Solo Thematic Campaign: Tower of Cirith Ungol 1.0

• Versions
• 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

Well, at this point in the campaign, some of my thematic ideals are falling by the wayside. These quests are HARD and I'm just trying to get through them at this point! At first I tried to build up Sam as a Great Elf Warrior with Elf Friend, Light of Valinor, Rivendell Blade etc. but I just couldn't do it. So into the deck goes Éowyn, Steward of Gondor and Sneak Attack Gandalf! This quest proved very difficult to overcome and I'm not particularly proud of this deck or optimistic about the deck taking down this quest even 1/4 of the time. I just kept making adjustments and tweaking it until I won a game. It was painful!

This quest presents all sorts of challenges. First, you have a mini-boss level enemy you have to defeat before you can advance to stage 2. This means you need 6 pretty quickly. If you don't advance right away, you need a fast willpower ramp to keep up with the junk that accumulates in the staging area since you can't travel to any other locations. That's a reasonable challenge by itself. But you also have a ?/6/4/12 Wraith on Wings in the staging area at the beginning that gets stronger and more menacing the longer it sits there. You pretty much have to deal with it. You kind of have to build a deck with an immediate answer for this enemy.

In the next stage you have 2 cards coming off the encounter deck nearly every turn. The enemies can end up killing themselves but it doesn't happen a lot in solo play. Every enemy has a nasty "when you engage" effect so you can't afford to engage and deal with every enemy as it comes unless you have a super aggro deck and you're ready to deal with the third (or fourth) boss enemy, Shagrat, who you can't even chump block. After beating that boss you have to fight the original Watcher boss again but he's bigger and stronger now!

During all of this, you're down one hero with Frodo captured and you're taking an extra threat every turn or exhausting the hero that's functioning as the Ringbearer every turn. That a lot to ask of one deck!

Enter Tactics Eowyn... She really helps deal with that opening Nazgul and Watcher at the beginning. I basically used her as a crutch but then tried to focus on Sam doing everything else for the rest of the quest. Folco is there just for Lore resources and low threat.

The main thing I'm proud of in this deck is my use of Speak Your Promise!. Frodo doesn't get built up very much in a campaign so this card usually isn't very good but here with Sam as the Ringbearer with Noble Hero, this card can be huge. I found that if I quested with Sam and Folco on turn 1, traveled to the Watcher location, engaged the Nazgul, Sam would be boosted to 5 WP. I could defend the Watcher with Sam, take a threat bump, play Speak Your Promise! vs the Nazgul, reduce his attack to 2 and defense to 0, take him undefended (with crossed fingers...), declare Sam (2 ), and Eowyn as attackers, trigger Eowyn so they combine their attack for 12, killing the Nazgul and they use Eowyn's second attack to take out the Watcher as well. It's a major threat bump between A Heavy Burden and the +3 for Eowyn, but getting that Wraith out of the way on turn 1 is huge.

The rest of the quest is spent trying to survive archery, keep willpower up, engage enemies when you can, and praying Sting comes up early and hits often. It was very difficult.

The Experience

I don't really want to relive it.. It was hard and brutal. I played it 10+ times. I really needed Speak Your Promise! in my opening hand to have a decent chance at overcoming the Wraith. I used Heed the Dream several times to grab those Sneak Attacks so I could knock out enemies with Gandalf so I wouldn't have to deal with the archery or nasty engagement effects.

It was hard to keep Fellowship of the Ring in play because my allies would die from archery fairly regularly. I really should have had some healing! I relied on Sting/Anduril on Sam to take out the enemies along with Gandalf's direct damage, but I was always need threat reduction and card draw with Gandalf as well. I played him the full 6 times in my winning game. Orc Disguise proved pretty valuable as well. Nice little Feint!

This was the hardest quest for me yet. I hope I didn't make any mistakes. Glad I'm through! On to the Black Gate!

Moving Forward

I killed Shagrat so I got my Mithril Shirt back but I go forward with no more burdens or boons than I started with.

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