66 - The Thing in the Depths (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 main goal in constructing decks for this quest was to ensure that each planning phase would take as long as possible. Despite how great he is, I have actually only used Erestor once in my progression series, so I tinkered with the traditional Noldor lineup that I have been using in this cycle and slotted him in instead of Galdor of the Havens. The Gandalf deck is pretty straight-forward, with Denethor and Beravor there to provide extra resources and card draw to get him off the ground and running.

Both decks can get moving really quickly, and get quite a few allies out on the table. This usually made it perfectly acceptable to delay a little bit before bringing Sahir and Na'asiyah into play. There should be enough Willpower out on the table to chump or use Gandalf or Denethor with a Gondorian Shield and then quest through the Helm of the Stormcaller, meaning that you really only have to deal with them for one round. That balancing act of when to bring Sahir and Na'asiyah into play proved to be the most difficult thing in this quest for me. I found that round 4/5 was about the best to be able to quest through all of their resource tokens.

Once Stage 1 is completed, these decks didn't have too many issues at all with The Thing in the Depths itself. Thror's Map is fantastic for being able to ignore some of the nastier travel effects this quest has (note: these decks were built prior to discovering that Thror's Map was nerfed in the most recent round of reprints), and by this point the Erestor deck should be able to hang onto A Test of Will between rounds to keep a treachery from overwhelming locations with multiple grapple enemies at once and forcing that 9 threat loss condition.