46 - The Antlered Crown (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!

Erkenbrand is really good. I had never used him before trying this quest, and he did a ton of work here. I knew I needed some healing to be able to keep him going, and deal with some of the effects that damage characters based on either drawing cards or having cards in your hand. This quest, since it involves Dunland, also really punishes card draw or having cards in hand, so I built both decks around low cost cards, or the ability to toss them away to Éowyn so that each could keep it's hand nearly empty. The only card that really needs to be saved is a Feint or two to use on the Raven Chieftan in Stage 3 so not too many time counters get eaten up by him.

Erkenbrand and Beregond should have no trouble defending for the table, especially with Elrond able to boost healing done by the Warden of Healing. The combat deck pretty much focuses entirely upon killing enemies, utilizing both Sentinel and Ranged keywords to help out the other deck as necessary, while it will hopefully be able to put enough location control through Northern Tracker and Thrór's Key and enough Willpower with all of the allies that Vilya can pump out.

I'm officially done the The Ring-Maker Cycle now, and it probably slots in near the bottom of my favorites so far. The Time Counter mechanic is kind of a pain to deal with, and really easy to forget a trigger on occasion. The Nin-in-Eilph was brutally bad, and there were a few quests that aren't particularly memorable. Now that I'm through this cycle, I have only played two or three quests total in any of the future cycles or saga boxes, so I will be going in almost completely blind. I'm excited to see what is next! This also marks the halfway point of currently released products, having completed 4/8 cycles and 4/8 saga boxes.