Challenge Accepted #1: Fatty vs. The Carrock

Play Conflict at the Carrock using a deck with Fatty Bolger.

Introducing a New Deck Series - Challenge Accepted!

I've been meaning to get around to publishing more decks and the new "Daily Challenge" feature of RingsDB felt like the perfect opportunity. So this is the start of a random deck series I have dubbed "Challenge Accepted"! I plan to publish a deck for every challenge (given the frequency of these challenges, I may not have time for them all, but I will be as diligent as my life allows) with a short write-up of how it fared against the quest. These decks may be gimmicky, may be straightforward, may be good and may be terrible! Let's just see where the Tides of Fate take us, shall we? :)

Deck Summary

Despite being 60 cards, there's so much card draw in this deck that it really doesn't matter. Between Daeron's Runes, Peace, and Thought, Drinking Song, Hobbit Pipe, and Bilbo Baggins himself, you'll see the bottom of this deck before you finish Conflict at the Carrock. The idea here is to plop out some side quests early on to make it easier to camp out at stage 1, set up your board state and then move on to stage 2 with Grimbeorn in tow. To convince Grimbeorn to join us, The Hidden Way and Scout Ahead are here to hopefully find a "Bee Pastures" which pulls Grimbeorn into the staging area. Song of Kings and Steward of Gondor are mainly used as a way to pay for Grimbeorn when we find him. Steward will go on Bilbo to pay for the more expensive cards and Song of Hope will as well to utilize the inevitable pile-up of resources.

Hilariously, the deck does not hide the fact that it uses Fatty Bolger solely for his resource. Early on his 1 helps out and later he switches to using his 1 . I originally had an idea of somehow capitalizing on Fatty's ability comboed with Sam Gamgee, but it wasn't working out. So for this challenge, Fatty is...well...just there.

If I were to pare down, I may honestly take out A Test of Will and Halfling Bounder as "Sacked!" is the only treachery worthy of cancelling and it will rarely surface in a single player game. Eventually Firyal makes a fine replacement in that department anyways.

Quest Summary

I played three games against Conflict of the Carrock, with 2 wins and 1 defeat. The defeat happened pretty quickly as low enemies swarmed my heroes the first couple rounds and I had no time to get out any allies to help. This deck really hopes for locations and treacheries early on so that it can build up and defensive capabilities. Luckily the large amount of threat reduction in the deck allows you to stay under the of most enemies if you get set up early enough. In fact, in both games I won I ended the game below my starting threat level! The games I won both started with Henamarth Riversong and a side quest or two, which is a very good opening hand. With scrying and/or side quests to do, you have high flexibility on when you hit stage 2. The deck likes to turtle, both wins took 18-20 rounds, most of the rounds being in stage 1. Once you get to facing the trolls, Gaffer Gamgee can give them a nice speaking to as you pick them off one-by-one, making the whole "conflict" quite trivial.

I thought about trying this against nightmare mode, but this deck in particular would be far too slow at preparing for the trolls.

It was fun to throw a deck together quickly to go up against a quest I haven't played in awhile. I look forward to accepting many more challenges in the future!