63 - The Fate of Numenor (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!

Since I had heard that both Voyage and Fate of Numenor were on the easier end of things, I really wanted to try to use a bunch of cards that I had either never played with, or not had much time to explore. This ultimately led me to needing to include Elladan since he is the only Tactics Noldor hero we have. That made Elrohir an auto include and sort of built the decks for me.

Side quests are great during this scenario, so I wanted to make sure that there was one down for pretty much the entirety of the game for me to be working towards. Gather Information and Send for Aid are both great ones to see early, allowing for each deck to find key pieces or get one of their expensive allies (including some Narya targets) out early. Sword-thain can get placed on either Gimli or Legolas depending on the situation. Legolas helps a lot more with resources, since Elrohir will have Steward of Gondor, but Legolas is also the best Narya target so that he can get some extra card draw.

Denethor can be a decent backup defense or scrying for a little while if necessary, but his inclusion is entirely for use with the Palantir. The encounter deck has very few locations in it, and once he gets an Unexpected Courage he should always hit on at least one option. Gandalf can help offset the threat from when you guess wrong. This allows for both decks to have tons of card draw, so some of the discarding effects from treacheries and the forced effect on the final location won't be too punishing.

Northern Tracker can pretty much trivialize the last stage by either multiple Steep Plateau's in play (their 1 threat shouldn't be much of an issue) and then cleaning them up in during the first quest phase of Stage 2. Enemies in this quest also don't pose much of a threat, especially with Elladan/Elrohir out on the board. There can be some unlucky shadow effects, so I did tend to use Calphon's ability whenever I could to put an expensive card on the bottom of the deck.