score the heroes threat, and damage but only the rounds and VP. A spirit deck would then look less bombastic.

leptokurt said:

But I think I would want to score round points at something a lot less than 10, otherwise it doesn't seem worth it.

Couldn´t resist to play. I hope there won´t be too many tournaments. That´s awfully time consuming......

So here´s my entry.

Heroes: Eowyn, Theodred and Beravor.

Game 1:

Rounds: 12, Wounds: 0, Threat: 0, Victory points: 33. Total score: 87

Game 2:

Rounds: 13, Wounds: 0, Threat: 0, Victory points: 33. Total score: 97

Game 3:

Rounds: 18, Wounds: 0, Threat: 0, Victory points: 24. Total score: 155

(score went so high because I had to play the last 5 rounds to get 1 more victory point)

Game 4:

Rounds: 13, Wounds: 0, Threat: 0, Victory points: 25. Total score: 105

Game 5:

LOST (2 of my first 4 treacheries were Rockslide and killed two of my heroes)

Win ration: 1,25 (5/4)

Average score: 111 (87+97+155+105=444/4)

Weighted average: 139 (111*1,25)

Am I missing something here or you managed to lower your threat to 0 all 4 times?

How did you do? Just sneaking multiple Gandalf and using Galadhrim's Greetings?

SiCK_Boy said:

Yes.

SiCK_Boy said:

Plus Will of the West to reshuffle (and immediatly redrawing) these cards into the player deck. He always plays that deck. Surprisingly this works in approximately 100 percent of the games in which one tries this, even with only one coreset. Have to try this out myself.

Seems like it's very difficult to build a deck and employ a strategy that wins 100% of the time....I don't believe anyone has done it for this tourney yet. Do you think playing solo there will always be cases where the draws from the encounter deck are so bad that there is no defense? I'm curious what type of win % an expert player could generally expect to get versus the different difficulty scenarios?

RGun said:

Against this scenario I'd consider a win ratio of 80 percent as good. There are some encounters that can ruin the game for you when they appear early in the game - 2x Rockslide, a Hill Troll , 2x Wargs, Wargs/Goblin Sniper, East Bight/Brown Lands. Most of these can be countered, but early in the game you have to be lucky to have all the cards (= Gandalf in most cases) that can help you.

Ugh! I just typed the whole scorecard up for 1/2way and then went to insert a dumb smiley face and lost the whole thing!!! Ugh!!!

Okay, halfway, we have five competitors...well 4 and then there's the organizer who just makes pretty patterns with his wins and losses!

Place Name Scores W-L Weighted Factor Weighted Score

1. Meumaken 87/97/155/105/L 4-1 1.25 138.75

2. Sick_boy L/128/163/109/135 4-1 1.25 167.19

3. Leptokurt 203/85/L/188/L 3-2 1.67 264.97

4. RGun 162/138/L/L/198 3-2 1.67 277.22

5. Zjb12 144/L/L/L/144 2-3 2.50 360.00

Ouch! Can you say weighted factor hurtz!

I'm tempted to try again, but I just can't afford to stay up until 2 AM again tonight. I think if I dropped a few of the cards I never ended up using for some additional ones with card draw capabilities and perhaps swapped Eoywn for Beravor I might be able to do significantly better....ahh well, maybe next time. I always underestimate the power of additional card draws...

RGun---u could, but it wouldn't count towards the tournament. I don't think I changed my deck at all even though I went 2-3. I am glad to see some people could be ptty successful. It means it was not horrifically hard like last week!

Muemakan: Do you think you could post your full decklist?

I find your results very impressive in getting to 0 threat systematicaly. My games lasted a similar number of rounds as yours (11 to 16), but for you to take a starting theat of 27 and bring it down to 0 each time, you need to play a lot of Gandalf and/or GG. That's at least 6 or 7 play of either one per game, with only two Sneak Attack, two GG and a Dwarven Tomb. I understand Theodred accelerates your resources production so you can play Gandalf more often than I did, but that still sounds like a lot. Were you getting through your whole deck every time with Beravor's card drawing (I only had Gleowine and Ancient Mathom, so I wasn't going that fast, but I did come close to drawing the whole deck once).

I know it sounds like I'm doubting it, and maybe there's a part of it, but since I'm all for milking every last drop of score you can when playing, I'm also really interested to see if there's a strategy I'm missing here or something.

Also, in order to get that many victory points, were you using or not using Northern Tracker in the HoEM portion? For me, every time I had the Tracker, I was bound to finish the game very close to the 20 vp mark (plus getting the additional 4 from Rhosgopel) because Tracker cleaned the last locations while they were still in staging.

Just a few hours left! Also, let me know in the other forum post about next weekend. Thinking of a couple of different options and need to know if most people have Khazad dum by now!

leptokurt said:

Only in games where speed is not that important.

SiCK_Boy said:

I tried muemakan's approach myself. I played only Emyn Muil with the Wilderland deck, was too lazy to put the Rhosgobel deck together, but I can promise you that it would have taken me only one more round to finish.

The result was: 12 rounds, 0 damage, 0 threat, 20 VP, 90 points

I think I got Unexpected Courage in round 4 or 5. The trick is to draw your whole deck, play 2x GG, 2x Sneak/Gandalf, 3x Gandalf. That lowers your threat by 37 points (I didn't even use Dwarven Tomb). In the meanwhile you draw your whole player deck, so that in the discard pile you only have the above mentioned cards plus a handful of other cards. Then you play Will of the West, and you can draw 5 cards each round from a deck that has only around 10 cards, so in 2 turns you have all those threat lowering cards in your hand again.

This deck is indeed a no brainer. You only have to survive the first two rounds (I had Henamarth in my starting hand who warned me twice that there was a Rockslide coming), and you have to get UC and SoG as son as possible.

Here is my deck list:

2x Northern Tracker

1x Éomund

3x Escort from Edoras

1x Unexpected Courage

3x Ancient Mathom

2x Galadrim's Greeting

2x Will of the West

2x Test of Will

2x Faramir

3x Snowbourn Scout

2x Steward of Gondor

1x Celebrían's Stone

3x Mark of the Dúnedain

1x Grim Resolve

2x Sneak Attack

2x Haldir of Lórien

2x Daughter of the Nimrodel

2x Miner of the Iron Hills

1x Henamarth Riversong

2x Protector of Lórien

3x Lore of Imladris

2x Secret Paths

3x Gandalf

3x Song of Wisdom

And te Heros for that deck are: beravor, bilbo, ?

SiCK_Boy said:

Here´s my deck. Normally I have a Horn of Gondor so I don´t have to pay for sneaking. Theodred was used instead. The only way to do it with this deck is to draw your whole deck, and then draw another third of your already discarded deck to get your discard pile empty.

I had one Tracker. He is very helpful in getting rid of a lot of locations at once........so they all count for victory points.

Heroes:

Eowyn, Beravor and Theodred

Spirit: 22

3 Westfold Horsebreaker

3 Stand and Fight

2 GG

2 Ride to Ruin

2 Riddermarks Finest

3 Old Mathom

2 Will of the West

1 Unexpected Courage

1 Northern Tracker

1Dwarven Tomb

1 A Test of Will

1 Hasty Stroke

Leadership: 12

1 Celebrians Stone

2 Vailiant Sacrifice

3 Snowbourn Scout

2 Sneak Attack

2 Common Cause

2 SoG

Lore: 11

1 Daughter of Nimrodel

1 Erebor Hammersmith

1 Lorien´s Wealth

1 Henamarth Riversong

1 PoL

1 Gleowine

1 Gandalf´s Search

1 Forest Snare

3 Lore of Imladris

Neutral: 5

1 Song of Wisdom

2 Song of Travel

2 Gandalf

Zjb12 said:

Looks like muemakan lost another battle against the board.

EDIT: wow, mighty comeback!

Answer:

Beravor, Théodred, Éowyn