The Passage of the Marshes - Specialist Deck Series

Another expansion, another Fellowship. The Specialist Deck Series continues with the Land of Shadow Saga box and its first quest, The Passage of the Marshes.

For an explanation of the series and to see the deck for the first quest, A Shadow of the Past, look here: https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/18970

As a note, I decided on a pair of decks for this quest because that makes Gollum a little more interesting and I think the location mechanics work a bit better too.

In The Passage of the Marshes, we must aid Frodo in crossing the Dead Marshes on his journey to Mordor. The quest naturally features a raft of extremely unpleasant Marsh locations which all feature the Mire keyword, meaning we want to deal with them as quickly as possible and will be punished if we don't explore them quickly. There are also Undead enemies to slow our progress and who interfere with our threat reduction. Speaking of threat, there are several effects that raise our threat, and keeping it under control will make our lives much easier.

But before all of that, we start off having to deal with Gollum, who finally shows his face in this quest. Aside from being immune to most player card effects, he will attack us relentlessly until we tame him. This can put a lot of pressure on our defenses, so we'll make sure we have the tools to handle him.

In that vein, our first choice for heroes will be Beorn. He's almost the perfect Gollum tech, featuring the very relevant abilities Sentinel and Beorn does not exhaust to defend, which allow him to deal with Gollum's attacks until we have defeated him. His 5 is also extremely useful in winning over Sméagol, particularly in Stage 1 where Gollum can get bonuses to his defense. We'll be aiming to have Gollum beaten in the first 2-3 turns, which will the rest of the quest far more pleasant. Not to mention that Beorn can only defend so many times since we can't heal his damage.

My idea for this deck is to be mainly focused on Ents, since their high power level will help us to push through the quest. With that in mind, we need a hero to pair with Beorn. We'll also benefit from a nice low starting threat. Naturally this pushes us towards Hobbits and an excellent pairing of Pippin and Folco Boffin. Between them they only have 11 starting threat, less then Beorn's 12! Pippin also gives us a boost with engagement and Folco can save us from threating out in a pinch. They also have a very nice 2 each, which we very much need since Beorn won't be contributing any.

For the next deck, we'll start with Galadriel. She brings with her high and built in threat reduction, which is exactly what we need. We even get to bring along the excellent Mirror of Galadriel. Next, there is really no other option for hero than Sam Gamgee. He has an unmatched combination of high and low threat. We can even count on him for some combat while our threat remains low.

For the final hero we have Idraen. She brings an excellent combination of stats and built-in readying. We'll definitely need her power since the other deck has no ranged capability. There is a focus on exploring locations in this quest, so we should be able to ready her most rounds. However, we won't be expecting to explore more than one location per turn.

Our main concerns in this quest will be getting sufficient stats on the table, particularly , as well as managing our threat. We also have a few location control cards to prevent any problems from the Mire keyword.

We're back to Frodo quests, and I'd recommend using the version that comes in this box. His willpower boost can be very valuable, particularly early in the quest. He's also the only version that makes sense to use with Speak Your Promise!, an excellent solution for dealing with Gollum. Black Riders Frodo could be a good choice also, but I'd hesitate to use the other two.

In my testing, these versions of the decks managed 3 wins out of 3, although they were all hard fought victories. This quest really piles it on, and that last quest stage can be rough. I did try a couple of other variations and they performed much worse, with a string of losses before I settled on this hero lineup. I think in any case, that if the first few turns go badly, we're unlikely to come away with a victory.