The Battle of the Pelennor Fields - Specialist Deck Series

The Specialist Deck Series arrives at one of the defining moments of the Third Age - The Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

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

For the 2-deck fellowship used to beat the previous quest, The Siege of Gondor, look here: https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/11645

There's no doubt that this is a community favourite quest and it's easy to see why. The quest is huge in scope and scale - 5 quest stages representing the shifting tides of a huge battle. All the story beats are here: the retreat from Osgiliath, the attack on Minas Tirith, the arrival of the Rohirrim (and if playing campaign mode, the arrival of Harad, and Aragorn with the Outlands forces too). There is a even a free turn at the start, so we know we are in for a real rollercoaster of a quest.

Well we won't have the thematic arrival of the Outlands from the campaign card, but we can include them ourselves. It would be a strange Outlands deck that didn't start with Hirluin the Fair as a hero. The contracts from the last cycle give us a way to start with 2 Outlands heroes, so we'll include Forlong along with Messenger of the King. Finally Denethor rounds out our mono-sphere lineup.

The first deck provides the stats and manpower to get us through the quest, but it's not without weakness. A supporting deck can provide early , a sentinel defender, card draw, and healing among other things. Beregond can start us off. Glorfindel has the and low threat. We'll round out with Beravor for her card draw.

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

For this quest we want the Outlands deck up and running as quickly as possible. There is plenty of card draw and resource generation included to do this. Ideally by stage 3 it will be in a good position to quest hard and prevent as much damage as possible being put on the Minas Tirith objective. By taking some pressure off Minas Tirith, we can make some other effects easier to handle by choosing to damage the objective. On the other side, Beregond is tooled up to deal with defense, especially to get those Wraiths on Wings out of staging, and for the final showdown with the Witch-king.

As we are not playing campaign mode, this quest gets a little easier. For one thing, we start with Aragorn in play, which is much kinder on our early questing. We also don't have to deal with extra enemies in stage 5, so wrapping up the quest should go smoothly. It's still possible to become overwhelmed in this quest, but ideally we will have sufficient time to set up our forces. In testing the decks won 3 out of 3 times and the objective didn't come close to being destroyed.