We Must Away, Ere Break of Day - Progression

A few notes: We have shied away from Dwarf decks in the past, particularly throughout Khazad-dum and the Dwarrowdelf cycle with the express purpose of using Dwarves during the Hobbit Saga Boxes as it is fun to be thematic and we didn't want to do all Dwarves all the time; we also wanted to try out a lot of new cards as this box gave us a lot of new, strong, Dwarf synergy cards; our intention was to obtain the treasures (which we did) so that we could use them in the subsequent scenarios; we view each scenario as a puzzle to be solved and therefore read the encounter cards before deckbuilding, however, we only read the encounter cards for the first scenario and have not looked at the second and third scenario so hopefully we picked a decent group of heroes to carry us through; and finally as just alluded to, we intend on keeping the same band of heroes throughout this box, we will change the decklists a bit to suit the needs of the particular scenario but the band of 6 will remain the same.

Our playthrough: We felt in control the whole game, not a terrible lot to note regarding our playthrough. I didn't find this one to be of particular difficult and there were not many, if any, stand out moments. We did obtain both the purse and the key (which is cool) but, we didn't need the purse because we were fortunate to not spend many Baggins' resources on cancellation and therefore had plenty to pay to travel to the cave.

Card choices to note: We obviously wanted Dain in a Dwarf deck but we also wanted to try out Thorin's resource acceleration. This posed an interesting deck building quandary as we oft omit the leadership sphere. We designed around this by planning for Thorin to double down on resource acceleration by being the target for Steward of Gondor and further placing Narvi's Belt on him. This allowed Thorin to pay for a lot of cards in his triple sphere deck. Moreover, we included an older card that we had never used, Parting Gifts. Thorin was always brimming full of resources so there were plenty to steal. I do not know what the next scenarios entail, however, I believe the Crows appear in each scenario so I hope Thalin was a good choice, if he only nullifies that card I think he's still good but we will see. We only took 1 spirit hero so the idea will be to include songs and other resource smoothing if we need more spirit in future scenarios. Also, I hope the lack of Orcs in this scenario leading to the not taking Dwalin does not come back to bite us but we did take Nori so we at least have his threat reduction. We also omitted some objectively strong cards in favor of others, for example Legacy of Durin. Why? We felt (and it was true) that Ori would provide plenty of card draw and the tactics/leadership deck did not have enough Dwarves itself to play to benefit from Legacy of Durin being played on that side of the board.

This may not be the most innovative deck as many likely use a band of Dwarves for this Hobbit Saga, however, I hope we have made some interesting picks that differ from your run of the mill Dwarf deck. Hope you have fun, we certainly enjoy the narrative, thematic, adventure style !