Not quite as meme-y as my decks for Passage or Anduin, since this quest is significantly harder in true solo. However, I still wanted to stick with my theme through the Core Set of building decks inspired by other members of the game/community. So I decided to make a deck that included favorite heroes and contracts for myself and my two cohosts on Backboard of the Rings, Beorn and Bardlee.
Caldara is obviously not really here for any reason other than Bardlee's favorite deck being a mono-Spirit The Burglar's Turn deck utilizing her. There are no other Spirit heroes in the deck and there really aren't many great targets for her to pull out of the discard pile even if I tried some Without My Hat + Sword-thain or Prince Imrahil style shenanigans in an effort to make use of her. So she's basically there hoping to be the captured prisoner and hoping to get a Gondorian Shield or Silver Circlet from the Burgle deck.
Beorn is obviously one of Beorn's favorites, given his name, blog, and general love of Loyal Hounds (that may or may not walk on two legs with serving trays). Grimbeorn the Old was another consideration for a little bit, but I felt like having two heroes that really wanted to spend resources for their ability was a bit tough to deal with here. Beorn, assuming he isn't captured, is a pretty good solution to the problems of dealing with the small, early enemies here in this quest. His big downside is not being able to take the attachments, which means that some of the toys from the Contract will probably end up getting discarded once you need to claim the final two objectives and advance to Stage 3.
Frodo Baggins is one of my all-time favorite heroes, and the threat reduction and action advantage he provides here is pretty invaluable. Gandalf is an absolute powerhouse card with Frodo, allowing you to use his stats twice on a round where you hard cast him (and maybe even tell a A Very Good Tale if you're particularly lucky). He admittedly doesn't have a ton of early game targets if Caldara is the captured hero, which is the ideal situation for this deck. I found that it is oftentimes worth using the resource to ready up one of the unique two-cost questers just for the threat reduction and ability to exhaust/chump if absolutely necessary. But by the end of the game you will likely have a Landroval/Treebeard/Buffed Caldara where it feels a bit more useful to send them on the quest and be ready while still helping keep threat in check.
I think it is an instant scoop of Frodo is captured. I did however manage to beat the quest once with Beorn getting caught, but it took a lot more luck than my win with Caldara as the captured hero. Admittedly the rest of the deck isn't using too many niche cards or anything, its a lot of Good Stuff type cards. But I kinda needed to do that for this quest since it can be a bit tricky. I'm sure I'll be back with something dumb again next week for The Oath.