Solo Thematic Campaign: Race to the Ford 1.0

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• 1.0

The Campaign

I’ve been part of 2, 3, and 4 player campaigns but I’ve never sat down and run my own solo campaign. I won’t be recording or blogging this campaign as others have recently done that (I’m in the middle of a YouTube thematic campaign with Mr Underhill right now) and I want to play rather quickly through the entire set of quests but I will play in “strict” campaign mode and trying to build as thematically as I can.

I can’t promise the decks I publish in this series will be totally optimized or super teched against each quest for a 90% win ratio, but I hope they will be decent thematic decks that could provide a good experience for people looking to play the campaign in a thematic manner.

The Deck

While keeping the same three characters as heroes, I changed up the deck substantially by changing spheres for both Aragorn and Merry. For this quest I relied on Aragorn to kill things, Sam to defend and Merry to keep my threat low enough for Sam and the Daggers to work.

Overall the cost curve is pretty low here so the deck can move fast. Glorfindel is the exception but I got him into play by the end of the quest. I figured the Silvan Refugees could be found in this area and they provided some cheap willpower.

Is your defender. Look for Rosie Cotton, Hobbit Cloak or a Staff of Lebethron or a Feint in your opening hand if you intend on engaging that Rider on the first turn.

Without Pippin's card draw, I added Ancient Mathom and Foe-hammer to supplement Frodo's Intuition.

Finding Fellowship of the Ring or Sword that was Broken right away is always helpful for boosting willpower numbers. Without many allies, you'll be relying on buffed heroes to get any sort of decent willpower.

The Experience

This took a couple attempts. I ran Frodo's life down to nothing once as I didn't have enough willpower to get through. I won handily on my successful run. Without tons of readying in the deck, I found I would have to keep a couple heroes out of the quest so handle any enemy that might come up so I found Shadow of the Past well worth the 2 resources if I was able to just recycle a harmless location. This really helped me quest through to the end safely on the last stage.

I used the Black Riders Frodo Baggins this time since I didn't want to use the Ring unless I absolutely had to.

This isn't a super reliable deck vs this quest and I would guess I could win every third game with this deck.

Going Forward

This quest can really shape your entire campaign as you are force to deal with a Burden in one way or another. There is a way you can move forward without taking the burden with you by using Shadow of the Past and Out of the Wild to add the Burden to the victory display before the game ends but I chose not to build that way. I was lucky and drew Eaten Alive! which I consider the weakest burden, especially in solo play. Taking 1 damage and surging is much less punishing than the rest of those burdens!

I have the opportunity to switch up my hero lineup without penalty before Breaking of the Fellowship and I think I'll swap out Sam for Pippin so I can play with a full Fellowship.

You can see the final board states to my successful games on my Twitter account.

Campaign Decks so Far

1. Shadow of the Past
2. The Old Forest
3. Fog on the Barrow Downs
4. Knife in the Dark
5. Flight to the Ford
6. The Ring Goes South
7. Journey in the Dark
8. Breaking of the Fellowship
9. The Uruk-Hai
10. Helm's Deep
11. The Road to Isengard
12. The Passage of the Marshes
13. Journey to the Crossroads
14. Shelob's Lair
15. Passing of the Grey Company
16. The Siege of Gondor
17. The Battle of the Pelannor Fields
18. The Tower of Cirith Ungol
19. The Black Gate Opens
20. Mount Doom