23 - Flies and Spiders (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!

This quest was fairly fun to build for, and a nice break from the Heirs of Numenor box that messed me up pretty well. I just finally got On the Doorstep from this newest cycle of reprints, so this will be fun for me to play through these quests since I haven't seen any of them yet. Again, these decks were fairly standard fare, but I did try to include as many On the Doorstep cards as I could.

The biggest thing here is to make absolutely sure that you're ready to advance to Stage 2. Have Bilbo as beefed up as you possibly can with Sting, his ring, Fast Hitches, and a Ring Mail. The quest is far easier to go through with the Bilbo hanging out with Dain in stage 3 while the Spirit/Tactics deck handles the neverending run of spiders until Bilbo can rescue enough Dwarves to join the fun. Both decks have a small amount of location control to avoid having to waste Baggins resources of travel effects.

Overall, the quest isn't too bad as long as Bilbo is ready to go before blowing past the first stage. I always tried to stall long enough to get a Gandalf out to lower threat in the Dain deck before advancing as well. It's not a terrible idea to spend the majority of resources on attachments, saving allies to throw on the board after Bilbo starts waking your other heroes up, but I didn't really have too many issues when I swarmed the board either.