![]() There was a Blood-thirsty Warg in the staging that made an immediate attack, but for all of that and the Pack Leader that gets added at stage 3, I had calculated and still could have defended. ![]() The encounter objective flips to night when you advance, revealing a White Warg. I got two wins and had things pretty much under control on my third attempt, making it to stage 3, where the encounter deck decided to go crazy. The deck performed actually quite well with solid questing, readying for combat, and enough answers to the threat raising and direct damage. Spirit gives access to cancellation against treacheries like the aforementioned Cold from Angmar and also more threat reduction, especially in combination with good old Sneak Attack/Gandalf. While they are also high threat heroes with readying abilities, their main advantage over the previous deck comes with their spheres. I, however, liked Loragorn here, giving access to healing with the Lore sphere and threat reduction, so I paired him with his “Three Hunters” Partners: Leadership Gimli and Spirit Legolas. I made another attempt switching Mirlonde with Lore Aragorn, adding some starting threat for a reset of my threat later on, but the result was the same. So I hit 50 before I even made it to stage 2. The other issue was my threat level that already started at 30 and on stage 1 gets increased by one more point whenever it becomes night. While this is actually a benefit regarding Gwaihirs passive text (he can now ready at the end of the round), but losing the readying ability on both him and Radagast is just horrible, and my healing cards couldn’t keep up with the damage from the encounter deck. This worked well in the early game, but then I encountered two problems: The first was Cold from Angmar, a condition encounter card that blanks the text boxes of damaged characters. Both Radagast and Gwaihir have “not exhausting” or readying abilities, so they can help with both questing and combat against multiple smaller enemies. I like the idea of a Lore/Tactics line-up, and so I next brought my Eagle deck with Radagast/ Gwaihir/ Mirlonde. While I think you can certainly win against this quest, it doesn’t seem optimal for this series where I want to maximize my winning chances and have a chance to handle whatever the encounter deck throws at me. So I quickly abandoned the Trap-strategy. I just kept revealing locations for the first two rounds, and with rather low willpower, I couldn’t make it through the initial active location, Shrouded Hills. I brought my favourite Damrod/ Pippin/ Mablung hero-line up… and lost terribly on my first attempt. Cause it’s one of my favourite archetypes and doesn’t work against every quest, I thought why not try it as well. ![]() Matt mentioned in his article that he used a Trap deck to defeat this quest, and the combination of the Lore sphere and good combat tricks make this seem a good fit for this quest, which has a lot of enemies. You need a good general deck that can handle basically 1.5 encounter cards each round, has both strong questing and combat capabilities, and you will also need healing, so we probably want at least one Lore hero. First attemptsĬonsidering all this, a solo deck has to bring a lot of things to the table. However, this quest isn’t much better with higher player counts because the Foul Weather encounter set from The Lost Realm returns, and with it, some horrible treacheries that deal damage around the whole table. I think the main reason is that the objective reveals an encounter card whenever it flips to night, which is especially a problem in solo play. I also like that this quest is on the harder end of things, which shouldn’t be surprising, giving that the designers recommended using the day/night objective in different quests to make them harder. All of this gives the quest a very unique and memorable rhythm and really gives you the feeling of playing through multiple nights and days. While at night, you need to “rest” and hold characters back to protect against the unavoidable attack by wargs. So you want to quest with most of your characters during day to make a lot of progress. During daytime, enemies don’t make engagement checks, while at night, progress can’t be placed on the current quest. There’s a day/night objective in this quest that flips every round and changes the rules of the game. This is just one of these quests where theme and mechanics work so perfectly together to create a very enjoyable experience. Given that this is, together with Ered Mithrin, my favourite cycle, it ranks pretty high on my list of overall favourite quests. The Wastes of Eriador has always been my favourite quest from the Angmar Awakened Cycle and Lost Realm Deluxe box.
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