33 - The Blood of Gondor (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!

Now that The Black Riders are taken care of, it's time to finish off the Against the Shadow cycle. I've actually enjoyed the quests in this cycle quite a bit, which I wasn't expecting after really not enjoying the quests in the deluxe box. Blood of Gondor is no different, providing an interesting deck building challenge with the hidden cards. It did create some weird results on a few attempts, either resulting in incredibly easy or incredibly difficult games, but I liked the attempt at making it feel like an ambush.

I decided to go mono-sphere again for both decks, because I've been enjoying trying out the interesting options this cycle has created for those decks. The leadership deck is a all about trying to get as much use out of Boromir as possible. There are plenty of Gondor allies for him to boost, and his stats with Prince Imrahil allow for some decent siege questing and defense. With Blood of Númenor he can boost his defense stat up incredibly high. Getting an Unexpected Courage (or two) from the other deck can make siege questing pretty manageable. If you can manage to get Denethor with Sword of Morthond and a couple of Warrior of Lossarnach on the table, this deck should be able to handle the siege questing and race toward the finish line.

I found this quest to be a lot easier if I just left The Crossroads in the staging area then entire game so that I never had to do anything but Siege questing. As such, the Northern Tracker isn't quite as great in this deck as it can be in others, since I never triggered it's response. The Caldara deck is pretty standard fare, using Imladris Stargazer, Zigil Miner, and Emery it isn't too hard to build up some decent resources and get some of your bigger allies in your discard pile. Once Caldara has been discarded to bring in some help, Good Meal and Fortune or Fate can get her back into play pretty seamlessly. Frodo and Glorfindel can handle some defense, but ideally this deck doesn't want to deal with too many enemies, using Emery or spare Stargazers/Miners and chumps tended to be the easiest way to stay alive while both decks pushed forward to the finish line.