Showing posts with label Fellowship Event. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fellowship Event. Show all posts
Monday, January 9, 2017
Print on Demand 5: Fog on the Barrow-downs
Victory on the Third Attempt!
The Recap
After a peaceful round in the house of Tom Bombadil, Fog on the Barrow-downs has your heroes travel within sight of the Hollow Circle. This piece, despite being set in broad daylight, gives off a sinister feel and seems like something out of a colorized Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Maybe it's the muted tones. Maybe it's the birds for scale.
So there are thematic hits in the fifth Print-on-Demand* pack, but there are also slight misses when it comes to the wights themselves. I say "slight," because it does not feel thematic to be facing powerful wights right off the bat but we do not know what Sam, Merry, and Pippin faced when it came to the wights. Were they attacked directly? Were they lulled to sleep and then entombed? We meet them in the story after the fact and the only bit of wight we see is an arm. So as a direct relation of the novel there is a miss, but as a plausible "what if" there is no thematic issue. And I'm unsure about the strength of the wights, who are powerful and feared but basically keep to themselves. Enemy power vs. hero power is an issue that often comes up for me. Strong enemies do force players to put a lot of thought behind their deck and their decisions, which is a plus.
*Note: I did not title this Fellowship 2014 simply because I was not able to attend that event. Thus this is either A) A passive sign of protest and resentment or B) The result of the fact that I simply have nothing to say about the event itself.
Now a note on strategy. My second attempt was pretty close to a victory but repeated visits to Stage 4 stalled me out and allowed the high number of threat-increasing effects in this quest to do me in. While your deck may not be able to deal with revealing a Great Barrow during the quest stage, you can hold off the start of that chain by avoiding travel to the Standing Stones until you have 16 quest points on stage 3. This will greatly increase you chances of only 1-2 trips to stage 4.
Fog on the Barrow-downs is tough. This is to be expected for a Fellowship quest. Community gatherings such as GenCon and Fellowship events are going to attract a higher concentration of established players and those players are likely going to bring strong decks. This is not a pack to pick up if you are a casual player looking for a quest to try out a quirky deck idea. If you are looking for strong, but not crushing, challenge then you are looking in the right place.
Final Scoring
9 Completed Rounds x10: 90
Ending Threat:44
Total Damage on Heroes: 0
Threat of Defeated Heroes: 0
Victory Display: -12
Total Score: 122
Campaign Resolution
Boon: Ho! Tom Bombadil! (added to hand)
Previous Campaign Resolutions
Boon: Mr. Underhill attached to Frodo Baggins
Boon: Old Bogey-stories (added to hand)
Burden: Gandalf's Delay added to staging area
The Deck
Sometimes I'm happy with my deckbuilding skills and other times not so much. Part of the blame is not taking the time to dive into the wider community. People have been brewing up powerful decks for LotR since the game's inception and there are some fun interactions and combos I have been missing out on. Fog on the Barrow-downs seemed like a good starting point for exploring a few highly-rated decks.
The goal this time around was to stick with my campaign heroes of Sam, Merry, and Pippin. Looking at the RingsDB Hall of Fame, the second option on the list met what I was looking for: Sting Like a Bee by Tales from the Cards. At its heart, this deck is a pretty straightforward Black Riders hobbit build. The path taken here is to get out large allies ASAP while keeping a low threat. My only additions were my campaign boons & burden, along with Frodo Baggins (Land of Shadow).
In hindsight, this is a great deck but not the right one for this quest. Fog on the Barrow-downs is not friendly to amassing allies nor keeping a low threat. I realized this after my first attempt with the deck an was considering switching to Beorn's For the Shire! to get much-desired access to the spirit sphere. Threat reduction and Thror's Key would have been fantastic! I also considered adding in a little more card draw via Rod of the Steward or Frodo's Intuition. But I ultimately figured it was worth it to give the #2 another shot and I ended up walking away with a victory.
Sting Like a Bee is indeed a well-tuned take on the hobbit deck. Worth taking for a spin when you want to leave the Shire and hit the road.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Fellowship 2016: The Siege of Annuminas
Victory on the fourth attempt!
11/11/16 @ The Wizard's Chest
For my first Fellowship Event this year, I headed down to The Wizard's Chest in Denver. The greater Denver area has a fairly consistent LotR scene, including a Friday meet up at the Wizard's Chest. Their attendance for last year's event went above and beyond the amount of kits they reserved (a problem they accounted for this year), so a good size group was likely this year. 15 players showed up, splitting into five different tables attempting the Standard Game Mode.
The Deck
My usual tendency is to go into a quest as fully blind as a I can. Being that this would be a multiplayer event with time for only a few attempts, I decided to take a few quick peeks and keep my ears open for community advice. The need for healing stood out so I started thinking along those lines. The interaction between Hero Elrond and Dunedain Remedy intrigued me and seemed to have a lot of possibility for multiplayer (spoiler: this was an all-star in both attempts). On a separate note, I had been playing with some Silvan bounce decks. It hit me that both archetypes could likely be merged, especially with Galadhrim Healer. Now I could bring the needed healing, but in what should be a fun shell that could help with questing and (hopefully) taking out and enemy or two.
Silvan Bounce House of Healing
Heroes
Celeborn
Elrond (Shadow and Flame)
Galadriel (Celebrimbor's Secret)
Allies
Naith Guide x3
Orophin x1
Galadhrim Healer x3
Galadhrim Minstrel x3
Ioreth x1
Warden of Healing x2
Galadhrim Weaver x3
Defender of the Naith x2
Gandalf (Core) x2
Attachments
Dunedain Remedy x3
O Lorien! x2
A Burning Brand x1
Light of Valinor x1
Mirror of Galadriel x3
Unexpected Courage x1
Nenya x2
Events
A Very Good Tale x3
Feigned Voices x3
Sneak Attack x2
The Houses of Healing x1
The Tree People x3
A Test of Will x2
Dwarven Tomb x2
Fair and Perilous x2
RingsDB Link
Attempt #1
Knowing we were looking at over 12 people attending, I was hoping to get in a game of Epic Mode. How often are you going to have a chance to get 12 LotR players together at one time? But most tables were hesitant to take on what they anticipated would be a higher difficulty before they became familiar with the quest. I can understand and respect that. And if the Epic Mode is more intense than Standard Mode, we likely would not have had much of a chance. Our table barely got going on our first attempt before we threw in the towel. The main issue here were two decks misfiring, one of which was mine. Elves were very much not bouncing. I basically just contributed a Dunedain Remedy. We still gave it a valiant attempt, with one player defending just about everything the deck could throw at him. Once his defender bit the dust, that was our signal to re-start.
Attempt #2
Silvan's were firing on attempt two! Almost every round featured some level of elven shenanigans. In fact, everyone's decks seemed to be doing well. A little too well, actually. By decimating any enemies that showed their heads, we made traveling to the copies of Gate of Annuminas in the staging area impossible. Not a huge issue as long as enemies were decimated, but rough on the threat if we kept an enemy or two engaged and flipped a good number during the staging step. In the end, despite the strengths of our decks, threat is what did us in. The nice thing is we were able to handle any enemies the deck threw at us, which was satisfying. Once again, a very strong defender with action advantage was a crucial piece of the success we had (paired with other defenders and some strong attackers). But with that the event drew to a close and I barely had enough energy to drag my defeated bones back home.
11/29/16 @ Haunted Game Cafe
The Haunted Game Cafe up in Fort Collins, CO, is the store I began building my Lord of the Rings: the Card Game collection through. The very first LotR community event was a preview of The Hunt for Gollum which I played at Haunted Game Cafe back in the day. They then began a subscription service which is still going on. We were able to get three players together for another round of Standard Mode attempts!
The Deck
Healing was a definite need during the first two attempts. And we had some great success dispatching any enemies foolish enough to come across our path. But location lock was a problem, as were the unforgiving treacheries that popped up. My goal this time around was to focus on helping more with our location problems through questing and direct progress, while keeping the healing sub-theme and adding a few ways to deal with treachery cancellation. (Note: I totally missed that Halfing Bounder needed a completed side quest to trigger it's effect, but we actually had one towards the end of our winning trip, when the bounder did his best work).
Run
Heroes
Arwen Undomiel (The Dread Realm)
Eowyn (Core)
Erestor (The Treachery of Rhudar)
Allies
Ethir Swordsman x3
Glorfindel (Flight of the Stormcaller) x1
Lorien Guide x1
Rhovanion Outrider x2
The Riddermark's Finest x3
Ghan-buri-Ghan x2
Ioreth x1
Ithilien Tracker x1
Quickbeam x1
Robin Smalburrow x2
Warden of Healing x3
Wellinghall Preserver x2
Treebeard x1
Attachments
Silver Harp x3
Thrors Key x3
Windfola x1
Asfaloth x1
Explorer's Almanac x3
Thror's Map x1
Events
A Test of Will x3
Strength of Will x3
Will of the Wext x3
Secret Paths x3
The Evening Star x3
Sets Used
Core Set
The Hills of Emyn Muil
The Long Dark
Foundations of Stone
Over Hill and Under Hill
Heirs of Numenor
On the Doorstep
The Steward's Fear
The Antlered Crown
The Treason of Saruman
Across the Ettenmoors
The Treachery of Rhudar
The Dread Realm
The Grey Havens
Flight of the Stormcaller
The Drowned Ruins
The Flame of the West
Temple of the Deceived
A Storm on Cobas Haven
RingsDB Link
Attempt #3
The first couple of rounds honestly had a feeling of "Not again; this quest is brutal." I guess the previous attempts left a mark! But things started looking up rather quickly. While not giving the city any extra defense the first round, we were able to keep up with only modest threat increases and continued making our way through the quest. Questing was rough, though, even with my deck contributing 20-23 willpower for most of the final half (not amazing, but decent enough). What got us here was city damage. We seriously only needed 2-3 more strength on the city to have a victory in the bag. Rough to get so close and fail, yet encouraging that the end had been just within sight. Our evaluation was that we needed one deck to stay dedicated to attack & defense with the other two questing with as much power as they can.
Attempt #4
Taking our analysis from the last attempt, one player opted to bring a dwarven army to the table. This would likely help with our questing needs, but also be able to provide some strong attack if needed. We quested for all we were worth right off the bat, allowing us to get some needed strength onto the city. The rest of the attempt proceeded in a similar positive fashion to the third one. The quest tried to throw it's usual bag of tricks at us, but we usually had an answer (thank you, Halfing Bounder) or were able to suck up the effect. When we were towards the end of stage 3, I was waiting for that sudden turn of fate that would signal another defeat. But we ended up in a "Do you want to kill that guy or want me to kill him?" position of strength and attempt #4 ended in a sweet victory!
The Recap
The Siege of Annuminas does not pull any punches. You need to quest hard, but your questing heroes can easily be damaged. Enemies are either huge, small with downsides (attacking instantly or surging), or mid-size with archery. Or huge with archery. And taking care of enemies is good (and needed), but location lock is very real here. In a sense, most quests end up sounding the same ("The locations are tough! The enemies are tough! The stages are tough!") and it can be hard to capture the nuances that truly make one quest a breeze and another a nightmare. Anuminas is definitely the latter. As for solo play? That is going to go on the far back burner!
But what about the fellowship? Grabbing a few other players and tackling a beast of a quest, trying to work out the puzzle of victory, is always a blast. Without a lot of multiplayer opportunities in my world, Fellowship Events are a welcome addition to my life no matter how punishing the quest is.
11/11/16 @ The Wizard's Chest
For my first Fellowship Event this year, I headed down to The Wizard's Chest in Denver. The greater Denver area has a fairly consistent LotR scene, including a Friday meet up at the Wizard's Chest. Their attendance for last year's event went above and beyond the amount of kits they reserved (a problem they accounted for this year), so a good size group was likely this year. 15 players showed up, splitting into five different tables attempting the Standard Game Mode.
That's me in the (bottom right) corner,
That's me in the camera glare
Loosing my ability to bounce elves
That's me in the camera glare
Loosing my ability to bounce elves
The Deck
My usual tendency is to go into a quest as fully blind as a I can. Being that this would be a multiplayer event with time for only a few attempts, I decided to take a few quick peeks and keep my ears open for community advice. The need for healing stood out so I started thinking along those lines. The interaction between Hero Elrond and Dunedain Remedy intrigued me and seemed to have a lot of possibility for multiplayer (spoiler: this was an all-star in both attempts). On a separate note, I had been playing with some Silvan bounce decks. It hit me that both archetypes could likely be merged, especially with Galadhrim Healer. Now I could bring the needed healing, but in what should be a fun shell that could help with questing and (hopefully) taking out and enemy or two.
Silvan Bounce House of Healing
Heroes
Celeborn
Elrond (Shadow and Flame)
Galadriel (Celebrimbor's Secret)
Allies
Naith Guide x3
Orophin x1
Galadhrim Healer x3
Galadhrim Minstrel x3
Ioreth x1
Warden of Healing x2
Galadhrim Weaver x3
Defender of the Naith x2
Gandalf (Core) x2
Attachments
Dunedain Remedy x3
O Lorien! x2
A Burning Brand x1
Light of Valinor x1
Mirror of Galadriel x3
Unexpected Courage x1
Nenya x2
Events
A Very Good Tale x3
Feigned Voices x3
Sneak Attack x2
The Houses of Healing x1
The Tree People x3
A Test of Will x2
Dwarven Tomb x2
Fair and Perilous x2
RingsDB Link
Attempt #1
Knowing we were looking at over 12 people attending, I was hoping to get in a game of Epic Mode. How often are you going to have a chance to get 12 LotR players together at one time? But most tables were hesitant to take on what they anticipated would be a higher difficulty before they became familiar with the quest. I can understand and respect that. And if the Epic Mode is more intense than Standard Mode, we likely would not have had much of a chance. Our table barely got going on our first attempt before we threw in the towel. The main issue here were two decks misfiring, one of which was mine. Elves were very much not bouncing. I basically just contributed a Dunedain Remedy. We still gave it a valiant attempt, with one player defending just about everything the deck could throw at him. Once his defender bit the dust, that was our signal to re-start.
Attempt #2
Silvan's were firing on attempt two! Almost every round featured some level of elven shenanigans. In fact, everyone's decks seemed to be doing well. A little too well, actually. By decimating any enemies that showed their heads, we made traveling to the copies of Gate of Annuminas in the staging area impossible. Not a huge issue as long as enemies were decimated, but rough on the threat if we kept an enemy or two engaged and flipped a good number during the staging step. In the end, despite the strengths of our decks, threat is what did us in. The nice thing is we were able to handle any enemies the deck threw at us, which was satisfying. Once again, a very strong defender with action advantage was a crucial piece of the success we had (paired with other defenders and some strong attackers). But with that the event drew to a close and I barely had enough energy to drag my defeated bones back home.
11/29/16 @ Haunted Game Cafe
The Haunted Game Cafe up in Fort Collins, CO, is the store I began building my Lord of the Rings: the Card Game collection through. The very first LotR community event was a preview of The Hunt for Gollum which I played at Haunted Game Cafe back in the day. They then began a subscription service which is still going on. We were able to get three players together for another round of Standard Mode attempts!
The Deck
Healing was a definite need during the first two attempts. And we had some great success dispatching any enemies foolish enough to come across our path. But location lock was a problem, as were the unforgiving treacheries that popped up. My goal this time around was to focus on helping more with our location problems through questing and direct progress, while keeping the healing sub-theme and adding a few ways to deal with treachery cancellation. (Note: I totally missed that Halfing Bounder needed a completed side quest to trigger it's effect, but we actually had one towards the end of our winning trip, when the bounder did his best work).
Run
Heroes
Arwen Undomiel (The Dread Realm)
Eowyn (Core)
Erestor (The Treachery of Rhudar)
Allies
Ethir Swordsman x3
Glorfindel (Flight of the Stormcaller) x1
Lorien Guide x1
Rhovanion Outrider x2
The Riddermark's Finest x3
Ghan-buri-Ghan x2
Ioreth x1
Ithilien Tracker x1
Quickbeam x1
Robin Smalburrow x2
Warden of Healing x3
Wellinghall Preserver x2
Treebeard x1
Attachments
Silver Harp x3
Thrors Key x3
Windfola x1
Asfaloth x1
Explorer's Almanac x3
Thror's Map x1
Events
A Test of Will x3
Strength of Will x3
Will of the Wext x3
Secret Paths x3
The Evening Star x3
Sets Used
Core Set
The Hills of Emyn Muil
The Long Dark
Foundations of Stone
Over Hill and Under Hill
Heirs of Numenor
On the Doorstep
The Steward's Fear
The Antlered Crown
The Treason of Saruman
Across the Ettenmoors
The Treachery of Rhudar
The Dread Realm
The Grey Havens
Flight of the Stormcaller
The Drowned Ruins
The Flame of the West
Temple of the Deceived
A Storm on Cobas Haven
RingsDB Link
Attempt #3
The first couple of rounds honestly had a feeling of "Not again; this quest is brutal." I guess the previous attempts left a mark! But things started looking up rather quickly. While not giving the city any extra defense the first round, we were able to keep up with only modest threat increases and continued making our way through the quest. Questing was rough, though, even with my deck contributing 20-23 willpower for most of the final half (not amazing, but decent enough). What got us here was city damage. We seriously only needed 2-3 more strength on the city to have a victory in the bag. Rough to get so close and fail, yet encouraging that the end had been just within sight. Our evaluation was that we needed one deck to stay dedicated to attack & defense with the other two questing with as much power as they can.
Attempt #4
Taking our analysis from the last attempt, one player opted to bring a dwarven army to the table. This would likely help with our questing needs, but also be able to provide some strong attack if needed. We quested for all we were worth right off the bat, allowing us to get some needed strength onto the city. The rest of the attempt proceeded in a similar positive fashion to the third one. The quest tried to throw it's usual bag of tricks at us, but we usually had an answer (thank you, Halfing Bounder) or were able to suck up the effect. When we were towards the end of stage 3, I was waiting for that sudden turn of fate that would signal another defeat. But we ended up in a "Do you want to kill that guy or want me to kill him?" position of strength and attempt #4 ended in a sweet victory!
The Recap
The Siege of Annuminas does not pull any punches. You need to quest hard, but your questing heroes can easily be damaged. Enemies are either huge, small with downsides (attacking instantly or surging), or mid-size with archery. Or huge with archery. And taking care of enemies is good (and needed), but location lock is very real here. In a sense, most quests end up sounding the same ("The locations are tough! The enemies are tough! The stages are tough!") and it can be hard to capture the nuances that truly make one quest a breeze and another a nightmare. Anuminas is definitely the latter. As for solo play? That is going to go on the far back burner!
But what about the fellowship? Grabbing a few other players and tackling a beast of a quest, trying to work out the puzzle of victory, is always a blast. Without a lot of multiplayer opportunities in my world, Fellowship Events are a welcome addition to my life no matter how punishing the quest is.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Fellowship Event 2015: Murder at the Prancing Pony
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.
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.
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.
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