Ambush at Erelas 2p Fellowship

This fellowship has two main goals:

1. Use a bunch of the awesome new cards from Children of Eorl Expansion
2. Avoid the looter keyword (don't engage enemies AND explore locations in staging area that have travel effects requiring you engage enemies)

Both decks have very low threat to avoid engagements. Then a combination of traps, dunhere staging attacks, forest patrol and worthy of remembrance takes care of the enemies in the staging area.

Progress tokens build up on stage 1 so Backtrack is a great card for location control. Lore deck also uses mirkwood explorer and explorers almanac to take out other locations. You can basically avoid traveling (except when beneficial as outlined below).

These decks can consistently beat the Ambush at Erelas quest often only having to engage a total of 3-4 enemies as follows:

• start with sneaky thief and pillaging swordsman in the staging area and take out the sneaky thief with worthy of remembrance (if you don't draw this card than this will be 1 of the 3-4 enemies you have to engage).
• you have to have each player engage an enemy in order to move on to quest stage 2 (use unattached followed or outmatched with live bait to avoid looter keyword on at least one of those enemies when you engage)
• the spirit/tactics deck engages the brigand ringleader so it's stuck with 2 enemies. Ideally you can use the travel effect on erelas stables to return the other enemy to staging area and take out with dunhere (use eowyn on this turn to give 5 damage to the ringleader)
• the lore deck engages an enemy with poisoned stakes where if you time the moving on to quest 2 just right this enemy will then die the round the ringleader enters play.

You should be able to take out the ringleader enemy in a few rounds (use progress to remove loot cards that keep his healing to 2-3 tops). First round use eowyn. Then remaining rounds can use dunhere + celador across the board (if dunhere has a war axe he swings for 5 on engaged enemies, otherwise an ally or gamling also needed to get the 8 attack to maximize 5 damage). The one trick is if you get the shadow that forced ringleader to engage the other player. IF this happens late the lore deck can manage 8 attack to finish him off (quickbeam, celador, gildor, or holding back damrod from questing).

The new traps and rohan cards are great! I wanted to try Thengel, but I needed to keep threat low. Hats off to the whole ALeP crew!