"Won in One" Land of Sorrow 2-Player Fellowship

SPOILERS for Land of Sorrow scenario are in this deck description.

A 2-player (actually 2-handed solo) fellowship I put together specifically to beat Land of Sorrow. I tried the quest blind with different decks, bringing a Burglar's Turn deck initially---bad idea. So I sat on it for a couple of weeks and stewed, ran through many potential decks in my head, eventually putting these two together. I won on the first try after an epic 2 1/2 hour game (I play slowly and carefully when I'm on my own, I guess. Lots of pausing and thinking).

The decks are pretty intuitive in that one handles questing and the other handles combat, for the most part. The mono-spirit deck includes a couple of key cards intended to support the tactics/spirit deck, such as Song of Wisdom to enable some essential healing to hit the table.

Land of Sorrow raises your threat very quickly, so threat control is very important. It also hits you with an enemy with attack as high as 9 strength given the wrong combination of Camps and Wardens, or 11 with a bad shadow. And two of the Wardens need 11 attack (13 with a bad shadow) to defeat in one swipe. Add to that the need for a bit of location control (because you want to travel to Camps, not other locations--- although I did take some rounds to clear out locations that prevent healing) and the need to quickly build willpower so you can advance at the speed you want to advance. It's a tough nut to crack.

Probably the trickiest part was, given all of those requirements, Sentinel and Ranged don't work against Wardens! So it's that much harder to do dedicated willpower or combat decks. I initially thought about doing two decks which could check all of the willpower and combat boxes I listed above, but that was just too crazy. Specialization is so much easier to build. On stage 2 you'll get all 3 Wardens back, and at that point it's very likely that the mono-spirit deck will end up engaged with one. Then you'd have a hard time defeating it, because you don't have attack power and can't use Legolas's ranged attacks. So that's where the secret weapon comes in: get the single copy of Thorongil on Eowyn and use her +9 attack boost to take out a Warden while on stage 2. Time it correctly and you can do that during the combat phase to win, never having to deal with the extra card reveal (if you're not engaged with a Warden while on stage 2, you need to reveal an additional card each round). Thorongil is proxied here with Prince of Dol Amroth. You need a lot of threat reduction to make sure threat is low enough at the end of the game that you can afford to raise it by 3 for that trick.

Dáin Ironfoot and Beregond handle most of the defense, with Beregond also acting as a key threat reduction card-- assign his defenses accordingly. Beorn provides extra defense and the massive start-of-game 5 attack power.

This is built for a single core set card pool in mind, with the following exception: I've gotten a few extra cards from various sources over the years, so I do have 3x A Test of Will and I have 4 copies of Stand and Fight, which are divvied up 3 and 1 across these two decks.