Passage Through Mirkwood - Nightmare - Progression

Are you guys still building? My wife and I are following along!!

I'm glad you guys are enjoying !

My wife and I have been on a long hiatus, we both work and have kids so it's no always easy to find the time. We actually just talked about getting back into it a few days ago. We own literally everything that has come out so we intend to play through it all eventually.

I hope we get back to it soon, if not I'll have to start following your deck building !

-Brad

How do you guys tackle deck-building? We just seem to be bad at it.

It always depends on the scenario. I know some disagree and want to be surprised, however, we view this game as a puzzle game. The puzzle is building the deck perfectly tailored for overcoming the threats of the encounter deck. Therefore, we always start by looking at the whole encounter deck thoroughly.

Our process usually starts with choosing our fellowship/distribution of spheres. Sometimes we end up tweaking the heroes or sphere representation once we notice we've chosen a lot or little of cards from a certain sphere.

Once we choose heroes we pull out our binders and just pull out every card we think might be appropriate for the scenario. This usually results in 70-100 card decks. Although allowed, we prefer to stick to 50 wherever possible because the 50 absolute best cards will be more efficient than a huge deck. So from that initial pass we iterate and iterate and iterate over the cards trying to remove the least relevant until we get down to 50.

This is one reason to include We Are Not Idle even without dwarves, just chose zero dwarves and effectively it thins your deck to 47 cards rather than 50, more efficient.

One of the biggest considerations we make is what area of focus is most important to beat the scenario and look for the sphere that excels in that area. For example, very broad stroke, high level, over-simplification:

 Spirit: Questing, cancellation and threat management

 Lore: Healing and card draw (support)

 Tactics: Combat

 Leadership: Resource acceleration and action advantage

Once we know which of these areas/combination of areas best suit the scenario we basically pick the best cards from the spheres that represent those areas (with some cards selected specifically for certain cards of the encounter deck).

We usually favor spirit heavily, I think it's the best class and we don't tend to favor leadership, it's a bit of a JOATMON (jack of all trades master of known). It can do a bit of everything but is not terribly competent in any one area. I rather specialize with a sphere that is really, really good at something specific.

Lastly, for us, we value diversity in our gameplay. We could easily smash a lot of scenarios with a general purpose deck but the same thing isn't fun all the time. We could play dwarves or outlands a lot but it gets boring. So sometimes we know our deck is sub-optimal but we select heroes we haven't used for a while to spice it up (Although it's very hard not to use spirit Glorfindel all the time). We also try to use as many new cards and heroes as they are released, even if they may not be most optimal.

This is just an overview of what we do but it really depends on the scenario. Also, over time deck building gets more intuitive (but also more difficult with more card options). I have experience with years of other card games so some of that intuition is ingrained because it is true of any card game (like card advantage = good), et cetera.

Hope it helps and feel free to ask me questions even if I haven't posted a deck, although I will not look at a scenario's cards or player cards until I reach it in progression.

-Brad