Quickbeam Leads the Last March of the Ents (FFG 10th Anniver 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

I used this deck to successfully beat The Road to Isengard (normal difficulty) in one-handed solo play, fulfilling the conditions of FFG's 10th Anniversary Challenge. Hat-tip to @Asgardian Phil's conversation-starter on this topic.

Setup: Grab Strider and mulligan for Song of Wisdom, Timely Aid, and/or Resourceful. None of these are critical (I whiffed on all three in my first successful game, never playing any of them), but they are the most helpful early on. Barring these, it's good to have Treebeard to play immediately on Round 3 (the first round you will collect resources, see next paragraph).

Rounds 1 and 2: My strategy was to use Quickbeam + Strider + The Grey Wanderer to almost guarantee an Ent of Fangorn for each round I sat on Stage 1A. Exhaust Quickbeam once, ready him with his ability (2 damage), exhaust him again, then ready and heal with the contract, then exhaust the third time. At 4 , there are only two cards in the Encounter deck (2x Underground Armoury) that will cause Quickbeam to fail, which is good odds. I found that, with this strategy, it was optimal to wait 2 rounds (for 2 Ents of Fangorn) before advancing. Chances are that your two reveals from the encounter deck will not cause much trouble -- none of the four treacheries will have any effect (apart from Surge on two of them), any location revealed is a good thing and easily cleared with your two ready Ents of Fangorn before it causes any trouble, leaving just the enemies, most of which Quickbeam can tank and kill on his own next combat phase.

Rounds 3 up to End Game: The next strategy is to turtle on Stage 2B. I often chose to fail the quest (aiming for failing by just 1 or 2) so as not to trigger the forced effect on Orthanc and give myself more time to build board state. I would snipe off any locations with my two Ents of Fangorn, which I generally reserved from questing. In general, with just 12 starting , you can eat a lot of threat increase. Generally you're killing enemies as they come out, so apart from avoiding threating out you can just laugh off your threat meter. The only time I would quest successfully was if I really want another non-unique location to come up that turn so that my Ents of Fangorn could snipe it.

End Game, or Defeating Saruman and Tearing Down Orthanc: You have to be careful to time when you complete Stage 2B. If you do it right (and I believe this is legal), you can explore your fifth non-unique location during the quest phase, immediately advancing you to Stage 3A and letting you place your progress there. If you do this just right, you can actually place all the progress you need, then travel to Orthanc, and then deal with Saruman all on the same turn. That's hard to pull off unless you get lucky with 3x Booming Ents and Trained for War. More likely, you'll have to spend a couple of turns. The key, though, is to over-damage Saruman the first time you engage him -- Booming Ents are perfect for this. Try to get at least 10 damage on Saruman (more is better) so that you don't have to travel to Orthanc again. After that, just keep questing hard until you beat Stage 3A. You can take Saruman's attacks from drawing your 1 card each round with Treebeard, Quickbeam, or Derndingle Warrior. Just make sure that Quickbeam is at full health and has an Ent Draught attached so that he can (hopefully) survive a Grima shadow effect (rare, but can end your game really fast).

Concluding Thoughts: You won't win every game, but you should have decent odds with this deck. There are likely many tweaks that could be made to help you turtle longer at Stage 2B -- I considered scrying effects, threat reduction (Secret Vigil, Woodmen's Clearing), and side quests, but didn't feel they were necessary. A Sword-thain might be good tech to protect against the Grima shadow effect, but it's a fairly rare occurrence so not necessarily worth it.