6 AP Challenge: Return to Mirkwood & The Long Dark

As planned, I played Return to Mirkwood and The Long Dark on stream for the 6 AP Challenge last Sunday to kick this off. Both went pretty well, though as expected return to Mirkwood presented more problems than The Long Dark, and my victory was much more contingent on luck of the draw.

The Line Unbroken – 51: The Dread Realm

And now for the final quest of the Angmar Awakened cycle, as we descend into the catacombs beneath the city of Carn Dum to try and prevent Daechanar completing his dark ritual to return to life by possessing the body of his distant descendant. Where the last quest mixed the theme of sorcery in with that of a massive pitched battle, here that dark necromancy is everything as we fight through hordes of undead, hampered by the sorceries which in turn empower the villain. This quest really nails the feeling it’s going for and it’s basically exactly what I wanted out of the cycle taking us into Angmar.

The Line Unbroken – 50: The Battle of Carn Dum

Back from my First Age interlude, there are just two quests remaining in the Angmar Awakened cycle, and we’re really at the climax both in terms of narrative and gameplay. Having discovered the connection between the kidnapped Iarion and the now undead Daechanar who betrayed the Dunedain at the time of the war against Angmar, we are left with the unenviable position of needing to go forth into open battle against the forces of Angmar at the fortress of Carn Dum.

Decks: Heroes/Allies Stand Ready

Readers may recall that in a Deck Spring Cleaning a while back I updated an old deck focused on action advantage. In that post I commented that in some ways the logical way to update it might have been to keep the idea and just create two new decks, one focused on action advantage for heroes and the other for allies, and that I might do that in a future post. It’s taken a bit of work, but these are those two decks.

The Line Unbroken – F11-12: Among the Outlaws

Taking a brief break from official releases, The Line Unbroken is returning to the Tales from the Cards First Age Doom Mastered cycle for the second adventure pack – Among the Outlaws. It’s fortuitous that not only is this the natural narrative break in the Angmar Awakened cycle, it’s also exactly the point when Among the Outlaws was released. Of course Treachery of Rhudaur had some interesting implications for the First Age since it included both a neutral Elf-friend attachment which can easily replace the First Age one, and hero Erestor, who could potentially break the Oath of Silence (though I’ve never actually done this and have no particular intentions of trying it out).

6 AP Challenge: Introduction

My next deckbuilding challenge is a slightly more long term case. It’s also an older one, as this is a challenge which Some Sort came up with on Discord about a year ago when we were discussing Progression-style things (my Line Unbroken and others) and Seastan’s Minimum Purchase idea which he’s done a few times. The idea he put forward was a kind of Minimum Purchase variation – randomly select six adventure packs, beat those quests using only cards from those six packs plus the Core Set. And since that produces a list of 18 heroes, only use each one once and that goes through all of them. I don’t know if he ever actually did it himself after randomising the quests (it has taken me a year to get to it so I’m not really in a position to criticise) but I’m at least going to do mine.

Deck Spring Cleaning: AraBalTheo & AraBeoGlor

For this instance of Deck Spring Cleaning I’m updating a couple of old decks which I’m linking together by the fact they both use (different versions of) Aragorn and that when I originally built them I couldn’t come up with snappy names for them and therefore just named them with abbreviations of their hero lineups: AraBalTheo and AraBeoGlor. Here’s what I said about each of them back when I was going through my old decks:

AraBalTheo – Aragorn (Lo)/Balin/Theodred. An odd one this, I realised at some point that I had lots of good combat decks and not many questing decks, so I decided to build a questing deck, and it ended up being this. Aragorn + Sword that was Broken gets me a lot of willpower, card draw’s great between Lore and King Under the Mountain, I get the best Spirit cards (Test of Will, Unexpected Courage) as well via Celebrian’s Stone. This is a decent one, and I could probably do with having a few more decks that are just generically good rather than everything I build being based around some weird gimmick or other.

AraBeoGlor – Aragorn (Ta)/Beorn/Glorfindel (Sp). Can’t remember how I came up with the idea, but I was going for a very aggro sort of thing obviously. Aragorn and Beorn make short work of most combat, and of course handily Aragorn’s -1 defence to engaged enemies still applies even if he quested rather than attacking. Which brings me to the definite weakness of this deck, that being willpower. Played in multiplayer as just a combat deck it’d probably be fine. I did manage to use it to solo Dunland Trap; then tried it against Three Trials, killed the Guardians, but threated out before I could complete the quest. Again, this is good generic.