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.

The Line Unbroken – 62: Desert Crossing

We continue Sands of Harad with Desert Crossing. I haven’t revisited this quest anything like as much as Escape from Umbar, but that’s not because of any problems with it, just it hasn’t necessarily occurred to me repeat it. Actually that may be a bit of an ongoing theme for my engagement with this whole cycle.

The Line Unbroken – 61: Escape from Umbar

OK, The Line Unbroken returns to standard difficulty for the Sands of Harad deluxe expansion. There’s a lot of interesting things to be said about this box, and the first quest I’m tackling in this post is a great one which I’ve used a fair bit for deck testing. Let’s get into it.

The Line Unbroken – Nightmare Fellowship of the Ring Wrap-Up

Alright, the one thing which remains for me to do with The Line Unbroken before I ditch Nightmare for another little while is the Nightmare Fellowship of the Ring wrap-up, since I’ve just finished the relevant quests.

The Line Unbroken – NC6: Nightmare Breaking of the Fellowship

Still grieving the tragic loss of Beorn in Moria, my fellowship must nonetheless continue with their quest by passing through Lorien and down the Anduin. The loss of the huge frontloaded combat power Beorn brought to the table will be a concern, but I’m pretty sure I can still handle things. And of course this quest in particular gives you a bit of a delay before combat starts to be a thing.

The Line Unbroken – NC5: Nightmare Journey in the Dark

The Nightmare campaign comes at this point to in my opinion the first really iconic campaign moment – the fight with the Balrog and the fall of a hero on The Great Bridge. However you handle it, this is a part of the campaign you inevitably have to think through carefully and be prepared for.