31 - A Knife in the Dark (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!

As with A Shadow of the Past, I am not playing in campaign mode, just building decks that I think can handle the scenarios that allow me to explore the card pool like I have been doing in this whole series. I swapped out Fatty Bolger, even though I liked him well enough for Aragorn, to keep it moderately thematic.

The Hobbit deck didn't undergo too many changes from the last quest, just adding some bigger allies and Elf-Stone to be able to cheat them into play along with the effect from The Prancing Pony. Son of Arnor, Hail of Stones, and Gandalf are all in the deck to help deal with Bill Ferny as early as possible to prevent the threat of each deck from getting too high. Sam and Merry should be able to handle all of the combat necessary, but some chumping and Barliman Butterbur can help a little bit when things go really sideways, which can happen since neither deck has any Shadow cancellation. Faramir can really help alleviate the issues that Power in Their Terror can cause by adding some Willpower to all allies committed to the quest.

Beregond remains pretty invaluable in this box, easily handling defensive duties for both decks when necessary. In order to be able to deal The Witch King you can load him up with The Favor of the Lady, which when combined with Sword that was Broken (and Faramir if you have a Black Rider engaged), will give him the Willpower necessary to handle those attacks. Aragorn with Gondorian Fire and Glorfindel with a Dagger of Westernesse should be more than enough fire power to handily wipe out all enemies that engage that deck in Stage 3. Ideally, that should be either one or no extra Nazgul that were added into the deck in previous steps, although these decks can certainly deal with a few more if the encounter deck is particularly unkind.