Siege of Annuminas (Progression - 1 Core Only) 1.0

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• 1.0

Last night on CotR Chad mentioned that he was having issues with The Siege of Annuminas in his Single Core Progressions series and was likely going to use either a Vilya or Outlands deck in order to tackle it. He put out a call for others to come up with something that didn't use either of those archetypes, so I went with the only slightly less cheesy Caldara deck.

There is a little bit of luck involved in beating Annuminas here, in that I think you really need to have Narya and Steward of Gondor online fairly early, so it isn't a perfect Silver Bullet type deck. I lost a number of times just by not being able to get the Willpower allies online quite quickly enough. One copy of Unexpected Courage just isn't enough, but with the Leadership Icon from the ring you can make due with a Armored Destrier instead so that you can make sure Beregond can handle an attack from an enemy in Stage 2's quest phase and probably in the combat phase as well (though Jubayr and Treebeard will help a lot by that point in the game).

I think you're best off just eating the Treachery cards here, since most aren't really that punishing once you've got some Warden of Healing on the table, but the shadow effects can really be a killer. So Destrier, Jubayr and Hasty Stroke should all be used to help make sure Beregond doesn't get killed.

Stage 2 is the big grind, and probably needs to be played differently based on if you're able to get 10 extra health on the city. It was fairly rare for me to be able to do that, since this Caldara deck doesn't quite fill allies into the discard pile as quickly as one with Dáin Ironfoot or Zigil Miner might, so you probably need to kill enemies as much as possible and just eat the second encounter card reveal instead of leaving a werewolf or something up in staging to attack you each round.

Since it is a deck with Caldara and Narya and Cirdan and Beregond and whatnot, I'm sure it is probably pretty decent and fun against many other quests as well.