72 - A Storm on Cobas Haven (Progression Series)

This is another fellowship continuing on in my goal to play through all of the quests in release order to learn how all (or most) of the cards interact with one another. The first fellowship for the quests in the core set can be found here, and it contains a slightly more detailed overview of what I'm going for with building these decks. As always, any feedback is appreciated so that I can continue to learn more!

I'm not quite as high on Dream-chaser and Sailing as a lot of the community seems to be, but A Storm on Cobas Haven is probably my favorite of the bunch. There are a couple of different ways to try to beat this one, but I opted for the "stay below enemy engagement and sail and quest hard" sort of option. Staying on course is vitally important to avoid some nasty effects and boats engaging when you don't want them to, so each deck is full of cheap Sailing allies to make sure that they can always send quite a few of them at the Sailing test. The Noldor deck will start with the Dream-chaser and the Dúnhere deck should start with Silver Wing to get the bonus attack on Dunhere and be able to help kill any boats that might engage with the Noldor.

The main goal is to get Dunhere to a point where he can start killing boats in the staging area with Gondorian Fire and Steward of Gondor so you can clear out some threat in Staging and avoid having to deal with many Corsair enemies. If the deck gets stuck with one, Terrible to Behold can send it back up to staging for Dunhere to pick off later. I would recommend selecting Tower of the Heron as the starting Guarded Objective in order to cancel out Archery for when a Corsair Warship inevitably arrives. It is a bit of a janky combo, but the Noldor deck passing over a hero can allow for Revealed in Wrath to blank the Warship so that Dunhere can clear one out later in the game (ideally shortly after a reshuffle of the encounter deck).

I've found that slow playing it a little bit on Stage 1 and 2 can mean that you should have enough Willpower on board (and enough dead ships from Dunhere) that Stage 3 can usually be quested over in one turn, so the decks should only have to deal with the Flagship for that first round when it is forced to engage before questing away for a victory. Justice Shall Be Done can then be pretty useful there to make sure a few more bodies and Lords of the Eldar can get enough Willpower out.