I'm done trying. I tried this god dam journey down the Anduin too many times and every time was a file. I tried it with diffirent starter decks, I tried it with tournament-legal contructed decks, today I tried it with a really deeply thought deck 3 friggin times and all 3 friggin times I was crushed to wrecks, just not as fast as previous times. Get past the troll two times of three and everything seemed well, but then again this **** come up and it was over. And whats most frustrating is now when I look back, knowing what was coming to me - even with this knowledge I wouldn't prevent the loss, because I didn't has the means to. Why include scenarios into the core set with so badly suited player cards against them? In the end it's all just up to random and player has a very little impact on whats going on.

Yes, I always can just call a friend and we could faceroll through all the high-"difficulty" quests, because multiplayer is like x10 times easier than solo, but whats the point? "You could always buy the expansions" - I already did, but it takes months for them to ship into my country and shelving the game until they arrive is something I wish I'd didn't had to do, but I just see no other way. It's not fun anymore to me.

Sorry for the garbage I just posted here, just frustrated.

this is a extremely common reaction, and there is no defence for the game.. people either put up with it and like a battered wife just start to believe it is normal.. or they spit the dummy and stop playing. For me the game is fun, but I mainly play 2 player and 3 player.

People will prob post all sorts of crap in here about how it is not that hard and all that but what these people are not telling you is that they either have a low win %.. or they do not know how to play correctly, so their "wins" are invalid, or they are lying. I mean look at those cardboard of the rings guys, very high profile players of this game, and even they play so badly rule wise that unless they WHERE playing so badly they wouldn't be winning. I once held a competition across 5 forums a while back for people to play and win, I think if was 3 out of 5 games of solo Journey to Rasgobel (just after Khaz was out but b4 darrowdelf I think it was). Anyway, I was offering a prise of the next adventure pack.. I had over 30 people attempt, some regular posters here.. I will not name.. but you know who you are.. vocal guys too.. and EVERYONE failed.

The bottom line is, If your not having fun.. then stop playing that simple.. Still high win percentages are not important to some, and I can respect that. . I mean when the game was younger I played a lot of solo, as I felt that this game was kind of like a puzzle. Build a deck that is able to win the scenario at a decent win%. The truth is though, that no matter how deep and thoughful your deck building, there is the random luck angle that this game can not recover from. On a single turn of the card you can loose it all, regardless of what you do in game, or in deck building… so the game is more about getting a good encounter deck draw than deck building.

BUT.. they have improved their quest design form the core set, and while the "flip a card form the encounter deck, game over" frustration has yet to be ironed out, the quests are defiantly MUCH better designed.

Still, I hear you… and sympathise but hey, this is the game.. This is Lord of the Rings LCG… take it or leave it. Like it or don't like it..

I hear you. I have been there myself. Then one guy, can't remember who, suggested me usin a single sphear deck, spirit+3 Gandalf. I thought "yeah, RIGHT!!" untill I tried it. I beat the dang quest the first or second time using that deck. BUT this only apply if you don't care at all about the scoring system. I snailed my way through and it worked nice for me. Next time I tried that quest was some days ago, about half a year later, here I beat it with a 2 player run. I played 2 player by myself.

But as stated above, if you don't have fun, give it up. That's after all what it's all about

You know, I had fun. Before I lost 20 times in a row without a slighest chance of winning.

whilst i dont take the extreme opinion that booored states, i am a 'guy who puts up with it' ….i dont lose this game half as much as i did- and i do play correctly. however i used to win about 1 in 10 games. admitedly ive just about got every rule wrong at some time in the last year or so, but i now play to the rules and funnily enough the game got easier…perhaps my card pool just coincided with me getting the rules right…anyhow i digress

if the theme is enough for you, as it is for me, its worth sticking with it. if you like the feel of the game and are not bothered about the theme so much then again perhaps its still worth sticking with it….otherwise perhaps not. all depends why you play.

if you can stand to keep loosing at the rate you are (which is understandable) then perhaps set it to one side until the packs arrive in your country? that way you dont frustrate yourself even more

i know the exact position you are in, even with all the packs available now i remember the first 3/4 months of the game- they were tough on solo players especially, but the game was new and it had all its new packs coming up- it was worth sticking around, an still is in my opinion

rich

Yes, I like the LotR theme but I'm not that huge fan of it. Yes, I like how the game plays, but then again, the main point of fun for me is challenge.

There is no challenge. You're absolutely going to lose, unless encounter deck/your deck will get insanely lucky, which fact you can't influence in any way by core set means. Challenge is when you know when it's gonna be hard, but you know you have an opportunity to overcome it too, maybe not big, but still opportunity(depends on level of challenge). In case of this quest, I tried it and lost so many times I'n confident enough to assume the two reasons: 1) I was incredibly unlucky all of these times; 2) Second quest is just unbeatable in terms of the core set. There is also third reason which I also assuming: I'm very, very bad and every deck variant I built for this quest sucks big time. And this is only second quest. I imagine the solo for third, where you're lose one random hero at the beggining of the game.

yeah the theme is defiantly the weakest part of the game for me… elves and magical woodland critters are lame as hell.. I mean the theme is ok, and the card art is great.. but as a whole i find it pretty dull and restrictive.. I mean we are already running our of stuff with 5 billion different types of orcs and trolls and stuff.

Lucky there is a scifi lcg co-op game coming soon.. Still LoTR is defiantly the best deck construction game around for co-op.

I want to make a little research just for the sake of it. Sort of experiments.

If it wouldn't bother anyone from the pro-players around here, can you suggest me best tournament-legal deck, build only from a single core set against the Journey down the Anduin? The cards, the heroes, the way I should play it. What this experiment is that I will play the second scenario with this deck 10 times in a row(or until I win) and then post the results there, giving a brief description of every game I went through.

My best shot was Spirit/Tactics hybrid, as I realized this quest needs both heavy fighting and questing. Hero setup was Eowyn, Legolas and Gimli. Eowyn as a best solo quester, Legolas as a strong attacker which can make a decent progress and a Gimli as all-round good defender, attacker and quester when forecast is clear. 3 Gandalfs for obvious reasons. Feints as a timely counter against trolls, which actually worked well. With some light-cost cards from the Spirit(up to 3). 2 of 3 games I got past the troll and get pretty far at the second stage, but got toally overwhelmed. Third time I got second troll coming out of encounter deck the 2nd turn.

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

Could you remind me what Expansions you have?

And in which country do you live?

I have no expansions and I live in Ukraine.

I made a tri sphere deck with Gimli, Theodred and Eowyn and tried it twice with OCTGN. Won both times, could be a deck that got lucky.

If you want to, I will post it.

What do you pay for your packs? Maybe someone can send you the pack so you don´t have to wait that long..

Whats OCTGN?

I already ordered some packs in the online store and waiting for them to arrive. I don't have the resources right now to afford another ones.

Out of the 4 premade decks, I was only ever able to beat it with the spirit deck. The key is keeping your threat low and beating on the trolls very slowly and safely with dunhere. Use gandalf to lower your threat to keep them off of you, or his direct damage if you can manage to pull it off without your threat raising too much after the fact.

I beat it the other day in a second play through, though at this time, i own every set, so i wanted to see how bad it was this time around with all the new cards. I was able to beat it with relative ease.

Try something like this:

Eowyn

Dunhere

Theodred

You're using the core set only, so you are somewhat limited on build options, but include 3x gandalfs, 2 sneak attacks, dwarven tomb, and galadrims greeting. That will keep you at a low enough threat to keep the trolls off of you. Use unexpected courage on dunhere to allow him to attack 2 monsters per turn. For gondor! is kind of a crap card, but in this point, its one of your few options to boost your attack. I think if you go this route, you should be able to pull off a victory.

I tried to do it the way you describe, the thing is Dunhere just can't get through troll's 3 armor and there is almost no options to boost his attack with a spirit/leadership deck. Spirit has a very weak fighting potential, Leadership has a slightly better but still weak figthing potential, and once troll descended - I had no means to hurt him.

I did it like Captain Poe described. Hm, I think I used Dunhere to take out all the smaller Enemies in the staging area. A couple of northern tracker (or the other guy, something with guide) the one that puts progress tokens on all locations in the staging area. And if remember correct I used Gandalf to hurt the troll and then defend against it. I used the card that lets you lower your threat by 6 (not good at names) and after a little while I used the card that lets you shuffle your discard pile back into the deck. It requires a little luck I'll agree but this is a very usefull tactic have you tried to play a single player "2 player" game? This way you have 2 decks and are able to use 6 heroes in total.

I should also mention that this quest almost killed the pleasure for me too. I own every pack to date except the latest one BUT I haven't opened anyone yet. I know, I'm strange but the reason is that I wanna beat every quest in order and only using the cards existing at that quests time. Later I plan to use all the best cards and try it out again but my first run must be limited to the current cards at that time. I have had the game for about a year now but haven't played it the last half a year or so. The reason was too little time AND I was a little tired after all the failed attempt to Anduin. After I beat it I just sort of lost the interest for a while. But now I've picked it up again and it's better than ever the last couple of days I have beaten the 3 core quests with dou decks and today I opened Hunt for Gollum. I'll give it a go tomorrow

Regarding OCTGN, it's a windows based software that lets you play this game and some other card games online. OCTGN and LACKEYCCG are the two hottest ones. Since I have a mac I use lackeyccg. This really gives me the time to play whenever I have a little time since I don't need to unpack all my cards and put up a big game. You can check it out if you want, just google it. However, if you decide to use one of these program's I'd strongly recommend you to only use the cards you have physically. This way you won't make decks that you can't play yet with your friends. AND off cause, if everyone stopped buy the packs and just used the "free" online software editions the game would die sorry for this novel of a text. Just felt I wanted to tell you that you weren't alone in your frustrations and that it's possible to beat the Anduin…once in a while

Well, I've already beaten second and third scenarios in multiplayer, so now I'm up to beating them in solo mode, which I'm stuck in.

While using only Spirit in solo, clearing enemies with Dunhere is very problematic as most of them have threat threshold lower than Spirit's starting 24 or something around it. And when they reach for you - spirit has a few means to defend.

For what its worth, I had some luck with Eowyn, Dunhere, and Denthor againt Anduin. I primarily used Forest Snare to tackle the troll. If I didn't get it in my first 6, I mulliganed to see if I could get it that way. The low starting threat plus Gandalf, Galdrium's greeting etc. should bye some time until you can draw the snare, or get a Gelowine to help draw for it. Denthor can be used to syphon away some bad guys so you can concentrate on the troll as well once you have snared him and brought him down from the staging area, gang up on him with your allies etc.. I have not beaten Anduin often, but when I have, Spirit and Lore has been in my deck. All I had at the time was a single core. It is possible, just keep plugging away.

I pretty much just play solo, and i've tried lots of decks against all the quests - my experience is generally that any deck running tactics doesn't work at all (tactics may be good for support in multiplayer, but for solo they aren't even worth thinking about), leadership only works as a support to lore or spirit, and the best decks are spirit/lore .

I've tried a variety of spirit/lore decks, from "control" with denethor, burning brand, and similar cards, speedy-Rohan, to my current build with Frodo, Glorfindal (spirit) and Aragorn (Lore), which just runs rings round every quest except Dol Guldur and Rhosgobel.

I'd suggest that the game is very playable, and very enjoyable, for a solo player - but pretty much only if you go Spirit/Lore.

One big problem I had in the beginning was that I was too afraid of the troll and the extrat threat he causes when killing a low stat enemy. However, sometimes it's better to take this deal if this enables you to take down the troll.

The other mistake was to enter stage 2B too early. A player should be sure that he was gathered enough WP to make it down the Anduin in 2-3 rounds. Otherwise he gets overwhelmed by the risning threat or there will be too many enemies waiting at the banks.

In the first two expansions there will be some cards which help to make Anduin easier to travel. Rivendell Minstrell, Strider's Path and, most importantly, Longbeard Mapmaker. The first expansion also includes the Dúnedain Marks that give + 1 ATT to a hero (=Dunhere).

Yes, yes, and yes. I tried everything stated above more than one time and everytime it failed. Spirit and Lore of a core have one flaw in common - lowest attack. When you snare Troll - you can't advance until you kill it, and you just have nothing to kill it with if you didn't happen to draw Gandalf. And while you're trying to - your threat grows, staging area gets crowded, more and more enemies descend, taking away your weak attackers and stuff.

I got it pretty decent with tactics. My personal record - 11 prgoress token on the 2B stage of the quest. My threat was 35. And I drew this card which damages all characters of a player with 35 threat or higher. And it was instant death to all my wounded allies(and unwounded with 1 maximum health), leaving me down with 3 1 health left heroes.

Beating that quest solo is one of the more satisfying victories I have had in this game. Even with an expanded card pool, that quest still gives me fits. One combo that might be feasible for you since you only have the Core set is Son of Arnor and Forest Snare. The Son of Arnor can let you engage the Hill Troll in the Planning Phase and then you can Forest Snare it. That might be a bit tricky though, since that requires 6 resources across two different spheres.

Perhaps you should try a Spirit/Tactics deck with Eowyn, Dunhere, and Thalin. Thalin gives you access to Veteran Axhand (2atk) and Gondorian Spearman. Spearman in combo with Thalin can really put a dent into enemies and makes those crows (and surge) irrelavent. You could put Dwarven ax on Dunhere to bump up his attack against the troll and deal with him in the staging area.

I assume you are playing with 30 card decks? Putting two spheres together in a 30 card deck will give you better opportunities to draw the cards you need and see how your deck can perform until you get a larger card pool. Hope this helps.

I construct tournament-legal 50 minimum card decks. Well, Dunhere will need something about 9 turns to kill the troll in staging area, if I'll get lucky with starting hand and one axe in it. Troll will engage because of threat or I'll get overwhelmed by things from the encounter deck, constantly coming at me.

MyNeighbourTrololo said:

You are probably aware of this but just in case. when you attack an engaged enemy you can attack with more characters at the same time adding the attack value together thus easier get past the troll than just relying on attachments for +1 attack strength.

You could eventually go for the spirit/lore suggested by another but instead of using Denethor for a low starting threat go for Glorfindel. You can use him to fight in stage 1 and 3 of the quest and questing in stage 2.

Piaf you are up to it give some of all this a second chance and then report back how it went. People here at the forum are famous for supporting each other and there's a LOT of experience and helpfulness between my fellow LOTR LCG players

I had a bit more luck with Anduin and managed to beat it even before I got second core set and expansions.

I had just one strategy - start with a low threat and field as many allies as possible before taking on the troll. Many times I had Gandalf ready to defend against it at least once to minimize the threat increase. As far as I remember I was planing spirit/tactics deck back then.

Still I only won once back then (and tried 10 or more times) and I was getting annoyed at this quest. Then I decided that since FFG is not giving me enough cards in the box to build decent tournament legal deck so I stopped using the "rule" requiring me to use 50 card decks - I went for 30-35 decks and my win ratio against Anduin went up (not as far as being able to beat it 50% of the time but close to 30%). Then at least I had a felling I had a shot at winning.

BTW: I don't know where do you order the game from (since you have to wait such a long time) but you might have a look at a Polish shop rebel.pl ( http://www.rebel.pl/category.php/1,1619/Lord-of-the-Rings-LCG.html ) - they carry LOTR:LCG in English and are well respected in Poland (you can contact them at: [email protected] in English and they should be able to calculate the shipping to Ukraine and it should be much faster then from say USA)