Victory on the first attempt!
Last week, I marked my return to the game after a very long hiatus by recounting an amazing play through of The Ring Goes South
. You may have noticed that I have a trademark quirk of tiny mistakes with big ramifications. Well, I may have set my starting threat just a wee low when the game began. With Loragon on my team, unused the whole game, I probably could have fixed this in retrospect. But let's just forget that refresher happened (I removed the post) and mark my return with this here bad boy...
The Journey
I returned to the US from Thailand just about a month ago and wrote my LGS to ask if they still had room for the 2015 Fellowship Event. "I don't think we're hosting any event," they said. Uh-oh. In Thailand at the time with no strong LotR:tcg presence at stores I knew, I had already missed out on the 2014 event and was not wanting to miss out yet again. With only weeks to go, I sent out feelers to the surrounding area and found three possibilities within a 90 minute drive. Available space and prize support helped lower the decision down to
Adventurer's Quarter down in Arvada, CO. Five of us showed up and the event organizer, who had participated in a separate event on Friday, stepped back to provide support (reminding us of terrible effects we might forget) while the remaining four of us began our investigation.
I was nervous to go to this, in all honesty. Being primarily a solo player, I was just waiting to come face-to-face with crucial multiplayer rules I had forgotten. Or general rules, for that matter, having not read the most recent FAQ. And this was a fully brand-new deck I would be trying out (see below). What if it was total flop? Or I was "that guy" who drug the whole team down? Groundless fears! The playgroup quickly introduced themselves, casually chatted about their LotR experience up to date, then got down to business. All of us had complimentary decks, with one player bringing Hobbits (Leadership/Lore/Tactics), another bring Rohan (Spirit/Leadership), and another bringing a Tactics/Leadership deck focused on allies entering and leaving play. I brought Treebeard + Silvan heroes + threat cost management to the table. Our decks were pretty complimentary and everyone was excited to see how the other players' decks would fare.
We began with a slew of enemies from the encounter deck. After setting up and going through our first quest phase, the event organizer said he had not seen a more dire-looking set up during any of his three games Friday night. Our eyes went a bit wide at the staging area, but we (surprisingly to us) cleaned the clocks of every enemy waiting for us. This pattern kept going on: big threats during the quest phase that were readily defeated during the combat phase. Towards the end of stage 2, it seemed like we had this quest pretty much in the bag.
Then we flipped to stage 3.
If you look at the below picture, you can see how many locations were left in the staging area at the end of the game. Most of those were revealed during the transition from stage 2 to stage 3 and stayed there over the next two rounds. But we managed to pull off successful quest phases two times! The final round, all four players had access to a way to boost the willpower significantly. We flew past the immensity of these locations with room to spare and cards unused! The biggest decision we faced at the end was which hero the Rohan player should sacrifice (sorry, Eowyn).
We did make a mistake as a group: After guessing the wrong suspect, we only added the poor falsely accused troll to the staging area and did not face the actual murderer + location until the following round. Would this have done us in? Unsure. We took on everything the deck threw at us pretty handily and our hobbit player took out the troll at his leisure. I'm still going to count this as a win, with the caveat that our recorded score probably needed to be a bit higher and a solo re-do will be in order.
Mistake or not, this was an amazing time of multiplayer goodness. These were great players and it was simply a blast of a quest. While I will continue my solo adventures on this blog, I also plan to expand my LotR gaming circle going forward.
Team Score: 151
The Deck
This deck marks the beginning of me really exploring deck-buildling theory. Early on, I got the basic idea of splitting my cards fairly evenly among the spheres I was playing (1 leadership hero should result in roughly 1/3 leadership cards in my deck) and the idea that you don't want a ton of expensive cards clogging up your hand, no matter how amazing they are. I had also settled on my standard 20 allies, 15 attachments, 15 events pattern fairly early (for average decks not trying to pull of some amazing combo or tricky strategy...which I rarely do). Then I played
Magic: the Gathering for the last few months, specifically the limited format where the concept of mana curve was drilled into my head. You play cards in
Magic using mana which most often comes from land cards. Since you can only play one land per turn (typically), you often want to have a one-cost card on the first turn, a two-cost card on the second turn, and on and on (hopefully winning fairly early). I started thinking how this would apply to
Lord of the Rings, since this game has a set generation of one resource per hero per turn. Taking away resource-adding and cost-reducing effects, could I implement a "curve" in my deck? I think there are many ways to utilize this sort of thinking. Here is how I went about it:
Since you can have up to three of most cards, I decided to try my strategy out on a set of singleton cards and then multiply that three times to make my deck. That gives a result of 16 unique cards (plus 2 extra, which I will get to). I took that number and divided it by three again, representing the number of heroes I would be using, giving me 5 (plus a bit). So my goal would be to plot out my ideal five rounds of play, imagining that I could utilize every resource (which would take a bit of card draw) and purchase roughly a card per resource (mixing 0, 1, 2, and 2+ cost cards to achieve this effect).
Next, I took a look at the type of deck I wanted to work on. A few ideas were playing around in my head. Having just received most of the last year's worth of product, I was itching to get bring some Ents to the table. Before thinking through this curve concept, I threw together an Ent/Eagle mash up with Beorn and Legolas as supporting heroes. The sample draws were not impressing me and I went back to the drawing board. Knowing some of the group members were talking about brining willpower and combat-heavy decks, I thought of going mono-Lore and controlling the encounter deck as much as possible. Finally I decided to mix all of this together, with Haldir replacing Beorn to support Legolas and Treebeard. I looked through my Tactics and Lore cards, pulling out everything I would be excited to play in the deck and used that as my starting pool for the build. With this hero set-up, I would be looking at 1/3 Tactics cards and 2/3 Lore cards.
I then thought about what a normal round of play needs to accomplish. Not fully knowing the decks my co-players would bring to the table, I wanted to contribute to the three major areas of questing, defense, and attack. So I would try to hit all three areas with my playable cards each round. This could be done in creative ways, such as counting healing in the defense category. Hands Upon the Bow (my favorite card to used with Ranged characters) could count as all three: eliminating threat in the staging area while also circumventing the need to defend. Looking at my selected pool, I laid out the ideal round 1 play: Quickbeam, Don't Be Hasty, and Rivendell Blade. There are plenty more zero-cost cards I would love to play in my first round, but keep in mind that I was really aiming to build a 50 card deck on the principle of 3 cards x 5 rounds x 3 sets. It actually ended up plotting out as 6-7 rounds, since playing 3 cards/round was not always practical (there area only so many zero-cost cards worth playing). I did not limit myself to only low-cost cards, but this type of build limited my "high" cost cards (only 1 two-cost Tactics card and 1 three-cost Lore card made the cut). I also kept my eye on my favored 20/15/15 split and made sure not to go too far over or under in any category, often "playing" a set of ally/attachment/event each round.
Now I had my singleton pool. I put three of them together and ended up with 44 cards (only having two core sets, I only have two copies of Henamarth Riversong). I added in Favor of the Valar to count as 1 round of play, then used the remaining 5 spots to plot out two full rounds of play.
The final step was substitutions. I allowed myself to make a fully even exchange: same cost, same category, same targeted effect. An example would be taking out one copy of Elrond and adding in Wellinghall Preserver. While Elrond has additional effects, both were primarily included for the upkeep and care of Treebeard. Rivendell Blade was there to help Legolas be awesome, so one was replaced with a Rohan Warhorse. Sometimes matching the targeted effect was not fully possible, but in general the substitutions went well.
The result of all this is a deck list that, looking at it spelled out, appears to be a mess I would never have built before. All these x1 and x2 cards seem random and haphazard with no real justification. Some real auto-include cards did not make the cut (i.g. Burning Brand for Lore, Boomed and Trumpeted for Ents, and Gandalf for every deck ever). But everything was planned out to a degree that actually playing the deck was a blast. I usually had a card or two that was just perfect for an area of need each round. The only "unplayable" card I had the entire night was Distant Stars. And that was only because my Ithilien Trackers never surfaced and Haldir was too valuable each round to exhaust for the card's effect. Expert Trackers never made it into my hand (chose to discard at least one via Daeron's Runes) and would have suffered from the same problem, so that whole group could be possibly replaced. Everything else was welcome, either as a drawn card or as a card I would have been happy to see come up (although my co-players were a bit bummed that Warden of Healing did not make an appearance, with that feeling mitigated by The Long Defeat).
Now that this theory has shown some fruit, I look forward to implementing it further and thinking through the complicated implications of resource-generating and cost-reducting effects.
Tree-Hugging Elves (courtesy of our event organizer)
Heroes
Treebeard
Haldir of Lorien
Legolas
Allies
Ithilien Tracker x2
Elrond x2
Quickbeam x3
Wellinghall Preserver x1
Henamarth Riversong x2
Envoy of Pelargir x3
Dunedain Hunter x3
Defender of Ramas x3
Vassal of the Windlord x1
Attachments
The Long Defeat x2
Wingfoot x1
Ent Draught x1
Lembas x2
Favor of the Valar x1
Song of Wisdom x1
Black Arrow x1
Arod x1
Rohan Warhorse x1
Rivendell Blade x2
Secret Vigil x2*
Events
Daeron's Runes x3
Distant Stars x1
Expert Trackers x2
Secret Paths x3
Don't Be Hasty x2
Foe-hammer x1
Feint x1
Hands Upon the Bow x2
Sets Used
Core
Conflict at the Carrock
The Dead Marshes
Road to Rivendell
Foundations of Stone
Shadow and Flame
Over Hill and Under Hill
On the Doorstep
Heirs of Numenor
The Road Darkens
The Voice of Isengard
Trouble in Tharbad
The Nin-in-Eilph
The Antlered Crown
The Treason of Saruman
The Lost Realm
Escape from Mount Gram
Across the Entmoors
The Battle of Carn Dum
Note: My original build had Blade of Gondolin in this spot. Talking with our event organizer well before the game, conversation turned to Secret Vigil and I realized I needed to make a last-minute switch.
The Recap
A challenging quest with variety in the gameplay and an openness to creative deckbuilding? Count me in, every time! This quest essential mixes of The Steward's Fear (which I loved) and A Knife in the Dark (which I did not love) and knocks it out of the park. And reinforces the correct viewpoint that Bill Ferny is basically the worst person ever. There is honestly an emotional high from a great multiplayer experience last night, but even after the stars fade from my eyes I have a feeling this will be a treasured quest in my collection.
