57 - The Battle of Carn Dum (Progression Series)

This is another fellowship continuing on in my goal to play through all of the quests in release order to learn how all (or most) of the cards interact with one another. The first fellowship for the quests in the core set can be found here, and it contains a slightly more detailed overview of what I'm going for with building these decks. As always, any feedback is appreciated so that I can continue to learn more!

I know I had stated earlier in the series that I wanted to stop relying on Glorfindel, and now I've used him two quests in a row again! I don't feel overly bad, since The Battle of Carn Dum has a reputation for being one of the toughest quests in the game, if not the toughest. I played it a few times with a few decks dedicated to beating it and got a feel for what some good strategies are. I built these two decks to try to cheese the quest as much as I possibly could in order to achieve victory. I also wanted to do this without A Burning Brand, since the new errata to it does limit it's use in this scenario by quite a bit.

My hero lineup has plenty of Attack and Willpower, so that I can Battle Quest through the starting location on the first turn and then be able to quest regularly from there on out. After that, it's all about staying alive until the trap deck can get some Forest Snare and Ranger Spikes onto enemies so they start loading up on Shadow cards. From there, there are two different ways to go (both of which I was able to successfully pull off). Either wait until the entire encounter deck is empty due to all of the shadow cards in play and then advance to Stage 2 with Favor of the Valar attached to both threat dials, or be sure to play Shadows Give Way off the top of your deck with Wizard Pipe and Gandalf's ability to clear all of the shadow cards out during the quest phase where you are attempting to advance so that threat doesn't rise at all. The Shadows Give way approach seemed a little less cheesy, and was my preferred method for trying to beat the quest.

Whichever way it happens, Thaurdir is still going to be attacking a fair bit, with a bunch of shadow cards behind him. To deal with that, I found that Beregond with Gondorian Shield, Raven-winged Helm, Citadel Plate and an Honour Guard and some readying pretty much did the trick. Thanks to his built in cost reduction, it wasn't too tough to get all of those pieces into play and on him to start taking some punishment.

I can certainly see why this quest is counted among the most difficult, even with decks that were designed specifically to handle everything it could throw at me, I still lost quite a few games against it. I had significantly more trouble with Wastes of Eriador, though I went into that one fairly blind, where as I read up on some strategies for Carn Dum that helped quite a bit.