The Last Gasp (Mount Doom Progression Solo Deck) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

I used this deck to (finally) defeat Mount Doom in six turns.

Heroes

• Sam Gamgee - I mean, you've got to run Sam for this quest, right? He provides early , access to Friend of Friends and readying for Fortitude tests.

• Gandalf - His main job is to help you cycle through your deck (especially with Expert Treasure-hunter) and to block the enemies that engage you (use Lembas to provide healing).

• Galadriel - I know that Glorfindel is a more strategic choice, but I had already used him for The Black Gate Opens and the Lady of Lorien's influence from afar seemed thematically appropriate. She needs Nenya ASAP in order to fuel Sam Gamgee for questing and fortitude tests. In addition, give her Steward of Gondor and build up resources to use Lay of Nimrodel for big questing pushes.

Questing

You want to quest heavily right off the bat, and so Nenya is essential to have, plus access to boosts (Fellowship of the Ring, Celebrían's Stone, Strider, Frodo's Intuition). With the right combination of cards and a tame first turn staging, it is possible to clear stage 1 on round one (but two turns is much more common). If you give Gandalf all three damage from Brake of Thorns, you can use Lembas to heal him and ready him to travel to Old Water-course (your starting location) for the threat reduction. Use Mountain of Fire Frodo Baggins to play cards as quickly as possible (Gandalf + Wizard Pipe can help with this as well). Don't forget to trigger your Expert Treasure-hunter(s) after questing for additional card draw!

Defense

This deck cannot handle a swarm of enemies, and so you are relying upon a combination of: 1) friendly encounter outcomes, 2) Sam Gamgee getting boosted w/Sting and Friend of Friends, and 3) Lembas to heal Gandalf repeatedly. Since you have to move quickly anyway, you will hopefully (Eru-willing) manage to avoid being swarmed. In my campaign, I had the Phial of Galadriel available to give me one free turn of enemy attacks toward the end, which was very important.

Attacking

Apart from the chance of direct-damage from Sting and the potential for Flame of Anor to provide a big boost, there is not a lot of attack power available, so this deck has to do its best to survive the enemies that do engage it and then heal the damage w/Lembas.

Miscellaneous

The sideboard consists of the Boons and Burdens I had earned as part of my campaign. Shadow of the Past can be incredibly powerful in this quest to avoid the awful surging treacheries of stage 1 and 3 (or to set up a controlled questing push to the end on stage 4). If you have the opportunity to plant a benign location on top of the encounter deck, take advantage of it (but don't forget to wait until after the mandatory fortitude test at the start of questing on stage 3!!!). Unless you have more than 6 tokens from The Black Gate Opens, it is crucial to arrive at stage 3 by the start of turn 4 with your questing engine set up (I generally took two turns to clear stage 1 and then one to clear stage 2). You must have readying on Sam Gamgee so that he can single-handedly pass the fortitude test and then contribute to questing. The simplest way to accumulate the necessary is to have 7-10 resource tokens on Galadriel (from Steward of Gondor) and at least one copy of Lay of Nimrodel to play. I added Rosie Cotton as another option after several games in which all of my Lay of Nimrodels were in the bottom of the deck. If this happens, you can play Rosie Cotton then boost her with Galadriel and then exhaust Rosie to "double-count" her to the quest. Hopefully, you have enough readying for Sam Gamgee to pass the Mount Doom fortitude test, but if not, you can just eat the increase of 9 threat and quest through on your final turn. Power of Orthanc is there to get rid of Heavy and Tired if it attaches to Sam Gamgee. Finally, if you have Old Bogey-stories from The Old Forest quest, you can use it early as a second attempt at a Mulligan (if you need Nenya or boosts.

Conclusion

This isn't the most powerful deck in the world and it certainly needs some help from the encounter deck to get the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, but I enjoyed the challenge of creating it and pitting it against this challenging quest. It's success rate isn't amazing, but it does increase noticeably if you can get 7+ tokens from The Black Gate Opens.