An LotR:LCG Saga: Escape from Dol Guldur

Well, that didn’t work. Threat got out of control quick, and so did enemies. All the heroes in play died.

This quest is just cruel, crippling one player’s deck by temporarily removing one hero from play. I think the quest would work well if you have four players with single-sphere decks, but if you have fewer players? Someone’s going to be hurting a lot.

But, like getting through the hard bits of video games: TO GOOGLE!

Some resources for beating Escape from Dol Guldur:

People seem to agree: this is a nightmare scenario, and probably should be rated higher than a 7. I imagine that, since it’s a first core set scenario, the development team just didn’t have the experience yet to properly rate Escape from Dul Guldur’s difficulty. They even added another special ruling to make the scenario even harder—no attachments can be played on the Nazgul. Which means you can’t Forest Snare it into not attacking you. Thematic, yes; makes the scenario better, arguable both ways. At the very least the difficulty rating needs to be boosted.

You also need to seriously tune the deck(s) specifically to beat this scenario, so it’s one for the devoted deckbuilders (which I’m not so much a part of):

  • Concentrate on one sphere alone per deck.
  • Focus on consistency over flexibility, because flexibility will only get you deads.
    • 3 copies of every card, minimum (which means you need two Core Sets to get enough Core Set Gandalfs).
    • Very tight resource control.
    • Very strong threat management for both locations and enemies.
    • The ability to kill enemies before they rez… er, I mean, engage.

I wonder if an all-Eagle deck will work alongside an all-Rohan deck. Maybe cards from Khazad-dum expansion are needed? On the other hand, probably not.

I’m not going to try this scenario again. It’s just evil and possibly the hardest quest out there yet, even with all the expansion packs accounted for.

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2 thoughts on “An LotR:LCG Saga: Escape from Dol Guldur”

  1. So much in gaming sounds like such fun (even the tough ones). Wish I had that kind of energy. I’m dating myself here by remembering the fun we had as a family doing Myst – but I’m afraid that if I ever start, I would descend to the world of gaming and never come out.

    I am still struggling to spend a part of each day actually writing, creating something that didn’t exist before I thought of it, putting into tangible form something from my mind. And failing most days.

    I was thinking about your previous commit log, and where compassion comes from. I think it must be hard to have compassion when you haven’t been given much, to feel safe when you have been very unsafe.

    The only thing I can think, though, is that you don’t want to contaminate the future with the past, because that is letting the past win. Every day I look at what I don’t like about the past, and try to think of a way to make today and tomorrow better because of what I have learned from it, to make the past give me something to improve the future. I don’t often succeed, but I am glad the impulse to try still comes.

    Little by little.

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