38 - The Dunland Trap (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!

This quest really messed me up the first couple of times that I played it, enough so that I decided to just power through it with a Vilya and Caldara combo (which is fine since I haven't actually used Vilya in a deck since Into Ithilien). The biggest issue this quest creates is having to more or less wipe out the boards after Stage 1B, and both of these decks are tuned to be able to handle that without much issue.

Using Desperate Alliance we can pass Glorfindel over to the Caldara deck and be able to pull three allies out of the discard pile. That + Vilya getting another blocker usually gave me enough time to be able to withstand the initial onslaught and get the board back under control again.

Both decks function in fairly standard ways, wanting to get as many allies onto the board as fast as possible so that you can block (and chump) with them as necessary to make it until all 10 time counters are removed from the quest card 3B. Since we're fighting Dunland enemies, neither deck has any card draw, but the Imladris Stargazer should hopefully be enough to get cards out. She should be the ally that the Caldara deck chooses to keep on the table after the wipe and use her ability on the Caldara deck with Zigil Miner during Stage 1B and then should be looking at the Vilya deck for the entirety of Stage 3 to try to get all of the big allies onto the table.

There aren't many attachments, since so many can get discarded, but having some out there for action advantage works quite well. Frodo Baggins is incredibly useful, able to adsorb damage as threat once per round while you wait out the time counters, and Éowyn can help get some allies into the discard pile as well as really help push to the progress needed in the 1B. There are a lot of nasty treacheries, including a potentially game ending condition attachment "In Need of A Rest." Between A Test of Will, Power of Orthanc and Miner of the Iron Hills it shouldn't be too much of an issue, but having a bunch of cancellation can really slow some of the nastier things in this quest quite a bit.