Scouting Ahead

Despite the title, this blog post is not about the side-quest Scout Ahead. There is a similarity though, because this is about kind of the same thing on a larger scale – the side-quest has you scout ahead within a quest to see what your next few reveals/shadow cards will be, but what I want to discuss is the larger scale scouting ahead you can do before playing a quest. That is, how one can examine the encounter deck to get an idea of what deck(s) to bring and/or how you may want to sideboard them to better suit the quest. Obviously the same principles can apply if one is custom building their decks for a specific quest.

Now the extent to which one does this can be a difference in playstyle when you’re new to a quest – different people approach new quests differently. Personally I like to go into new quests blind and just be surprised by what the mechanics are like, but since I tend not to get to new quests until a while after their initial release I’ve generally picked up one or two general tips from people who’ve already played the quest and talked about it online and that will inform my decision of what deck(s) I bring to the quest. Other people will go in completely blind without even those very minor spoilers. And some people will fully scout out the encounter deck in advance so they know exactly what they’re getting themselves in for. This latter attitude among other things I understand works well for people with more limited gaming time, as they don’t want to use up so much of that limited time beating their head against a brick wall because they unknowingly chose the wrong deck for a given quest.

Now if you’re not new to the quest you probably have at least a bit of an idea what you’re up against, but you still may want to review things before jumping back in again. A vague idea doesn’t match up so well to a detailed analysis. A lot of the time I’d say the experience of having played the quest before stands you in good stead for making strategic decisions during the game, but the choice of deck(s) to use and potential sideboarding decisions tend to call for checking aspects of the encounter deck. The crucial question then, the primary subject of this blog post, is what the aspects of the encounter deck are that you should think about checking.
One last sidenote before I get into it: It is by no means necessary to check all or even any of these things in order to beat a quest. Personally, most of the time I don’t actually bother to do checks like this, or I only check one or two of these things. And some of the things I’ll bring up are things you likely remember without checking. But everyone approaches things differently, and sometimes different circumstances lead one to a different approach, so I’m just going for completeness here.

So what could/should you check from an encounter deck before going into the quest? In no particular order:

Special mechanics
This one is pretty obvious. Most quests have their own particular mechanics, and some of them you definitely want to be ready for in advance. Things like Battle of Carn Dum’s penchant for dealing extra shadow cards, Road to Rivendell’s Ambush keyword, Battle of Pelennor Fields’ Assault keyword, and so on. Sometimes these may prompt specific deckbuilding/sideboarding decisions, sometimes they just influence your priorities and strategy, but either way it tends to be useful to know what you have to do/deal with.

Battle/Siege questing
Kind of just an example of a special quest mechanic, but it’s one which comes up multiple times and it’s also one which you really don’t want sprung on you unexpectedly given how much it turns regular questing on its head. Many decks which are good pretty much anywhere else when confronted with a Battle or Siege quest will fold like a road map. So this is a very important thing to check.

Time
Another example of a special mechanic which is more widespread. But in a different way here – Time itself crops up repeatedly, but what it does varies from quest to quest, and that’s what you really want to check. If the Time runs out, will it give you more enemies to deal with, deal damage or just cause you to instantly lose the game? In the latter case obviously you need to simply quest through before Time runs out, but in the former two instances or many others you can plan around the fact they may end up being triggered at some point and bring more combat power/healing/whatever else to handle the various problems which may be presented by the Time.

Range of threat
This isn’t something I would generally concern myself with checking, but it could be relevant. Certain quests (particularly if you get into Nightmare) tend to have higher threat cards than others, which means higher willpower demands you need to meet.

Range of attack
Again, not something I would generally bother checking, but again it can be a factor. If a quest has higher attack enemies on average then you want your defenders to be better – one thing this may influence could be the solo viability of certain decks which have a reasonable defender but not a great one.

Range of defence/hit points
This one is a bigger deal. Just hit points are relevant if you want to make use of direct damage effects, but usually the relevant point is the combination of the two which determines how much attack power you need to kill an enemy in one hit. Ideally you always want to be taking enemies out as fast as you can to minimise the damage you take and the actions you lose defending – which means that whatever the key attack value is you want to hit it early on.
This is even more significant if you use a strategy which makes use of pre-emptive attacks or attacking the staging area – Haldir, Quick Strike, Roheryn, Hands Upon the Bow, Dunhere. Such effects are of much less use if they don’t take down the enemy in a single blow, because then you still have to take the attack or get past the threat.

Direct damage
There are a few aspects to examining direct damage – the amount of cards dealing direct damage, how much they deal, and to who.
The more direct damage cards in the quest the more emphasis needs to be placed on healing and/or damage cancellation – in earlier quests it’s often possible to manage without healing, but in more recent times that tends to be impractical a lot of the time.
How much damage the effects do places demands on your hit points. If you never need to deal more than say 1 or 2 damage at a time then that’s fine, but as the damage values mount up you may need to either bring some higher hit point characters or accept that you will sometimes have to kill characters to these effects.
And who the damage is dealt to further accentuates that point. Cards like The Necromancer’s Reach and Blocking Wargs deal damage indiscriminately to exhausted characters and questing characters, respectively, and these can be important to be aware of as they greatly increase the values of those questing allies who have more than 1 hit point. Effects like Biting Wind deal damage specifically to questing characters but allow you to distribute the damage as you like, so it’s still useful to have more hit points on your questers but not quite as much so as with the indiscriminate damage. Then there are things like Archery which allow the damage to be distributed among any characters you choose, at which point it only matters that there are hit points to spare somewhere on the table. And lastly there are effects which specifically deal more than one damage to characters – for quests with The Master’s Malice you want to ensure you have a sphere of heroes all with 4+ hit points, or for Nightmare Into Ithilien given the Ithilien Overlook you want 5 hit point characters so you can take a potential (and reasonably probable) Archery 4 without anyone dying.

Condition treacheries
This is a simple one. Treacheries which attach as Condition attachments tend to be among the most debilitating effects the encounter deck has to offer. For this reason there are multiple player cards which exist purely to remove Condition attachments, but those cards are mostly useless if the encounter deck doesn’t contain such a treachery, or in the instances where such a treachery exists but is actually not that bad. For this reason a large number of decks will include Power of Orthanc as a sideboard card to be subbed in only for the quests where it’s relevant and omitted otherwise.

Shadow effects
While A Test of Will is a card I can never really justify omitting if I have Spirit access, shadow cancellation is much more variable. A lot of the time you can just take the shadow effects on the chin and use those deck slots for something else. But if you’re looking to customise for quests, then it’s worth checking if each specific quest maybe has worse shadow effects than usual, or shadow effects which might screw over your specific setup, and in those instances sub in your shadow control of choice (there are plenty of options for cancelling, discarding or just getting advance knowledge of the shadow effects you’re facing).

Engagement costs
Any deck which doesn’t plan to instantly engage every single enemy that gets revealed may gain some strategic benefits from you knowing what the different engagement costs are – or if not all of them then at least some crucial ones (the ur-example of course being the 30 engagement cost of the Hill Troll in Journey Down the Anduin). This may influence your choices for starting threat of heroes, importance of threat reduction, and how willing you are to use Doomed cards.

Threat increases
This one mostly feeds into the previous – if the encounter deck is going to be raising your threat then staying below engagement costs becomes harder and this further influences the things I mentioned above. But also the presence of significant threat raises in the encounter deck may discourage the use of decks which depend on Secrecy (as the encounter deck can easily boost your threat up past 20) or on Doomed or Valour (as the encounter deck could push you up to 50 if you’ve already boosted your own threat to high levels).

Travel costs
Thror’s Map can be an incredibly powerful card in quests which have punishing Travel costs, and it can be completely useless in quests with no Travel costs. If you’re thinking of using it then it’s very important before you start to know which sort of quest you’re playing to know if it’s a high priority or an easy cut from your deck to make room for something else.
If you’re not planning on bypassing the Travel costs it can still be useful to know in advance what they are so you can be prepared (e.g. holding back a character for “Exhaust a character”, being cautious about Doomed cards if there’s a threat-raising Travel cost, etc).

Suitability for side-quests
I’m a huge fan of side-quests in general, but some quests are much better suited to them than others:
Some quests have stages which don’t require any progress to be made (e.g. The Morgul Vale) or have you sit for ages on a single stage but you need to complete some other objective before moving on/winning (e.g. Journey to the Crossroads). And then there are quests with no such restriction but where you specifically want to stall on an early stage before advancing. These quests are obviously ideally suited to using side-quests.
Meanwhile other quests have you racing against a clock of sorts (e.g. Journey in the Dark with the Balrog countdown or Flight of the Stormcaller where the Stormcaller will get away if you take too long), which doesn’t preclude using side-quests but certainly discourages them – and trying to clear a large number of side-quests in such a quest would be difficult if not impossible.
And then there’s the majority of quests which fall somewhere between the two, meaning you’re certainly not losing out on anything by not using side-quests, but you are perfectly free to do so and they’ll work just fine.

Suitability for Traps
Traps are both a popular whole deck archetype and a nice set of cards that can be easily splashed into a variety of decks. But before bringing Traps to a quest you should probably just do a quick check whether the enemies have either of those annoying bits of text: “Immune to player card effects” or “Cannot have attachments”. If they do, you should probably leave your Ranger Spikes in the box and play something else instead.
Sometimes there can be other reasons for avoiding Traps as well – if the quest requires killing a certain number of enemies, for example, that will work against Ranger Spikes and Forest Snares. And for some quests at higher player counts, sometimes you may find it preferable to keep killing enemies so they can be revealed again later rather than trapping them and thus increasing the density of treacheries in the encounter deck – the primary example for this is The Black Gate Opens because you’re revealing so many cards as the game goes on that those encounter deck proportions make much more of a difference than they usually would, but in theory it could apply to other quests as well.

Boss enemies
Of course quite a few quests have a boss enemy. Maybe even two. In preparing for such a quest it’s important to know the stats (since it’s an enemy you presumably can’t avoid fighting), if it engages normally or is simply considered to be engaged – if the latter, with the first player or all players? And any special mechanics like direct damage, forced discards, extra attacks under certain conditions, is it immune to player card effects, etc, etc.

And there you go. That’s a rough overview of the things I would consider looking at when figuring out how to handle a quest. It may look like quite a bit, but firstly as noted I wouldn’t always bother checking everything, and secondly if you use handy resources like Hall of Beorn, some of these things will probably take you less time to check for a specific quest than it took you to read the description I wrote of them in this post.
If you think I’ve forgotten any crucial aspects of the encounter deck which can be helpful to assess before playing a quest, please tell me. There are a lot of aspects to this game and it’s entirely possible I forgot something. Otherwise, I hope this is of some interest and/or use. Happy questing.