49 - Deadmen's Dike (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!

One thing that I've discovered playing through all of these quests is that I really enjoy a quest that does something a little bit different. As such, all three quests in The Lost Realm have just been a ton of fun to play through. They have all felt very different and provided different deckbuilding challenges, and Deadmen's Dike adds another loss condition: having an empty draw deck. Treacheries that punish you for having additional copies of cards in your discard pile also forced a slightly different strategy (although I'll admit that they never caused me quite as much trouble as all of the enemies did).

The Dunedain deck is pretty much a Voltron-Aragorn deck. Once he can get loaded up with readying (Unexpected Courage, Wingfoot, #Cram, Lembas, Heir of Mardil + Steward of Gondor) he can handle all of the defense plus still attack to pull any enemies that might have engaged (or started engaged with) the trap deck. Celebrían's Stone and Sword that was Broken can both help with resource smoothing and increase Willpower by quite a bit. It was fun playing such an attachment heavy deck, which I hadn't done since trying a super defender Bilbo deck back in the Mirkwood cycle.

The Mono-Lore deck is there mostly for card draw and traps. Forest Snare is the card you want in opening hand, allowing you to trap the Baleful shade that starts engaged with this deck. This allows the Dunedain deck to kill their shade and then pull that trapped one over using Aragorn's ability. By doing that, you should be able to quest with all three heroes for the rest of the game and still have all three of them ready for combat. The Lore deck has a ton of card draw as well, allowing for both decks to happily run 60 cards so you don't have to worry as much about running out.

Gildor's Counsel + Scroll of Isildur is an absurdly good combo, that I somehow hadn't run before during this series. It can give a little more breathing room early game, or save it for when Thauradir comes out to prevent him from healing and making as many attacks. Master of the Forge not only helps find attachments, but can also shuffle Gildor's Counsel back in from the bottom of the deck so that it can hopefully be found again. Errand-rider from the other deck can help make sure that the lore deck has enough resources to get a few allies and traps out and still have enough to slow down the encounter deck when absolutely necessary.