Nightmare The Drúadan Forest

The Drúadan Forest is a wild and dangerous place. It is said that Woses, reclusive forest dwellers, still reside among the trees. You wonder if your quarry has considered the dangers of this course.

The second quest of the Against the Shadow cycle brings me to The Drúadan Forest, one of my favorite places in Middle Earth. It’s one of those very Tolkien-esque locations that you can tell has a deep history, even if we only catch tiny glimpses of it within the text of The Lord of the Rings itself.

The Drúadan Forest appears in the narrative only once: the Rohirrim take a shortcut through it on their way to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. They would never have made it safely or on time, however, if they hadn’t had the help of the native Woses—short, stout men who had been living there in relative isolation for hundreds of years. From the statues of the “Púkel Men” whom Merry saw earlier in the narrative to the way the Woses talk about the forest and their relationship with the Rohirrim, you can tell that the region and its people have an interesting backstory—even though we never actually learn about it.

That’s one of my favorite parts of Tolkien’s stories; he writes as though everything has a rich history, leaving us plenty of room to fill in the blanks, making even secondary characters met only for a moment feel deep and alive.

Ghân-buri-ghân by Piya Wannachaiwong

Unlike in The Return of the King, the Woses in this quest are hostile towards you—you are trespassing in their forest, after all. The many Wose Enemies (and a few of the other encounter cards) feature a new keyword: Prowl X. When a card with the Prowl keyword is revealed, the players as a group must discard X resources (or as many as they have if they don’t have enough). This means that you’re going to be constantly resource starved as you play through this quest.

To compound the problem further, the majority of encounter cards also interact with resources. Some cards punish you for not having extra resources lying around. Leaves on Tree forces you to pay 1 resource for each Attachment you control or discard them all. Men in the Dark deals 1 damage to every Hero who can’t spend a resource. Other cards, like Garden of Poisons, prevent you from being able to gain resources from player card effects.

But things get really interesting in the Nightmare version of this quest. Each Hero gets 5 whole resources at the start of the game—which is awesome until you realize that they also don’t collect resources during the resource phase anymore. If you don’t have some way of generating your own resources, then those 15 starting resources are all you’ll see until you reach Stage 2, where they give you 3 more resources per Hero. And let me tell you, those Stage 2 resources feel like a godsend.

This “no normal resource generation” rule totally changes the way the game is played. It’s surprisingly easy to burn through your starting resources really quickly, especially when the encounter deck is taking them away from you left and right. You have to decide—do you try to conserve them in an effort to stave off the bad stuff that happens when you don’t have any resources left in this quest? Or do you spend them all at once and hope to overwhelm the encounter deck with an explosive start? There are a lot of interesting strategies to consider here.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of the Enemies have the Archery keyword—up to Archery 3 on the Drúadan Stalker. Those that don’t start with Archery often receive it through other card effects like those found on Poison-darts or Glade of Cleansing. There are a ton of arrows sailing through the air in this quest, and if you don’t manage to keep the Enemy count low it can quickly overwhelm you. Fortunately, most Enemies can be dispatched with 6 total attack, and most of them hit for 4 or less.

The quest ends with a bit of a switcheroo when you reach the last stage and their champion, Drû-buri-drû, shows up and gives +1 to attack and defense to all other Wose Enemies. The quest switches to a Siege quest at this point—so now you have to quest with your defense stat instead of willpower—and instead of trying to fight your way out of the forest, you try to bargain with them. You use willpower in place of attack, and progress tokens are placed on Enemies instead of damage, adding them to the victory display once the progress tokens equal their hit points.

If you place the required 14 progress on the quest, and manage to convince Drû-buri-drû not to slay you, then the day is won and you are free to leave the forest.

You can see all of the encounter cards over at the Hall of Beorn.

Building the deck

Most of the time I’m playing these Nightmare quests for the first time when I play them for the blog, but in this case I actually played it once about a year ago with a Rohan deck I had built just for fun. I hadn’t built the deck specifically for this quest, but I remember that it just happened to work out really well. I loved playing that Rohan deck, even though it never got much table time, and I had always thought that I should return to it.

Well, now seems like a good time to bring it back and update it for the modern card pool. The core of the deck was based around three Heroes who all have their own way of helping with card costs: Gríma, who allows me to raise my threat to reduce the cost of cards, Théoden, who reduces the cost of the first Rohan Ally I play each round by 1, and Théodred, who gives me an extra resource as long as I commit him to the quest. These three Heroes combined net me an effective +3 resources per turn, making it easy to amass an army of Rohan Allies in no time.

Rohan has received a lot of new toys since I first built that deck. For starters, Guthwinë now provides an easy way to bring discarded Rohan Allies back from the grave. The original deck relied on Gamling for that purpose. But Guthwinë has a few advantages over Gamling. First of all, it’s one resource cheaper—and that can mean a lot in a trisphere deck. Even more importantly, in order to use Gamling you have to get him down first, and then you can start your sacrifice engine—but with Guthwinë you can start whenever you need it, and pick up the pieces later. Plus, Guthwinë can recur chump blockers, whereas a weird wording quirk means that Gamling can’t.

Another key development in the modern cardpool is that Rohan now has access to more 2-attack Allies. I remember the biggest struggle I had with the original version of this deck was in mustering up enough attack power to kill Enemies. I relied on regularly readying up Théoden or Théodred, and it took a long time to get prepared. But now I have access to characters like Ceorl, Rider of Rohan, or Tactics Elfhelm, all of whom can contribute significant attack power for a relatively small investment.

After adding some of these new cards and tuning the deck to meet the needs of the quest, this is what I ended up with:

Deck: Mustering the Rohirrim

Theme: Rohan before the war

“Later in the morning most of Théodred’s Riders that had been driven south down the river by a battalion of black Uruks came back battle-worn but in good order. They had a like tale to tell. They came to a stand on a low hill and prepared to defend it.”

—The Battles of the Fords of Isen, Unfinished Tales

Hero (3)
Gríma (The Voice of Isengard)
Théoden (The Treason of Saruman)
Théodred (Core Set)
Ally (28)
3x Ceorl (Temple of the Deceived)
1x Elfhelm (The Mountain of Fire)
1x Gamling (The Land of Shadow)
1x Ghân-buri-Ghân (The Flame of the West)
3x Gléowine (Core Set)
1x Háma (The Treason of Saruman)
3x Rider of Rohan (Beneath the Sands)
3x Snowbourn Scout (Core Set)
3x The Riddermark’s Finest (The Hills of Emyn Muil)
3x Warden of Healing (The Long Dark)
3x Warden of Helm’s Deep (The Antlered Crown)
3x West Road Traveller (Return to Mirkwood)
Attachment (6)
3x Gúthwinë (The Mountain of Fire)
3x Keys of Orthanc (The Voice of Isengard)
Event (14)
2x Captain’s Wisdom (The Thing in the Depths)
3x Hasty Stroke (Core Set)
3x Heed the Dream (Flight of the Stormcaller)
3x Mustering the Rohirrim (The Hunt for Gollum)
3x Well Warned (The Sands of Harad)
Player Side Quest (2)
1x Double Back (Escape from Mount Gram)
1x Gather Information (The Lost Realm)
3 Heroes, 50 Cards

This deck on RingsDB

Strategy

This deck can muster a large number of multipurpose Rohan Allies surprisingly quickly.

Each of the deck’s Heroes has a different way of paying for cards, effectively doubling the number of resources it gains each round. This helps it to hit the ground running, enabling it to play at least one Ally per round—and usually two or three. If I manage to find a copy of Keys of Orthanc early enough in the game, I generally put it on Théoden, since the deck leans a little blue. Théodred makes a good target too, though, if I happen to have a slightly more purple hand at the time I play it.

Early in the game, I’m pretty aggressive with triggering Gríma‘s Doomed ability to help me play down cards, but once I hit about 38 threat I start to ease off the gas a little. The deck has a little threat reduction in the form of Double Back (if I can manage to draw or fetch it) and Well Warned, provided that I’m able to find and play a copy of Ceorl first so that I can activate it.

Finding whatever card I need at any given moment is actually pretty easy. Gather Information obviously lets me fetch whatever I happen to be missing, but I also have access to Mustering the Rohirrim, which lets me fetch a Rohan Ally of my choice from the top 10 cards of the deck—especially handy since many of the key cards in the deck are Allies. Heed the Dream is great for fetching threat reduction cards or key attachments if I haven’t found them yet. And nothing beats good old-fashioned Gléowine for pure card draw.

My favorite combo in the deck is Gúthwinë + Snowbourn Scout. The Scout is free with Théoden‘s discount, so once my deck gets up and running it ends up in a tight loop of 1) Play Snowbourn Scout, netting me +1 progress on a Location. 2) Use the Scout to chump block the next Enemy that shows up. 3) Use Théoden and Gúthwinë to kill said Enemy, returning the Scout to my hand. 4) Repeat forever!

Thematic concessions

Technically, with my stated theme being “Rohan before the war”, Ghân-buri-ghân doesn’t really fit. But with this being literally the only quest that takes place in the Drúadan Forest, I wasn’t about to leave our only Wose player card behind. He definitely pulled his weight, with some of the Locations in this quest having 4+ threat, but in no way would I say he was essential.

The card I’m actually more sad about is Warden of Healing. That guy sure gets around, doesn’t he? I was hoping not to have to include him here, since he’s from Gondor and not Rohan, but with all of the Archery in this quest I really needed a release valve. There aren’t many healing cards that match a Rohan theme, and most of those only heal Heroes—which just wasn’t going to cut it in this quest. So in went the Warden.

If I were to play this deck against other quests with fewer direct damage effects, I would probably take him out. The deck relies more on chump blocking than standard defense anyway, so after a few rounds it should be able to stand on its own without needing to heal off any damage it accumulates.

The play’s the thing

Win ratio: 3 / 5

I had a great time with this quest. In all three of my victories, I managed to end the game with my threat in the mid-to-late forties, with my engine humming away efficiently. It always seemed to be vital to get both Gúthwinë and Keys of Orthanc early on—or barring that, Gléowine to help me draw them. Fortunately, I was usually able to mulligan for one of them and hunt for the rest, since my deck has plenty of fetch effects in it.

Location control Allies like Snowbourn Scout, The Riddermark’s Finest, and West Road Traveler were frequently instrumental in dealing with the quest’s many troublesome Locations, especially the Garden of Poisons that starts play in the Staging Area. Clearing that quickly was a necessity for ensuring I could keep generating resources so that I never found myself empty-handed whenever the quest demanded that I pay resources to avoid some terrible fate.

At the start of the game, all three Heroes would be used on quest duties. Once I had enough willpower down, though, Théoden switched over from a questing role to being held back in case I needed to attack an Enemy. The constant threat of Archery made it pretty important to clear Enemies as quickly as possible.

Both of my losses were due to early game Location lock, specifically the one-two punch of Eilenach and Garden of Poisons. In one game, I had the resources needed to fulfill Eilenach’s travel requirement, but I couldn’t quite get ahead of the willpower situation fast enough to clear its 5 threat, especially with a copy of Garden of Poisons preventing me from generating the resources I needed to put Allies down. The second game saw all three copies of Garden of Poisons in quick succession—which I was dutifully clearing, one at a time, waiting for my chance to generate resources—when Eilenach came out and sealed the deal. In both instances I threatted out.

These were a good set of games. This quest and my deck are pretty evenly matched, making for a lot of tense moments and interesting decisions.

Final thoughts

I actually played a ton of extra games of this quest with different variations of this deck. Partly that was due to the fact that I could easily achieve 2 / 5 wins, but 3 / 5 was proving to be tricky. But the main reason I played so many games was because I was having so much fun.

I had a great time playing this Rohan deck. I don’t really know what it is that I like so much about it, but it’s mechanically complex, sufficiently combo-y and thematically cohesive in all the right ways. I guess it just hits all the right notes for my playstyle.

Despite its sometimes punishing difficulty, Nightmare The Drúadan Forest is one of my favorite quests to date. I particularly like what they did with this quest in Nightmare mode. The fact that you don’t collect resources normally really changes the way you think about the resources that you have, causing lots of interesting strategic decisions to emerge during play. This quest really doesn’t play like any other quest available.

Next I’ll be following the Path Less Traveled to A Knife in the Dark, continuing my Saga playthrough from last week. After that I’ll be moving on to Nightmare Encounter at Amon Dîn—a quest I remember as fun, but relatively easy in its non-Nightmare incarnation. I hear the Nightmare version is a force to be reckoned with. Are the rumors true? We’ll find out soon!