The Line Unbroken – C17: The Black Gate Opens

Here we are for the penultimate quest of the campaign, The Black Gate Opens. This is the infamous unwinnable quest. Honestly this is one of my favourite bits of design in the whole campaign for how well the mechanics tell the story.

The Line Unbroken – C16: The Tower of Cirith Ungol

OK, at this point with Beneath the Sands being a neat mid-point of the Haradrim cycle I think this is the right moment for me to duck out and complete my saga campaign. It’s taken me a while longer than I expected for assorted reasons but here we are at last for Mountain of Fire.

Hunt for the Dreadnaught

Alright, so I’m doing my best at getting things done, but I’d say I’m not that far behind to come now to talking about Hunt for the Dreadnaught. The quest which would have been the GenCon/Fellowship event quest last year had both those things not been cancelled, and the last bit of official LotR LCG content we’re going to see for some time. Since I got to play it in an OCTGN epic multiplayer session a few weeks back I’m going to treat it kind of like the two years I had local Fellowship events, so this is a post giving some generalities and I intend to follow up with a more detailed review of the quest.

Deck: Dwarves Make Light of Burdens

Alright, now that Fortress of Nurn is officially out and on RingsDB I can post this deck. As soon as I saw Forth, The Three Hunters!, this was the first deck concept which I thought of, but in the process of building and reworking it I realised that I really wanted the Tireless Thoroughbred (Plus in general it’s nice to have a static card pool so I know I won’t feel the need to update the deck for the foreseeable future).

The Line Unbroken – 66: Beneath the Sands

Continuing through the Haradrim cycle, we come to Beneath the Sands. This is actually one of the few quests I remember definitely having played more than once before this. It’s pretty fun, though it has some potential to drag towards the end if you get unlucky.

What Might Have Been: Into Fangorn

Alright it has been quite a while since I did one of these, but especially after doing it in Nightmare, it struck me that Into Fangorn was a great candidate for imagining a possible redesign. The whole concept behind the Huorns was interesting, it just didn’t really work out in practice.

The Line Unbroken – 65: Race Across Harad

Continuing to the second quest of the Haradrim cycle, Race Across Harad is an interesting twist on an idea already seen in the previous cycle, as it essentially flips Flight of the Stormcaller around and has us fleeing away from the enemies in the encounter deck.

Deck: Stride is Long and Breath is Deep

There are a lot of newer cards I really haven’t done much with, and I keep thinking I should do something about that. Of course since I know the game is going on hiatus after Fortress of Nurn there’s some temptation to leave deckbuilding until after that so I can just consider the whole card pool and know it’s not going to change for some time. Certainly there’s one deck I’ve been working on for a while which will clearly benefit from a couple of cards coming in Fortress of Nurn, so I don’t want to post it until those cards are on RingsDB.
This deck, on the other hand, wouldn’t get anything out of the few cards which haven’t been released yet, so here it is.

The Line Unbroken – 64: The Mumakil

With the deluxe done, The Line Unbroken moves into the Haradrim cycle proper, beginning with The Mumakil. As I recall, the announcement of this pack was met with substantial glee at the prospect of being able to ride Mumaks, after the many years of them being among the most annoying enemies in the game. Of course we don’t actually get to ride them until the next quest and it turns out they’re a lot easier to kill when they’re on our side, but it’s the principle of the thing.

The Line Unbroken – 63: The Long Arm of Mordor

The Sands of Harad deluxe expansion ends with The Long Arm of Mordor, a quest which is mechanically unusual but very interesting, and thematically sets up not only the rest of the cycle but also the initial motivation of our heroes moving into the next deluxe expansion. Let’s take a look at it.