20 - Peril in Pelargir (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!

Yikes. This was another deck that I really had to build around (and steal the idea for the Mono-Leadership deck from another progression series deck I saw here). From what I've heard, I'll be using a ton of tactics in future quests, so I opted to leave that sphere out for this one. The Battle keyword is pretty interesting, and from what I've heard fairly disliked by the community in general. I enjoyed the challenge of having to build a deck where Willpower was pretty much worthless until the final stage of the quest, but man all of the enemies that this quest throws at you makes it super tough. Having Frodo to absorb some hits as threat, and Ranger Spikes to keep a few guys stuck in the staging area did help quite a bit, and Imarhil's built in readying from chump blockers also proved incredibly useful.

OHaUH Gandalf proved to be quite useful, and this was the first time I have ever used him instead of his Core Set counterpart. The threat increase didn't matter with Aragorn's ability, and he was a huge boon to questing throughout the entirety of the games I played. I really liked the Ithilien Lookout as well, who when combos very nicely with Ranger Spikes, Asfaloth, Northern Tracker, etc to be able to really manage threat in the staging area pretty easily.

All in all, I would say this is one of the tougher quests that I've played so far and it provided a pretty unique experience when compared to the quests played beforehand. It was also kind of nice to get a break from endless hordes of orcs and goblins like I faced for all of the last saga and cycle.