21 - Into Ithilien (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!

Well. That's a quest.

I have no shame in admitting defeat on my own to this one, basically stealing the ideas for these decks directly from Warden of Arnor's wonderful Line Unbroken series. I made a few tweaks to each deck, going mono-tactics obviously, and then removing some of the encounter deck manipulation that he used.

The gist here is that this quest hurts, and hurts in a lot of different ways so I just wanted to get as many stats out onto the board as I possibly could. As such, both decks start with very high threat, and keep climbing throughout the entire game. In a perfect world you can avoid the two enemies in the staging area for at least one round, optionally engaging one to tank with Beregond, though that almost never actually worked out in practice for me.

The enemies hit incredibly hard, and there are tons of them, so Ranger Spikes, A Light in the Dark, Feint, and Thicket of Spears are absolutely vital to survival in Phase 1 (and 2 if your ranger gets killed in the staging area). I found that if I was able to survive until Stage 4, siege questing was actually super easy and I was able to power through thanks to all of the defense in the tactics decks.

There were still a lot of things that could go sideways and derail this set of decks, including multiple losses on the first or second round of the game...but I won a few times without the wins feeling like I got crazy lucky, so I'm going to move on and probably never play this quest again.