52 - The Road to Isengard (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!

My plans for The Road to Isengard were pretty simple. I wanted some fairly high willpower heroes so that I could try to claim as many Ents as possible in Stage 1, and then I wanted an Ent deck with Merry, Pippin, and Treebeard. I pretty much always stuck around Stage 1 for two rounds, which more or less guarantees at an Ent for each deck, and if you're particularly lucky can manage to snag a third to give to the Ent deck as well. I didn't have too many issues dealing with the additional encounter cards right off the bat (and even found it helpful if they were enemies, allowing me to quest unsuccessfully for a round so that Orthanc doesn't trigger and you don't clear the Gates right away).

The Location Control deck is pretty much just that. I loaded it up with lots of Willpower, Asfaloth, Thrór's Key and A Watchful Peace to help the Ents chip away at Stage 2, or oftentimes allowing for players to not use their quest action and instead use them to kill some Orcs/Wargs. Ring of Barahir is nice for Aragorn, allowing him to help out both decks by spending his resources as Lore. Hasty Stroke should be saved for when Grima pops up as a shadow card, since Saruman seems to get that attack counts as undefended every single time I play. Galadriel can be used as card draw for most of the game, then should help quest using Nenya once Stage 3 starts.

The Ent deck is pretty simple, hoping to get as many Ents out with 1-2 damage on them as possible so that Booming Ent and company can put a ton of damage on Saruman in one turn. Boromir is our main Saruman defender for the round we travel to Orthanc. With Gondorian Shield and Arwen Undómiel he can defend for six, and then hopefully a shadow effect will deal a damage to him allowing him to ready and be part of the attack back. There is plenty of healing to keep Treebeard upright, and then clean up all of the archery damage that the Ents will be taking throughout the scenario. Gandalf's Search is a way to get around Saruman attacking with card draw in Stage 3, allowing the deck to either dig for cards or just get one in hand if it starts looking like an empty hand loss condition might be reached.