The Wastes of Eriador - Good win rate

Very difficult quest. Good to play if you like challenges, and you're ok with losing due to random encounter card combos.

We played around 20 times, tweaked our decks constantly, and with these decks we won close to half the time. So I'm pretty confident in these decks to handle many different scenarios in this quest. Healing is crucial, threat lowering is crucial. Player 1 quests, manages threat, and location control. Player 2 does most all the defending and attacking.

Player 1 (Spirit and Lore): The most important cards are Light of Valinor for Glorfindel. (Although there is a Treachery that deals 1 damage to a Hero and negates their text box, which lets you quest Glorfindel without having to raise your threat, still LoV is better.) Warden of Healing is crucial to get out ASAP, as you'll take a lot of random damage that can end the game. Master of the Forge is huge because you'll have a lot of very valuable Attachments, and he can get a lot of them into your hand. Elfhelm may seem like a weird choice, but if you can get him out early, he is a game changer. Threat skyrockets in this game due to the Night effect and doomed cards. If you play Elfhelm early, he negates the Night effect of raising your threat by 1 every other round, and some of the doomed impact. He can easily save you 10+ threat by the end of the game. Once you get to middle and end game, Elfhelm is no longer useful to play. Unexpected Courage is huge to play as many copies on Beregond as you can. Silver Lamp is good to give to Player 2. Asfaloth is good for location control. Ranger Spikes can be useful in spots, but it's the least important of the Lore cards. The rest of the cards are mostly for questing. Favor of the Valor is crucial to play on whoever is closer to threating out, usually Player 2.

Player 2 (Tactics and Spirit) needs the usual Tactics arsenal, such as Bow of the Galadhrim for Legolas, Rivendell Blade for Legolas, Gondorian Shield and Spear of the Mark for Beregond. Honour Guard is huge because there of random damage generated by the encounter deck, and one Side Quest prevents healing, so canceling damage is a huge benefit compared to healing. Same with Raven Winged Helm. Gandalf should always be used for threat lowering.

In general, the first quest card takes forever to finish, so you try to build up your board state, but while you're doing that, your threat goes way up due to the Night effect (+1 threat every other round) and Doomed 4 and Doomed 3 Treacheries. Encounter Side Quests are bad, but we found that you almost always have to finish them, except maybe once you're past the first quest. But it takes so long to finish the first quest, that you'll usually get 1-2 of the side quests in play. There are treacheries that punish you for having side quests in play, so as I said, we almost always try to finish them, even though it's frustrating because then you have to wait for the Day phase to go back to the main quest.

Once you finish the first stage, the second one must be finished ASAP because you lose an ally every other round in Stage 2. By the time you get to the third stage, you should have enough questing power to finish the quest, and enough combat power to kill the boss enemy.

The most common way to lose is bad combos of encounter cards, like ones that deal damage to every questing character, and bad shadow cards, like the enemy making another attack. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do about bad Treacheries because Test of Will doesn't work at Night in this game. So 50% of the time Test of Will is useless. We still include it in the deck because there are times when you really need it during the Day phase.

There were games where we thought we had it won, but some horrible combination ended the game on the last round. One time we had over 20 threat added to the staging area in one round.

All in all, this quest grew on us, once we had decks that could give us a fighting chance.