A Path Less Traveled Saga Campaign: Flight to the Ford

I have decided to start a variant on the Saga Campaign. Personally, I felt the strict hero requirements for the majority of the official saga campaign to be more frustrating than fun. My main goal is to balance theme with overall fun for playing each of the quests in the saga all while using as many new cards and archetypes as possible.

2p fellowships will be set up so that one main deck is more strict to the theme of the quest and the other deck is more for support in which it creatively follows theme to some extent but also focuses on trying out new cards and archetypes.

I mixed up the main and support decks this time. I wanted to try decks that completely avoided ALL enemies.

The Hobbits deck is very event heavy with a focus on avoiding engagements/attacks completely (out of sight and pippin hero), taking out enemies in staging area (ride them down), and encounter manipulation (risk some light, door is closed, out of the wild, fear fire foes).

The Aragorn deck was my attempt to finally use Spirit Aragorn. I think this card would be really strong if it added 2 progress instead of one to the location for his action. Instead with only 1 progress per action it takes 3 rounds minimum to get rid of most locations. BUT he does still serve as a 2-4 threat boost with the location threat negation which is helpful. This deck doesn't always reliably flip the contract but when it does it's game over.

Everytime I played I was able to use the thematic location Ford of Bruinen to discard 2-4 enemies and that was ideally the only time the aragorn deck engaged an enemy (I would optionally engage an enemy that was below Aragorn deck threat level and bounce back with Pippin if needed to avoid engaging Aragorn deck since it really couldn't handle more than a couple attacks). Otherwise terrible to behold could avoid an attack on aragorn deck if needed (Sam gets noble trait from the treasure card in campaign). Fear fire foes from hobbits deck could also be used as a last resort.

Hunting party is a really good card to get in the beginning and knock out a fell rider. IF you get hunting party in aragorn deck and ride them down in hobbits deck at start of the game you can knock out the two fell riders.

I prefer to engage, defend and attack enemies usually, but for this quest it was pretty fun to go the route of avoiding enemies altogether and making a mad dash to the end!