60 - Shelob's Lair (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 am pretty sure this quest takes the cake for the longest quest that I have played up to this point, both in terms of number of rounds and just overall time it took. Stage 1 can be a halfway decent place to stall until you get Sam Gamgee and Beregond ready to take some spider bites, and then Stage 2 lasts at least 4 rounds (though in practice usually took me 5 or 6 due to some unlucky draws and trying to play it too safe with Shelob's attacks), and then Stage 3 can really make you chip away at Shelob for a while if you don't tech for it well. I made the mistake my first time through the quest thinking that you removed 1 resource token for each damage dealt to Shelob. Once I got to Stage 3 and read the quest card more carefully, I realized I was in a lot of trouble with 7 resource tokens on her and had to scoop and rebuild the decks to handle that issue.

I might have gone a little overboard, but since the game can last a long time, I wanted to make sure I have as many ways as possible to remove resource tokens from Shelob once reaching Stage 3. Spear of the Citadel, Haldir of Lórien and Hands Upon the Bow from the other deck can help chip away at them, but I found the best strategy was Sneak Attack + Descendant of Thorondor + Hail of Stones to exhaust the Descendant of Thorondor. That could remove 3 resource tokens at a time from Shelob, allowing them to be removed much more quickly to be able to put the damage on her so she dies when I traveled to the Cleft of Cirith Ungol. Since both decks have such strong defenders and plenty of readying, you hopefully don't have to place too many resources on her, but the encounter deck will inevitably make it so that there will be a few added here and there.

Both decks have plenty of card draw to combat the Stage 1 and the orcs, though it can get a bit iffy at times, especially if your card draw is the card that is randomly discarded. The Hobbit deck typically had plenty of effects that I was able to recover, but Lindir proved to be incredibly useful for the other deck on a few occassions. I used Frodo Baggins from The Black Riders again after using The Land of Shadow version on the previous two quests in this box. There are just so many nasty treacheries that having the ability for the extra cancellation proved to be much more useful for me than the extra two willpower or attack was.