50 - The Uruk-Hai (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!

Diving back into the Sagas, now with The Treason of Saruman. Once again, I'm playing these all as standalone quests and not in campaign mode, so I don't have any boons, burdens, or threat penalties for switching out heroes from The Breaking of the Fellowship.

I drew some inspiration for this fellowship from Onidsen's fantastic Lorefindel Walks to Mordor decks. I knew that since each deck only had two heroes (Glorfindel and Pippin are the two captives) I needed a way to get the most extra breathing room that I could. I decided to go all in on taking undefended attacks and chump blocking so that I could use my heroes pretty much exclusively for questing and attacking until I got the board state under control.

Aragorn is the focal point of the fellowship, being loaded up with pretty much every attachment under the sun so that he can help each deck pay for cards, absorb a bunch of damage, defend, or attack as need be. Ideally, Ugluk will be engaged while the chump deck is 1st player, so that a well timed Feint + The Three Hunters will allow for Prince Imrahil + Éomer + Aragorn to be attacking for enough to take him out in a single round. This combo will need the other deck to pass over The Three Hunters using Message from Elrond, so there are a lot of pieces necessary to make it work, but with all of the card draw in the Gandalf/Treebeard deck + Legolas and Foe-hammer it shouldn't be too hard to find them for the round you want to advance to 2A.

The chump deck will pretty much rely on feeding cheap allies to the Uruks (not engaging Uruk-Hai Fighters, and relying on Gandalf's Staff to cancel shadows to prevent enemies from returning to the staging area) so that Eomer and Imrahil can swing back and kill them. Legolas and Faramir are the two most important allies to see, facilitating some card draw and boosting the other decks Willpower to get through the quest. I lost a few games due to hitting 30 pursuit, and won a few others hovering around 27-29 thanks to either not having Faramir, or getting my Ethir Swordsman killed by a treachery.

Gandalf and Treebeard are both incredibly good, and have large enough pools of Hit Points that they can absorb some undefended attacks in the early game along with Aragorn to let Treebeard swing back and kill the enemies. Elrond and Warden of Healing can help keep Treebeard upright, and then Waters of Nimrodel is a fantastic reset button to heal up all of the archery and undefended damage sitting around the board (including Glorfindel is you aren't able to deal with Grisnakh for a few rounds).