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Some Sort 3672
Legolas: "They're taking the Hobbits to Isengard!"
Aragorn: "Then we must make haste to... wait, which hobbits?"
Gimli: "Are ye daft? They have Pippin!"
Aragorn: "... Lore Pippin or Spirit Pippin."
Legolas: "Spirit Pippin, there is little doubt."
Gimli: "And Fatty Bolger with him!"
Aragorn: "Ah, it is as I feared. Come then, we must make haste to Edoras."
Earlier this week, I went (way too in-depth) on my history of throwing two-hero decks against Escape from Dol Guldur. I talked about how, thanks to the magic that is Timely Aid (and the turbo engine that is Denethor), they were actually able to achieve a fairly respectable win rate despite the massive handicap.
But nobody needed convincing that Timely Aid is amazing, so I wanted to take two heroes against Dol Guldur without it. And also without A Very Good Tale. And no uniques— If this were Lore Pippin, maybe, but as it is Aragorn, Gandalf, and company have much more important things to deal with.
For fun, let’s try it without any good cards at all. Our heroes certainly have us off to a roaring start!
For added difficulty, we're not going to pre-select our prisoner this time-- we want to design so that it works regardless of who gets captured. (In this case, it’s to our advantage that both of our heroes are equally bad.)
We’re also going to take a different approach to the two-hero challenge— this time we’re running a pair of Grey Wanderer decks. On the one hand, this is a great advantage to us— instead of one resource and one action per round, this lets our uncaptured hero use three resources and two actions! And the deck with the captured hero doesn’t have to passively wait for rescue— we have a few tricks up our sleeve to still contribute without any heroes.
And all it costs us is… twice as many encounter reveals. (This is probably bad.)
Since both decks will be identical except for the hero, I'm publishing this as a single decklist for convenience (in DragnCards I'll just remove the superfluous hero and adjust starting threat for each once I load it in).
Alright, let's talk about rulings. Early in the game's life, the developers ruled that if your last hero was the prisoner, you automatically lost Escape from Dol Guldur. This ruling is dumb and completely at odds with every other ruling ever issued-- if your last hero is passed away with Desperate Alliance, you do not lose. If your last hero is shuffled away with Lost and Alone, you do not lose. If your last hero is Sméagol and he flips, you do not lose. Because of this, we are just going to ignore this ruling.
But I did want to make a note that TECHNICALLY SPEAKING for COMPLETELY ARBITRARY REASONS (the developers had a history of using whatever justification they could find to rule in the way that made Escape maximally hard, even if these rulings were inconsistent with all the other rulings), this fellowship can never actually beat Escape.
But provided we all ignore that specific ruling— and fittingly for a pair of hobbit decks— we have some shenanigans we can get up to. First: with no heroes, the "captured" deck can engage all enemies and take all attacks undefended, which should help the "rescuer" deck quest successfully.
(This presents its own problems: once the prisoner is rescued, they'll have to survive combat with all of those enemies. If we lose a hero, we can’t hold all the objectives to advance the quest. So, shenanigans: Desperate Alliance so we can take the attacks undefended again and Hobbit-sense so we can stop them entirely.)
We also have an old ruling that you can play 0-cost neutral cards without any heroes-- the only thing you need heroes for is the sphere match, and neutrals don't require a sphere match. Enter a really neat bit of tech: Grey Wanderer says the first non-unique card you play each planning phase doesn't require a sphere match. This means we can actually play 0-cost cards from any sphere!
(Biggest benefits: Daeron's Runes, Deep Knowledge, Drinking Song, A Very Good Tale. If we have enough pipe attachments, we can use Smoke and Think to reduce the price of our next card to zero, letting us play any neutral card, such as Treebeard. Most fun: we could play Taking Initiative with no characters in play, giving us a guaranteed hit no matter what it flipped.)
Dúnedain Hunter is typically a risky card, but not when we don't have any heroes and are taking all the attacks undefended, anyway. It’s a great way to pull out enemies with annoying “when revealed” or shadow effects— especially Ungoliant’s Spawn, but also Hummerhorns and Dol Guldur Orcs. They’re also great for ensuring an early Dungeon Jailor doesn’t ruin our run.
(They’re mostly not for killing stuff, though we don’t mind putting some enemies in the victory display or shuffling the King Spiders and Cavern Guardians back into the rotation when the encounter deck resets. There's only one enemy in this quest we'll actually need to get rid of— the Nazgul— and the Hunters aren’t for that. For that, we have A Elbereth! Gilthoniel!)
Beyond 0-cost cards, there are a few other ways to get stuff into play without a hero. Elven Jeweler can put itself into play, as can Curious Brandybuck (which, as an added bonus, fits beautifully with the unofficial "terrible spirit hobbits" theme we have going on). In addition to late-game defenses, Desperate Alliance also lets the rescuer deck loan a hero (and all its resources) to the captured deck to let them get some cards down the old-fashioned way.
I was going to go without a starting attachment for Grey Wanderer just for extra style points, but at the last minute I decided to add a copy of Friend of Friends. It seems Pippin and Fatty have had plenty of time to grow close over the years they've spent together in the backs of binders.
Discussing rulings again: we've never had a ruling on whether attachments can remain attached to heroes once they're flipped face down. Prior to Grey Wanderer, we couldn't get an attachment on the prisoner before he flipped.
But with the addition of campaign mode in the re-released content, we could again get attachments on the prisoner, and campaign mode addresses this possibility directly, saying: Forced: When a hero would be randomly selected to be a “prisoner”, the “prisoner” from the Campaign Log is selected instead. Each card attached to that hero is turned facedown until that hero is “rescued."
We're going to generalize that rule to Grey Wanderer and say we can attach Friend of Friends, but it'll be facedown until we rescue Fatty and will flip back over when he does. Strider? Thrór's Key? Nah, we're going to escape from the most hellish prison the game has ever conceived with nothing more than the power of friendship.
I was going to post a report on my sessions, but they wouldn’t be all that meaningful given the number of iterations this deck went through. The first two games were lost to location lock, so I added in the Lórien Guides, one of the worst location control cards available to us. (They guarantee that even when we’re questing unsuccessfully we can still clear locations.)
They helped a bit, but game 3 also went down to location lock. I just wasn’t able to ramp willpower fast enough to deal with two reveals. (It also hurt that Fatty was prisoner in three out of the first four runs— with Grey Wanderer he can quest for one, ready, and still trigger his ability to drop threat in the staging area, typically giving you the equivalent of three WP during that crucial first round.)
As a result, I added some more 2WP allies. I tried to stick with some of the more middling options— Galadriel's Handmaiden rather than Ethir Swordsman, say— but there’s no getting around the fact that most of these allies are fairly solid and some are… certifiably good. The Celduin Traveler, especially, is fantastic (and his ability is also tremendously useful for avoiding location lock)— though I didn’t wind up playing any on my winning attempt.
I also added Courage Awakened, which is strictly worse than just playing a 2WP ally except we’re limited in how many allies we can play each round. (This wound up being one of the MVPs of our eventual escape, three times giving us just enough WP to clear the active location, avoid shuffling objectives back to a Dungeon Jailor, and finally, put a progress token on the quest so I could free my best buddy, though I was forced to say goodbye after the last one as I’d left secrecy.)
On the fourth playthrough I wound up with Great Forest Web guarding Gandalf’s Map, which was the objective I generally need to claim first to advance to Stage 2, but I can’t travel there until after the prisoner is rescued, so I decided I needed some way to place progress in staging. Enter Rhovanion Outrider, another certifiably good card. As penance, I removed all of my Hasty Strokes and one of my Test of Wills
(The only shadow effects I cared about were Ungoliant’s Spawn (+8 threat), potentially Under the Shadow (could be upwards of +6 threat), and potentially Hummerhorns (especially if I’d used Desperate Alliance to loan a hero so the prisoner deck could play down some allies). If I was lucky, I’d be able to find and engage Ungoliant’s Spawn and the Hummerhorns early— words you aren’t going to hear very often!— to remove them from the shadow pool.
As for Treacheries, I’d prefer to forego Test of Will entirely. With mostly 2hp allies, I could take a Necromancer’s Reach on the chin without issues, though the second would be a problem. But Eyes of the Forest was a potential immediate run-ender.)
Attempt 5 was a near-miss, making progress and freeing the prisoner but ultimately threating out. Attempt 6 was going well until Eyes of the Forest discarded all of my combat solutions the round I was planning on effecting my rescue.
But number 7 was our lucky number. Pippin got captured and Fatty’s ability came in clutch— I had to use it three times, but all three times it (along with Courage Awakened) accounted for the decisive margin. The reveals skewed enemy-heavy and I avoided any egregious shadows. My Curious Brandybucks were unfortunately wasted— one was discarded by traveling to the Necromancer’s Pass that I had hoped it would help me clear, while another never contributed anything because my Lorien Guides blew up the Enchanted Stream at the beginning of the quest phase.
By the time I rescued Pippin he already had six enemies engaged with him, but a Desperate Alliance got him away from the first combat phase, and for the second he let the Nazgûl initiate its attack before dropping a Hobbit-sense to shut down all other attacks and an A Elbereth! Gilthoniel! to clear that nasty wraith from the board. (He didn’t even have to raise his threat, as he was already up to 42.)
(I needed to Desperate Alliance Fatty over to his side of the board just to afford the A Elbereth. It’s actually kind of fun how often heroes kept popping across the table in my playthroughs— I gained a new appreciation for the card, both for shenanigan and non-shenanigan reasons.)
With the Nazgûl dispatched we were able to quest through Stage 3 in a single round and ride to freedom, only to find nobody had even noticed we were gone. Alas!
Loved the writeup!