Sam wins Against the Shadow

Those are the two decks my girlfriend and I used to beat the Against the Shadow, again, and this is the first deckbuilding experience for my partner Sam. She built the "Sam Wins" deck, because, "Sam Wins". It's obviously a Denethor and sons valour deck. On my advice, she had her first steps in deckbuilding starting with a mono-sphere deck. From there, it's 100% her creation and slightly different from my own take of the archetype.

Seeing she was building Gondor, I followed with my mono- deck, which is quite classical. With so few questing power, the only cycle I could think about tackling with those decks would be Against the Shadow with its numerous Siege and Battle quest stages.

The variance of win/lose is high and not so much dependent on our playstyle. Because on some quests, if you don't find Visionary Leadership right off the bat, you're pretty much screwed. But not all the time! Sometimes you can do without or at least in the first few turns. Of course, healing could also be an issue (Druadan Forest...). All in all, some very satisfying victories, especially on the last 3 scenarios!

I have to say, on 3 last scenarios, I discovered you could play with threat a lot with those decks! Like why not lose the quest and deal with all those enemies, so we can be safer on our next round of (low) questing? It worked for the most part, and Visionary Leadership always showed up at the right time. On that we were definitely a bit lucky. On a few occasions, Trained for War greatly helped with mitigating the wait of the Visionary Leadership, as well as Wait no Longer. Grabbing a feeble enemy and only revealing 1 card during the quest phase is invaluable.

Here are the results:

• Peril in Pelargir: 1/2
• Into Ithilien: 1/2
• Siege of Cair Andros: 1/17 (yes, that's a weird result actually cos our decks were tailored for that, but we were SO unlucky, it was insane)
• The Steward's Fear: 1/1 (even with all that standard questing!)
• The Druadan Forest: 1/3
• Encounter at Amon Din: 1/2
• Assault on Osgiliath: 1/1
• The Blood of Gondor: 1/1
• The Morgul Vale: 1/1