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Some Sort 3652
For this week's Quest of the Week, Seastan posted a hero quartet that was theoretically capable of beating Journey Along the Anduin without a deck (provided it got sufficiently lucky with the encounter reveals-- he estimated that the odds were a bit better than 1 in 400 trillion.)
Then he ended his musings with a challenge, which I'll quote:
As a side challenge for this quest of the week series, I propose something I call "LotR LCG Golf". Given a quest, what is the bare minimum number of cards required to beat it, in any universe? This means that every element of randomness is under your control. You can define the exact ordering of any deck at any time as it suits you.
To be fair, we will count heroes and contracts as well. So for JatA here, I used 5 cards. Is it doable with less?
This "deck" is my answer. My odds are significantly longer than his, but given infinite attempts, I could eventually beat Journey Along the Anduin using just two cards-- Thalin and either Bilbo Baggins or Argalad.
How? Couldn't be easier. We just need the quest to flip a treachery or the Hill Troll during setup-- not a lot to ask. (If the treachery is Massing at Night, we'll need another treachery or the Hill Troll for the surge.) After that, we quest with Thalin and use either Bilbo or Argalad's ability against the Troll.
We need the encounter deck to reveal an Eastern Crow, which isn't a crazy ask-- there are three of them, after all. Thalin will destroy it before it surges, it'll shuffle itself back into the deck, and we'll quest successfully, place 2 (with Bilbo) or 1 (with Argalad) progress on the quest and 1 damage on the troll.
Then we just do that eight more times. We'll need to pull an Eastern Crow each time, but individually, each pull isn't that crazy-- there are three of them in the deck, after all. On the ninth round, Argalad or Bilbo will finally finish off that Troll and we'll already have enough progress to advance to Stage 2.
From here we'll need the encounter deck to give us two Eastern Crows every round in staging. That's a much bigger ask, but fortunately we're really cooking now, with Thalin/Bilbo placing two progress per round (clearing Stage 2 in 8 rounds) and Thalin/Argalad placing three progress per round (clearing it in 6).
Finally, by the time we flip to stage 3, we're awfully sick of those Eastern Crows-- now we're hoping for two locations to show up and we're on our merry way to victory. This last reveal is a lot more flexible-- any of the treacheries are also fine, and a lone Wolf Rider or Goblin Sniper is no big deal. Even two of them is okay, though we'll be taking some attacks undefended so a nasty shadow could ruin our perfect run at the worst time. For maximum irony, we could get Double Crows one last time, that wouldn't be an issue.
Worst case scenario, a Dol Guldur Beastmaster would also be beatable with Thalin and Argalad, though we'd be facing four shadow cards on undefended attacks in the process, so a bit of a tense final stretch. (Also, he'd be far too much Orc for poor Bilbo to handle.)
But if I'm in charge of the universe's random number generator for the day, I go location + location and then the entire quest was basically just a casual 15-17 round stroll down a scenic river with one of my buddies. (The decklist-- required to publish-- is just some stuff that I thought Bilbo and Thalin might be inclined to bring on such a stroll.)
(I opted for Bilbo in the main deck and Argalad in the sideboard partly because the fact that the "deck" is mono-tactics-- given its history-- makes it way funnier to me. But mostly it's for thematic reasons: Bilbo goes way back with the dwarves, but the idea of a dwarf and an elf adventuring together? Who ever heard of such madness?)
(Also, LotR lore holds that Nate French used to have a Thalin deck that was so overpowered that it could beat quests without a deck. Have we finally discovered the deck in question?)
(Also, I really like parenthetical asides.)