Nîn-in-Eliph on nightmare 1.0

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• 1.0

will u discard folko or pay the full price for out of the wild, or depends it you get some good meal?

Folco was in there to keep starting threat really low. Originally I used Smeagol but he turned against me. So I scooped and put in Folco and then added Tom Bombadillo and removed 3 risk more lights.

I never used Tom Folcos ability in my game but I would have as a last resort. However i did use a woodman clearing and Aragorns threat reduction. Threat went up to 41 before I used him and I was really nervous about revealing a marsh dweller. Firyal was in play and was a great help In avoiding creatures. I also used 2 of the 3 hidden paths. One of them whiffed though and there was no location in the top 5 so I still drew an encounter card.

I used 1 out of the wild (which were originally included to remove Stinker but couldn't afford the resources. In my winning game though I did indeed get a good meal out and used it to reduce the cost of out of the wild.

This deck was about trying to negate the harsh punishments of the encounter deck. So there are no items, I have allies that already start exhausted, the gaffer which can be used exhausted, and encounter deck manipulation and something to get rid of swarming enemies (great hunt) Healing: well preserved went on Aragorn about turn 3 due to resource starvation but it more than paid for itself. The threat hike in not ideal in this deck due to threat increases from the Dwarf objective and each revealed stage but being able to defend the adder one or two turns if you don't have the gaffer in play is life saving.

The gaffer though was key and if you can remove the marsh adder in counter attacks then you buy yourself 1 or 2 turns of it out of play so you can set up your questers. I used gandalf too to dump 4 damage on the giant adder on the turn that i beat it.

The stages i had were the: play one card stage followed by the allies enter play exhausted and then got them both again. I managed to travel to an eyot and boost the time count on the no exhaust allies stage and then was able to clear it. the stage 3 was the -20 to engagement which cleared on it's last time counter.

I'm sure this deck will need some refining and tweaking to make it more efficient against this quest but I'm so happy it won. I've had about 8 failed attempts with other decks over the last couple of weeks.

if you keep folco, and not use his ability, i would choose pippin. more carddraw same startingthread, higher engagement for enemys.

or, a motk-hero with max. thread of 3 , then you start in secrecy. there are some, ioreth, gleowine, hememarth

Unless you have a ton of threat reduction it's very hard to start and stay in secrecy against this quest. The first round before planning you have a +1 threat increase from the first stage automatically moving on to stage 2.

I considered Pippin but chose Folco for his ability. With having the one ring in play you threat out at 45 not 50. So as a last resort near the end of the game Folco could be worth his threat in gold. To go down by one hero and reduce your threat by 7 could keep you in the game long enough to defeat the giant marsh adder. On the last stage of the quest there is no need to quest hard unless you have lots of locations in staging. I purposely didn't put in any card draw or resource generation in the deck as one of the quest stages completely locks it down. So I figured it's better not to have any than to build a deck relying on it and then be denied it.

I feel it's more important to manipulate the encounter deck with this quest and reduce swarming and keep your threat low.

I don't yet have MOTK yet but I have tried some of the other contracts against this quest- 3 hunters and council of the wise. Both struggled (based on my terrible deck building skills) Council Of The Wise is something I really liked the look of but was terrible to build a deck with and I struggled massively with it. I do love my 2 ofs and 3 ofs.

Another reason why I chose Folco over Pippin was the engagement. I was hoping to avoid many of the engagements by removing/discarding/avoiding enemies. Pippin draws a card when engaging an enemy if their engagement was higher than your threat. All my previous attempts with spirit questers and tactics Bilbo questing decks found me swarmed with enemies and the threat increases even in a questing deck soon spiralled up and up. Minimum 2 every round and an extra one from each stage advancement.