Free Wily (Rhosgobel without Lore) 1.0

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• 1.0

The typical way to deal with Rhosgobel is to bring Lore as it provides two key factors. The first being healing which is understandable. The second is the ability to scry the encounter deck and find Athelas quicker. When I beat Rhosgobel during my progression through the game I used Lore Denethor to manipulate the encounter deck and dig up Athelas. His ability plus a few Lore of Imladris events helped a ton.

This time i'm trying something different. I'm trying to make a deck that can beat Rhosgobel without the use of Lore. This is trickier and requires cards from outside the normal progression of the card pool. What we have here is the deck I put together for that purpose.

Honour Guard makes a big difference. His ability is a response so he can prevent 1 of the 2 damage Wily takes at the end of the round. This greatly lengthens the amount of time you have to find Athelas and get Wily to Rhosgobel.

Honour Guard is good and all but you still need to locate Athelas; without it you will lose. Outside of Lore there are not many ways to quickly cycle through the encounter deck. Consider Eleanor for a moment. I sometimes forget just how good her ability is. She exhausts to cancel a treachery card, discards it and replaces it with the top card. Cycling!

The Forest Grove location is a key location in the scenario. When explored it adds an Athelas from the discard or encounter deck to the staging area. This is where Shadow of the Past and A Watchful Peace come in very handy. The former allows you to put the top card of the discard back on the encounter deck. The latter is a bit more specific but allows you to put Forest Grove back once it has been explored.

Radagast is expensive and yes there are three copies so hopefully he shows up. He’s very useful and you should try to get him into play. Here I will note the interesting interaction between West Road Traveller and the Rhosgobel location. The Rhosgobel location says "Travel: Players must complete stage one of this quest before they can travel to Rhosgobel". West Road Traveller bypasses this. Keep that in mind in case the opportunity comes up to make it the active location and free Wily up for healing.

Everything else is essentially support. Legolas is included with a few toys to deal with enemies. Many of the enemies he can deal with by himself. His supporting cards are there to prevent shadow effects. Both Feint and Hands Upon the Bow perform this function.

Eleanor doesn’t have much to do except wait for a treachery so we give her a Gondorian Shield to help in the defense department.

Arwen Undómiel provides both resource acceleration and card draw.

Perhaps one of the oddest additions is Gather Information. It is generally accepted that questing through Rhosgobel quickly is one element of success so why slow yourself down with a side quest? Slowing down is exactly the reason. I’ve had several games where I progressed into stage 2B too quickly and needed more time to find Athelas. A side quest works very well for this purpose. If you need to hit the brakes then Gather Information will do that for you.

There are two cards I wish I could find room for and they are Blade of Gondolin and Arod. Its not lost on me that Forest Grove requires 3 quest points to explore. Meanwhile Legolas places 2 progress when he kills something. Having that extra progress to apply means Legolas could clear Forest Grove the turn it enters play.