The Siege of Gondor - Specialist Deck Series

This fellowship for the Specialist Deck Series is designed to tackle The Siege of Gondor, the second quest from the Flame of the West expansion.

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

For the deck used to beat the previous quest, The Passing of the Grey Company, look here: https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/21849

This quest is all about battling the Corsairs and their fleet. And I really do mean all - the encounter deck is trying to get us engaged with as many Corsair enemies as possible. Okay that's a slight exaggeration, it's trying to throw direct damage at us as well. To complete the quest we need to travel to and explore a gauntlet of Ship locations, each of which brings more enemies to the table.

One of my favourite combat decks to use is an Elladan & Elrohir "Twins" deck. Once they are setup right, the two of them are able to handle basically all the combat for the rest of the game. I have been waiting for an excuse to get them to the table again and this quest seems very well suited - a relatively straightforward wave of enemies without too much of a questing burden. To allow them to operate at peak efficiency we'll make it a Forth, The Three Hunters! deck. Gildor Inglorion will join the twins as the third hero. His low threat. card draw and make him a great addition.

So that's combat dealt with, but the twins will be joined by a questing and support deck. As it happens, another trio of Noldor are up to the task. Papa Elrond brings a big stat line, but more importantly he has an amazing healing ability which really pulls its weight in this quest. Círdan the Shipwright has huge and helps us find our important cards. Finally, Galdor of the Havens rounds out the trio with decent stats and even more card draw/selection.

See the individual deck descriptions for more detailed explanations of the decks and heroes.

The game plan is to get Elladan and Elrohir equipped and ready for combat ASAP. Ideally Elrohir can defend from turn one, and attachments and resource generation will allow him to keep up with the enemies. Attacking will begin as a collaborative effort, Aragorn will likely contribute a lot. By the endgame, Elladan should also be in a position to handle this all by himself. Everyone else quests, with healing taking place as needed.

Early game, we'll need to take the damage from The Corsair Fleet, but as the game goes on we can switch to taking extra encounter cards if appropriate. The fastest it's possible to beat this quest is 5 turns - this is important if playing Campaign mode, less so for us. However, in testing this pair of decks was able to manage a 5 turn win. The longest game went to the tenth turn and the fellowship managed 3 out of 3 wins.

Overall, this quest isn't too challenging when we don't have to worry about timer imposed by the Campaign. There is still a timer of sorts in the form of The Corsair Fleet objective, but once our engine is up and running we can safely take the extra encounter cards and there are no more threats we need to worry about.