8 - Into the Pit (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!

The very first deck I looked up online and built when I first got this game was a tri-sphere dwarf swarm deck with Dain, and it was super fun and simple to play. Having some experience with how good he can be, I opted to slot as many dwarves as I could into these two decks to try to make the most of that ability. I slotted in Brand and the two new dwarf heroes as well, so that I could give them a run. I almost never got to make use of Dwalin's ability (I needed his willpower for questing) or Brand's (I got to ready Beravor to draw some cards a few times I guess after sending her questing). I could see Dwalin being useful in the future, but Brand just seemed sort of bad...maybe like Dunhere he will get some more tools to be able to be better in the future.

I put Steward onto Dwalin to have access to Unexpected Courage to deal with that readying treachery and to get Northern Trackers on the board to avoid some of the nastier travel effects. Ancestral Knowledge and the Cave Torch were pretty great at dealing with some nastier things, especially if I accidentally underquested.

The Descendant of Thorondor was really great for picking off the goblins that stick up in the staging area, and the cheaper eagles were really nice to have out on the board early as a way to deal with some of the ugly treacheries on if I got swarmed due to some dumb use of a cave torch.

All in all, I don't think that these are the best possible decks I could build for this scenario (I still lost with it a few times), but it was fun trying out some of the newer heroes and seeing how they worked. I think the two fellowships that I built for the other quests in this deluxe are a lot better.