Solo Thematic Campaign: The Uruk-Hai 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

First of all, I’m swapping out heroes here without taking the threat penalty. There are rumors that that was the intention of the designers and even if it wasn’t, in doing it anyway! I guess I get a free pass on replacing Aragorn and Pippin is staying so trading out Merry is my only real issue.

The other strange thing about playing this thematically is that the Three Hunters actually never fought these orcs! It would be more thematic to play this with Eomer and Co since they are the men who actually caught and destroyed the orc party. But we work without the constraints of the game!

The third thing about this is I didn’t really build this deck. As a reward for being a COTR patron, Seastan made a deck for tailored to this specific quest. I’ve updated it with some new cards recently but he put the basic deck together.

Sneak Attack Gandalf is back since this is the chapter where Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli bump into him again. The deck focuses on getting these 3 heroes to do as much as possible. All three heroes has abilities that ready each other which is awesome but the resource and card drain means you need to find acceleration right away. This means finally resorting to Steward of Gondor but I can rationalize it since Aragorn starts to come into his own in this chapter. He longs to go towards Gondor but chooses to chase the Hobbits instead and then Legolas and Gimli catch a "brief vision of the power and majesty of the kings of stone."

Galadriel is there since they had recently left her realm with inspiration and gifts and she is central to the interaction between the Three Hunters and Eomer.

The rest is good attachments and events to help our heroes accomplish more. The Banner of Elendil is a little premature but getting either it or Sword that was Broken out early is massively helpful for catching up to the orcs.

The Experience

This took two attempts and was fairly manageable. On the last turn I had the Banner, SWtB, and Three Hunters buffing most of my characters plus Celebrían's Stone, Strider, Anduril (on Gimli for this quest!), and one Mirkwood Long-knife in play along with a Galadriel. With all those buffs, those 4 characters quested for 25 ! I was still a little slow and ended with the Pursuit value at 23 but that's good enough to earn a boon!

Moving Forward

With no Fallen Heroes, I chose Leader of Men as my boon and put it on Aragorn. Earning those extra fellowship resources will be helpful for the next 6 Aragorn quests.

You can see 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