28 - Encounter at Amon Din (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!

Hobbits are one of my favorite traits to play with (can't wait for the Black Riders quests here soon), so I was excited to finally get a third Hobbit hero to build with. Sadly, Pippin just isn't that great. I was able to get his ability to fire off an enemy into a waiting Ranger Spikes on a few occasions, but aside from playing Hobbit-sense this deck would have been orders of magnitude better just by including Glorfindel and a few of his toys instead. It was still fun to try to build around, and since this quest was relatively easy it was good to get to try to do some fun shenanigans with Small Target (though it is really difficult to make that work). The hobbit deck is pretty much there to give some card draw to the Hirluin, as well as keeping some enemies occupied (via traps or just Frodo defending/Hobbit-sense/Small Target) so that they don't clog up the staging area.

Much like the Hobbit deck, the Outlands deck isn't running at peak efficiency either. I wanted to try out Lord of Morthond and Strength of Arms so I needed a mono-leadership deck, which really cuts down on the card draw that Beravor provided. It still ended up working decently, but I ended up with a lot of extra resources without the card draw. Cram and Strength of Arms are really useful combo to pick off the boss as quick as possible when Stage 2 arrives. Since I didn't use Balin for any of the On the Doorstep quests, I figured this would be a decent place to slot him in, even though there aren't any truly atrocious shadow effects to worry about.

Since this quest isn't particularly punishing (unless the Craven Eagle shows up at a really bad time), it was fun to get to build some weird decks that would have probably gotten crushed by some of the earlier quests in this cycle. I doubt I'll ever use Pippin again, but who knows, maybe a time will come where he can shine.