43 - Breaking of the Fellowship (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 my previous quests in the saga boxes, I'm not playing in campaign mode, so there are no boons, burdens, or threat increases for changing out heroes. And thank goodness for that, because despite my best efforts I just could not manage to beat this quest with a Hobbit deck as one of my two. Breaking of the Fellowship actually managed to surpass Into Ithilien as the quest that took me the most attempts (and most different deck ideas) before I finally managed to somewhat crack the code.

Despite my issues at making it work, I enjoyed this quest immensely. Foundations of Stone is one of my favorites, so seeing the mechanic of separate staging areas return was delightful, and I particularly liked how each deck could help out the other (or themselves) by questing successfully through Stage 3.

Action advantage seemed to be the most important thing for this quest, so I created the Twins deck to specifically give me a big leg up on that front. Aragorn, Elrohir, and Elladan all have readying mechanics, a large HP pools, and good stats for both combat and questing. Ideally, you want to be able to play Steward of Gondor onto Aragorn along with a Celebrían's Stone in order to be able to get Arwen Undómiel out to help with Elrohir's defense. The first Gondorian Shield will hopefully come out during Stage 1 so that it can be played across table to Denethor in order to provide that deck with some solid defense.

Questing shouldn't be much of a problem with Arwen, Aragorn (with the Stone) and eventually Faramir, and this deck should be able to handle as much combat as it needs to. Ideally the Quest deck will be the one to get Frodo, but the first game I managed to win had this deck find him and was still able to power to the finish line thanks to Faramir boosting a table full of small allies. For Stage 3, this deck should select Orc Hunting as it's quest card so that it can help clear out enemies at the other staging area.

The Questing deck is fairly straight-forward. It wants to defend with Denethor (hopefully multiple times with Unexpected Courage and A Burning Brand) and then get as much Willpower on the table as possible. Glorfindel can help out a little with damage if he can get a Rivendell Blade in Stage 1, otherwise he is just there to Asfaloth and be a pincushion for archery damage. I opted to use Road Darkens Frodo Baggins just so I could say that I've used him, and his ability can come in fairly handy to help handle an extra attack in Stage 4 if need be. The Seat of Amon Hen is the best Stage 3 for this deck, allowing for some extra card draw wherever it is needed. If the board is starting to overflow with locations I suppose you can take Searching the Woods, but I never encountered that issue.

That was another really fun Saga box, and I can't wait to come back to the next one. Next up on my docket is...The Nin-in-Eilph, which I remember being absolutely terrible. Wish me luck!