Oh my, what a dreamy artwork! The stag looks half wolf to me, but of course the symbol of Thranduil should bear some fierceness.

So this card requires you to have three heroes, a sphere with limited resource access. You've got Bifur in multiplayer and Love of Tales, which can be quite strong, but your choice of songs may be limited. And sadly, cost reduction is not an option for this one. You can add in a hero and give them sphere access to solve resource problems, but that is more setup required and you need to be sure to have that arranged when the enemy drops in. Playing this event costs you a round of resources any way.

And what do you get? You get rid of an enemy in the Staging Area. A powerful effect that is commonly accompanied by limitations. The first one I already mentioned, it is a strong limitation compared to e.g. Hunting Party. The second one is timing: it is a Combat Action. There is no way you can get rid of the enemy before quest resolution. And it needs to be an enemy with a higher engagement cost than your threat because it only works on enemies in the staging area. If you do not engage the enemy anyway it will probaby be in staging next quest phase anyway, so in a card by card comparison, Hunting Party is much stronger. Within you have several options: for weak enemies there is Expecting Mischief, if you are able to sneak in Faramir (e.g. with Elf-stone), you might deal some more damage. And the biggest baddy with the same "not engaged" limitation is Haldir of Lórien, whom you can power up to take out most of the possible targets with a single attack. Where this card is okay at is getting you Guarded attachments. If you are unlucky and get an enemy you cannot kill so easily. There is no Guarded (enemy) attachment in , Stone of Elostirion is straight ineligible and for the others you need to depend on luck or encounter analysis (luckily there are lots of options to look at or manipulate the encounter deck, Henamarth Riversong, Far-sighted, Risk Some Light...)

So what are possible targets? Enemies may not be immune nor unique. Later in the game, most bosses that are worth the three resources have at least one of these feats. The famous Hill Troll is the most obvious choice, followed by Hummerhorns. Mûmakil and Oliphaunts are very good targets, ship enemies to avoid Boarding and many enemies with nasty engagement effects (e.g. Haradrim in Two Towers).

So far my only mono deck was a trap deck, which has other ways to deal with enemies, but Ships and Mûmaks don't fall into traps. Here this card really shines.

This is one of the worst cards of the entire cardpool, of course, but I think I finally found a case where it might actually be playable. For a long time, I thought you might want to play this against locations that sit in your staging area all game long, sadly those are mostly immune to player card effects. However, you could use this against locations you don't want to reveal ever again (be it for surge, doomed or when revealed effects).

As for doomed, Hall of Beorn gives 5 locations with doomed 1, of which 4 are locations you might still want to travel to for various reasons, and the fifth one is the Endless Caverns from Escape from Dol Guldur, which is a scenario you'd probably rather use more powerful cards against.

Similarly with surge, there are 14 surging locations, however, all of those will force you to eventually clear them through selfexploration, permanent effects or outright forcing you to travel there.

This leaves us with the when revealed effects, where we finally find some suitable targets, like the Impassable Bog (1st cycle), Fouled Well, Plundered Armory, Warg Lair, Stagnant Creek (2nd cycle), Slopes of Gundabad (8th cycle). A cool combo could be cooperating with the West Road Traveller on neutralizing the Dreadful Gap from Dwarrowdelf or the Stock-Brook from the Fellowship of the Ring.

Of course, in order to make all this worth the effort, you want to effectively lower your probability of revealing the said location again... which grows with a thin encounter deck (not the case with most of the quests quoted above) or with additional players.

So in summary, if you want to gain some "I actually put Power in the earth to a sensible use" bragging rights, throw it into your deck together with West Road Traveller the next time you play a 4 player game of Into the Pit/Flight from Moria/Redhorn Gate/Road to Rivendell/The Dead Marshes, and there is a slim chance it might actually happen :)

I initially underrated this card. The heroes are the core of any deck, so I never thought it would be worth it for me to exhaust two of my heroes for the entire next round, no matter what I was getting in return. Especially because I play true solo a lot of the time, and I'd be losing the stats of 2/3 of my heroes for the entire next round. But one day, just to force myself to use it, I decided to put it in a hero Gandalf deck to be my only source of card draw (besides Gandalf's Staff of course). My other two heroes were hobbits ( Pippin and Merry) to keep my starting threat low.

Well, boy did this card overperform. Every time this card came up, I realized I didn't mind at all exhausting my hobbits to draw 5 new cards. I kicked some serious butt when I tested the deck against The Oath and The Caves of Nibin-dûm and regularly ended up drawing my entire deck by the time the game was over. And then it hit me - you don't put Peace and Thought in a deck where you have heroes whose stats you need, you put it in a deck where you have heroes whose stats you DON'T need! (An obvious example would be a deck where one of your heroes is the star and the other two heroes are only there to keep your threat low - like my aforementioned Gandalf and hobbits deck.) Because the reason you want a hero to be ready is so that you can exhaust it to use its stats, and often in true solo you're left with ready characters at the end of rounds anyway, so if you don't need a hero's stats then exhausting the hero to do something else (like drawing a bunch of cards) is super strong.

I've tried to use this card for a while, but there's just never been a situation where it was worth it for me to play this when I drew it. By the time I felt ready to spend a resource and play this card, I had enough allies that I could defend and attack with them rather than playing this temporary stat boost. Maybe I'm missing something, but this card just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Straight Shot is a fantastic tech card. A tech card, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a card that is included in a deck because it is uniquely suited for a specific scenario or situation. It is a silver bullet, an efficient and powerful answer to a problem but is a but otherwise is not generally useful. Unlike cards such as A Test of Will or Steward of Gondor which are generically powerful (there are very few decks that do not become more powerful with their inclusion), there are many decks that become a lot worse and more inconsistent with this card's inclusion.

It's therefore, in those specific scenarios where Straight Shot shines. It is very much a tech card akin to cards such as The Great Hunt or A Elbereth! Gilthoniel!, a card to kill a very difficult enemy easily under specific conditions. The condition in this case is that enemies must have 0 . On it's own, the number of enemies that this can kill is relatively small (I'm looking at you Dread Realm Dwimmerlaik). However, as the other reviews have pointed out, there are a suite of cards that can boost the efficacy of this card. Aragorn, Bard the Bowman, Rivendell Blade and Marksman of Lórien can all reduce the of enemies, allowing for a greater range of targets to be sniped. Aragorn and the marksman are particulary effective, allowing you to kill an enemy before the combat phase, effectively avoiding an attack. Teching in out of combat phase attackers such as Quick Strike will allow you to use Rivendell blade or Bard to kill enemies before they attack (although I believe Bard's ability does not trigger attacking the staging area, so his ability is limited to enemies engaged with other players).

Using the above efficacy increases, Straight Shot becomes an incredible tech card against large enemies.

Horrible, big Mumaks that take turns to kill? BAM!! Shot with a silver bullet!

Nasty Trolls and Giants with a ton of health that will stomp on your dudes? BAM!! Shot with a silver bullet!

Nazgul screeching down your back, looking for your shiny new jewellery? BAM!! Shot with a silver bullet!

Straight shot is a fun card on quests where you tech it in and fully support it. Give it a go and have fun. Just don't waste your bullets on the little chumps.

(I do regognise the funny flaw in the silver bullet analogy, as most things that will die to a normal bullet will die to a silver one. But eh, the point still stands.)