Singing and Stinging with Samwise the Brave 1.0

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• 1.0

I'm pretty new to this game. I've mostly been playing a lot of Seastan's decks to get through the Lord of the Rings Campaign. I tried to follow all the rules I know of and could find, but it's possible I did some things here which were not allowed.

This is a very silly deck I made to try and beat the Tower of Cirith Ungol, one of my favorite scenes from the books. I wanted to do it with just the power of Samwise's singing and stinging as much as possible, and after five tries with this exact list, and ten or so previous tries with other variations on this list, I beat it on normal campaign mode. So I did add Sting from the campaign pool, as well as the Lórien Rope (which I used on the second to last turn to get about 12 progress on the last stage of the quest) and the Phial of Galadriel (which I never used because I got Sam's defense so high it seemed unnecessary; I suppose I could have used it to take some undefended attacks, but I had so many ways of readying Sam already with the contract, Fast Hitch, and his printed ability).

I'm happy with the fact that most of the key cards are very immersive, especially all the songs like Song of Hope. [I still maintain that omitting that song from the scene in the PJ films was one of their greatest mistakes. It's the perfect Tolkien eucatastrophe.] Friend of Friends felt very cathartic to activate when I finally freed Frodo and needed to fight Gorbag and Shagrat at the same time. I just imagined that using Rosie Cotton represented Sam's memories of her giving him yet more willpower to be a gardener of the highest quality. A few other cards obviously aren't quite lore-appropriate for this scene, but I had to make some compromises somewhere and at least it still feels very much like Sam forcing his way to the top with his unbreakable willpower.

The Hobbit Pipe was not reliable in this list, since I don't really have that many threat reductions to activate it. So that would be the first card to switch out if I was going to try again.

I would add the screenshot from DragnCards if I could, but I don't see a way to embed a screenshot here. Final tally of stats on Sam Gamgee when I defeated the Watchers: 17 will, 8 attack, 8 defense, 5 HP. Final threat was 48. So he could have used The Grey Wanderer to ready one more time and kill the last Orc of Mordor engaged with him but at that point I like to think the Orc wouldn't have challenged the Great Elf Warrior anyway.