2 - Hunt For Gollum (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!

My main point of this series is to try out all of the heroes in the game at least once, and see how they interact with one another. I recall from playing this quest earlier in my life that it was relatively straight forward and I breezed through it. After learning more about the game, I realize that is because I was playing the "Guarded" keyword completely wrong. Armed with that knowledge, The Hunt for Gollum was a bit trickier than I remembered it being. It doesn't have many enemies, but has a lot of locations. So I tossed in Beravor and Bilbo to see how much card draw I could get for myself to hopefully get everything up and running as quickly as possible.

The Leadership/Spirit deck is the questing powerhouse of the two, with Northern Tracker being invaluable in this quest. My goal was to get Celebrian's Stone and Steward on Aragorn as quickly as possible and have Theodred toss Aragorn a resource as often as possible while Bilbo and Beravor keep feeding that deck cards to play. In most games, I used Theodred to feed Arwen resources until the card draw was able to find me Celebrian's. The other deck relied upon drawing into the Winged Guardians, Feints, and Forest Snares so that I could keep the enemies at bay while the other deck devoted most of it's time to questing (though I could easily ready Aragorn with his ability and discarding Horse-Breakers).

I a perfect world, Sneak Attack + Gandalf + Gondorian Spearman handled all of the big ugly Trackers before they could even deal me any damage, but Gimli and the aforementioned Feints and Snares did a pretty good job at keeping things moving when I didn't have that combination in hand and ready to go.

All in all, it was a fun set of decks to play, which worked very differently from the decks I used to work through the Core Set.