53 - The Wastes of Eriador (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!

I haven't been keeping exact count, but I'm pretty sure I had more losses on this quest than I have had on any other quest up to this point in the series (though Into Ithilien might be close). Almost all of my losses occurred in the first or second round of the game, where something went just sideways enough that I had too many wolves to deal with. I tried a few different things, ranging from Traps to Dunedain to Dwarves and never really settled on anything that I really liked. So, I settled on running a Twins deck at it, which is the same way I beat Breaking of the Fellowship, which was another quest that kept overwhelming me with enemies.

Honour Guard and Raven-winged Helm both worked phenomenally with Elrohir, allowing him to defend around the table pretty easily once either Arwen Undómiel or Elven Mail showed up. The Day's Rising and Heir of Mardil also allowed him to help generate even more resources so that I had a bunch in hand for all of the wolves that showed up in Stage 3. Elladan tended to be a bit more pressed for resources, so Errand-rider can help out, but he was able to help take out wolves on either side of the table once he gets Rivendell Blade and Rivendell Bow. Aragorn provides some decent questing help, along with an emergency Sentinel defender or 3 in the combat phase.

The questing deck wants to keep it's threat below 25 (or ideally in secrecy) so that it never has to engage an enemy unless it really wants to. Once Sentinel is on the board it is usually a good idea to optionally engage one enemy, especially at day time, to clear some threat out and let Pippin draw a card. Once Merry gets a Hobbit Pony and some Fast Hitch he can keep the threat down all by himself, but I added some Hobbit Pipe and events as a way to get some additional card draw. The allies are mostly just there for additional willpower, so they are much more expendable to be discarded to some treacheries and during Stage 2 than the allies in the Twins deck are.

Despite having my party constantly killed by the wolves, this quest wasn't nearly as frustrating to me as some of the previous quests that I had to bang my head against the wall for. I think it's mostly because I kept dying to the same thing (way too many wolves) as opposed to constantly trying to patch up different parts of my decks like in Nin-in-Eilph or Escape from Dol Goldur.