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Cardboard of the Rings 
it may be on the boat, but that is one slow ass boat!
Hi Guys,
first off all let me get my emotions off: Woohoo, I won, can’t believe it. Have never won anything like that, yeehaw š
Ok, thanks for bearing with me, here are some comments:
You probably missed the preview for the card Born Aloft, which can be found here:
And one minor nitpick: I am pretty sure that you have to have the Westfold! guy in play in order to use his ability, which is still nice, but would’ve been much stronger, if usable from your hand.
Also I think that starting with Eomund, a Rohan themed deck becomes pretty viable, especially because you have forgotten about the strongest Rohan ally so far: Gleowine!
If you play with all Rohan heores (Eowyn, Dunhere and Theodred) you have a pretty strong hero mix, but the deck mostly lacks card draw. Thats where Gleowine + Mustering the Rohirrim shines (remember that Eowyn can spawn Gelowine with Stand and Fight). Here is my first try at such a deck with some notes:
Hero (3)
Dunhere (Core) x1
Eowyn (Core) x1
Theodred (Core) x1
Ally (20)
Eomund (CatC) x3
Gleowine (Core) x3
Gandalf (Core) x3
Northern Tracker (Core) x3
Snowbourn Scout (Core) x3
Son of Arnor (Core) x1
Westfold Horse-Breaker (THfG) x3
Faramir (Core) x1
Attachment (8)
Dunedain Mark (THfG) x3
Steward of Gondor (Core) x3
Unexpected Courage (Core) x2
Event (22)
A Test of Will (Core) x3
Dwarven Tomb (Core) x1
Hasty Stroke (Core) x2
Mustering the Rohirrim (THfG) x3
Sneak Attack (Core) x3
Stand and Fight (Core) x3
The Galadhrim’s Greeting (Core) x3
Valiant Sacrifice (Core) x3
Will of the West (Core) x1
The main strategy would be to keep your threat low (the obvious ones + Stand and Fight for extra Gandalf) and kill the enemies while they are still staging with Dunhere + Dunedain Marks. Since you can lower your starting with both a sneaked Gandalf or a Galadrims Greetings in turn one, you might never encounter a tough enemy.
With twelve Rohan allies the Muster becomes viable, especially since you want Gleowine.
If Eomund leaves play while Gleowine is also present, he then has immediately replaced himself with a new card.
Should you ever have to encounter a big bad guy, Eomund can block and die, giving you plenty of hitting power in return (5 ATK in your heroes alone).
The Westfold! guy also interacts nicely with Valiant Sacrifice.
I thats about it, thanks for a great show guys. Keep up the good work,
Sebastian
Great show as always, guys! I probably listened to this about four times on repeat at work today.
I’m gonna have to echo Sirprim’s sentiment about the Westfold Horse-Breaker, though. On page 22 of the rules, under “Actions,” it says:
“In order to trigger an action on a hero, ally, or attachment card, the card on which the action is printed must be in play, unless the action specifies that it can be triggered from an out of play state. Event cards are actions that are played directly from a player’s hand.”
That considered, I’m thinking that for my regular two player games, my questing/support focused Lore/Spirit deck will probably go ahead and swap out 3x Wandering Took for 3x Westfold Horse-Breaker once The Hunt for Gollum finally hits store shelves. I never really did anything other than quest with my Tooks anyhow, so switching them out and gaining the ability to be able to ready a hero if I really need them during an “oh shit!” or opportune moment would be an improvement. Plus, like Sirprim mentioned, adding in Valiant Sacrifice makes for a very nice combo. The fact that the Horse-Breaker doesn’t need to exhaust to do its action is nice, too, so I’ll never have to worry about holding it back from questing. The 1 HP really sucks, but considering most enemies have 3 attack or more anyhow, it isn’t that big of a difference between 1 and 2 HP. I’m normally pretty good about keeping threat < 35 to dodge Evil Storm, but I suppose I'll have to see how much of a problem Necromancer's Reach ends up being once I make that ally swap.
Eomund looks like a potentially very powerful card, and once Conflict at the Carrock comes out he will definitely have a place in my support deck, 2 willpower for only 3 resources to supplement my Northern Trackers is kickass, and his ability, while quite nice at the moment, can only get better as more cards are released. Our current roster of Rohan characters might not be that expansive, but still, it includes a few very popular heroes:
Leadership: Theodred, Snowbourn Scout (to uh… defend against Eastern Crows!)
Lore: Gleowine (bonus card draw!)
Tactics: Horseback Archer (ranged makes bonus attacks very likely)
Spirit: Eowyn, Dunhere (bonus attacks!), Westfold Horse-Breaker (to chump block if they had previously quested that round)
With The Hunt for Gollum in sight, here's hoping that episode six will be the most epic episode yet! Keep up the good work.
I forgot to mention, but obviously the Horse-Breaker works really well with Horn of Gondor, too, and it’ll finally give me something to use Stand and Fight on since I don’t normally find myself with too many dead allies.
I’m not seeing myself using Mustering the Rohirrim quite yet, and I’m not certain that Eomund alone is going to change my mind about that. He’s pretty good, but we’ll have to see what other cards come out.
Yeah we realized after that we messed up horsebreaker. Northern Tracker is only going to get better and better if what FFG was saying about increased location cards holds true.
Gleowine is a great Rohan card. He just keeps rising in my value of him.
I am finally back on the upswing in terms of excitement after getting the release date for the Hunt for Gollum. It is really going to happen!
So with the official release of The Hunt for Gollum so close to finally happening, it turns out that the person I have arranged to buy Adventure Packs from (someone providing a “subscription” service for the LCG, see their BGG link at http://tinyurl.com/3fulwos) STILL hasn’t received his shipment of the expansion packs, which was supposed to arrive last Friday! Ugh -_-
I love the game, but it feels like we’ve all been waiting an eternity for some new cards…
So I just finished my second two-player play through The Hunt for Gollum scenario, and holy crap, it was the most epic, “barely manage to pull a win out of your ass” game of LOTR:LCG I have ever played.
The decks involved were:
Leadership/Tactics (Theodred, Gloin, Legolas) – Me
Spirit/Lore (Beravor, Eowyn, Dunhere) – My teammate
The game started off extremely promising, since my teammate drew two copies of Northern Tracker in her opening hand to help us deal with the location-rich THFG Encounter deck, as well as a copy of The Galadhrim’s Greeting. I had a bunch of allies, but nothing too stellar. Early in the game, we ended up getting fairly swamped with weak enemies like Eastern Crows, a Goblintown Scavenger, and a couple Misty Mountain Goblins. I tried to tank most of them with my heroes and allies, but we ended up having to assign a Misty Mountain Goblins to my teammate when she only had Dunhere with 1 damage token on him open to defend. She flips its shadow card, and it doubles its base attack strength, landing 3 damage on him and killing him instantly, costing her two spirit resource tokens and devastating her income (she had only been able to get one Northern Tracker out thus far), and was suddenly left with something like one spirit resource. It definitely didn’t help that the next turn we ended up having to deal with Old Wives’ Tales, which only served to further crush our economy.
Things were starting to look very, very bad as we started encountering a few cards that boosted our threat, and ended up failing to successfully quest once for +3 threat. We started to quickly push toward the 35 threat mark, which meant that we would have to deal with cards like Evil Storm potentially massacring my 2 vulnerable Silverlode Archers. However, through getting into the habit of letting 2 enemies with only 1 attack strength get in some free, undefended attacks that Gloin sucked up (and being pretty lucky with shadow cards), I was able to not only free up enough characters to finally start to pick off a crow and two copies of Misty Mountain Goblins. Plus, the extra income from Gloin was desperately needed, and my teammate had a Daughter of Nimrodel in play that was able to keep healing him up to 3 hit points each turn from 1; I ended up being engaged with the same Goblintown Scavengers and Eastern Crow cards (1 of each) for literally 4+ rounds, eating one hell of a lot of undefended attacks (thankfully, the new scenario doesn’t have many nasty “if undefended…” effects).
Of course, since my teammate and I were slowly starting to get our bearings back from suffering such devastating early losses, we started an absolutely terrible run of horrible Encounter cards. During the same staging, I revealed not one, but two goddamn copies of Hunters from Mordor (with one Clue in play), and the next turn? Another Hunters from Mordor, of course. For two miserable rounds I was engaged with THREE Hunters from Mordor, an Eastern Crows, and a Goblintown Scavengers. My threat at this point was something like 38, and I thought we were absolutely boned.
I had recently gotten a Horn of Gondor into play on Legolas, and through even more rounds of painfully precise and calculated plays, I was able to play just enough allies to stave off attacks from the Hunters, losing allies only to boost Legolas’ resources. I would have been smashed to pieces had it not been for Beravor fetching me a godsend of a draw the turn that I was first engaged with the three Hunters, as my two cards were Sneak Attack and Gandalf. Holy shit, I saw a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. By Sneak Attacking him during that round’s refresh phase and again during the next round’s planning phase, he was able to drop a Hunters card all by himself with his enter play abilities, and served to eat one of their attacks. While Gloin kept taking two undefended 1 strength attacks per turn, I had enough resources thanks to Legolas to get enough allies in play to drop one of the Hunters to 1 hit point, and I was able to play a Feint at one point which was pretty clutch. At some point, my teammate had gotten her second Northern Tracker into play, and with and had her Beravor with Unexpected Courage doing double duty, questing and then having me draw cards, digging desperately for Steward of Gondor, or anything to save us from the goddamn Hunters.
The locations in the staging area were tying up all of her characters every turn just so we could break even or maybe make a quest progress or two, and even though the Trackers tore through locations, the second one came out rather late and it still seemed like the staging area was always full of locations. Plus, some untimely treacheries like “+1 threat to each of the 3-4 locations in the staging area” sucked a time or two. Things were really starting to look up when I played a Gondorian Spearman and it destroyed the Hunters from Mordor that had already taken 5 damage; that was absolutely kickass. At some point I had dropped a Dwarven Axe on Gloin, and by now I had finally come across a Steward of Gondor for Eowyn, and eventually a Celebrian’s Stone for the last round or two of the game. With Gloin still taking undefended attacks, he and Legolas ended up finally bringing down the final Hunters from Mordor, and with a Self Preservation finally stuck on Gloin, my teammate was able to divert the focus of her Daughter of Nimrodel to healing some of the other wounded heroes on the board. What really stunk about the whole 3 Hunters from Mordor situation was that my teammate had 2 copies of Forest Snare in her hand, but during the first round they were all engaged with me she had literally 0 Lore resources left.
Somewhere around this point, before the last Hunters was slain, we had finally progressed to quest stage 2B, and had a Banks of the Anduin kicking around the staging area. She eventually ended up dumping a third Northern Tracker into play, and she swept the staging area clean in short order. By the time I finally had the characters available to pick off the same 1 copy of Eastern Crows and Goblintown Scavengers that had probably been engaged with me for 5 rounds, things were looking very good for us, despite each pushing past 40 threat. We ended up drawing a second Banks of the Anduin card, and our final quest phase of the game consisted of the 3 Northern Trackers immediately exploring both Banks cards, placing them on top of the Encounter deck, and then proceeding to draw both of them again during staging, giving us enough quest progress during the last stage of the quest (with just one clue in play, stuck to Beravor), to win the scenario.
The most epic game I have ever played, I can hardly believe that we won. We started with excellent starting hands, but suffered the early loss of a hero. Things only got worse when we kept drawing Hunters from Mordor that cost me a good 4-5 allies, and suffered a pretty significant failure to quest. However, thanks to very timely draws and some occasional good luck with the Encounter deck (i.e., revealing Evil Storm as a shadow card when I had well over 35 threat), we were able to painfully slowly destroy all of our engaged enemies and eventually make enough quest progress to end the scenario in a victory for the players. I finished with 43 threat, and she ended up with 41, by far the highest my threat has ever been in a two-player game. God damn, it was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had!