55 - Across the Ettenmoors (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 built this entire fellowship strictly so I could make that bad pun (that I'm sure countless other people have already made), and to try to see if I could have some fun with Dori, since he is usually clumped in with Pippin as one of the worst heroes in the game. After building this, I can see why people are a bit disappointed in Dori. He actually functioned super well in this quest and was really helpful, but any of the other dedicated defending heroes probably would have done and equally good job and required less set up time.

The mining deck relies on the classic Zigil Miner + Imladris Stargazer combo to discard Hidden Cache and Gimli so that the deck can generate resources and use Stand and Fight to pull some allies out of the discard pile when need be. Dori will get loaded up with some Ring Mail and a Raven-winged Helm so that he can pretty easily defend anything on the board, or toss over his 5 defense (with Arwen Undómiel) to Bifur to defend on the Ent side of the table. I did play with the updated errata on Erebor Battle Master and Legacy of Durin, and both still seemed perfectly usable in this deck. Henneth Annûn Guard was used to cheat another Raven-winged Helm onto Bifur so that I had even more defensive capability over on that side of the board.

The Ent deck really needs a bit of help to get going, so it has a bit of card draw and relies on the mining deck tossing resources over to Bifur and hopefully getting at least one copy of Resourceful out prior to leaving secrecy. Once the Ents are actually out, it can pretty much handle anything, especially with an Ent Draught + Dori'd version of Bifur taking the biggest attacks from the trolls.

As expected from a dwarf deck without Dáin Ironfoot and an Ent deck, the early game willpower can be a little bit of an issue. It was typically pretty slow going the first couple of rounds until Ents started readying and Gimli was on the board, but since both decks start quite low on threat, and most of the enemies and locations in the quest don't have high threat, it worked out alright.