Nightmare Blood of Gondor

You’ve pursued the enemy all the way to the Cross-roads when a wicked horn blares in the distance. Within minutes, a host of orcs swarms out of the trees from all sides, led by a foreboding robed figure…

The penultimate quest of the Against the Shadow cycle, The Blood of Gondor takes place at the Cross-roads—a spot in Ithilien where the North/South Harad road meets the East/West road between Osgiliath and Minas Morgul. This region is considered contested land during the events of the Lord of the Rings, and brings with it the perils of proximity to Mordor. It was not far from here that Faramir and his company ambushed a company of Haradrim in the 15th chapter of The Two Towers. This quest turns that narrative on its head; this time it is Faramir and his companions who are ambushed by treacherous Orcs!

Orc Trickster by Piya Wannachaiwong

The ambushing Orcs are represented by a “hidden card” mechanic unique to this quest. Many cards instruct a player to “take a hidden card”, which they take from the top of the encounter deck and place face-down in their play area without looking at it. At a minimum, players will be accruing at least 1 of these hidden cards each round at the start of the Quest phase—but they’re doled out in spades by many different shadow effects, Travel costs, and Treacheries as well.

What do these hidden cards do? Nothing in themselves until they’re turned face-up by some other card effect. Each quest stage has some trigger that can turn all of your hidden cards face-up, and there are several shadow effects, Enemies, and Treacheries that can do it too. When you turn a hidden card face-up, if it’s an Enemy, you’re forced to engage it; otherwise you discard it. Each hidden card represents the threat of attack—but until you turn them face-up, you won’t know for sure just how many Enemies you’re dealing with. Most of the effects that turn over hidden cards do so all at once—meaning that it’s very easy to gain five or more additional Enemies all at once.

The other effect that hidden cards have is to power up the boss Enemy who is added to the Staging Area during Setup: The Black Númenorean. His threat is equal to the number of hidden cards in play, and he raises your threat by the number of hidden cards you control at the end of each round—meaning that you either need to kill this guy fast, or you need to keep finding ways to flip those hidden cards over so that he doesn’t get out of control.

Fortunately, you don’t have to face these adversities alone—you have the help of two Objective-Allies, Faramir and Lord Alcaron. In addition to their sizable combat statistics, each one can be exhausted to trigger a beneficial effect to help reduce the sting of hidden cards. Faramir can flip one over, and if it turns out to be an Enemy, he starts it out with 3 damage—which is enough to flat-out kill most of the Enemies in the deck before they even get a chance to be a problem. Lord Alcaron, on the other hand, can be exhausted to move one Enemy back to the Staging Area—although it’s worth noting that most of the Enemies in this quest have low engagement costs (with a sizable number of them sitting at 20 or less) so they’ll probably be coming right back next round anyway.

You’ve got to make sure you get good use out of these two Objective-Allies during the first quest stage, though, because as soon as you reach the second stage they’re captured by the Orcs and you are no longer permitted to use them. There’s no way to get them back after you’ve crossed that threshold, so make sure your board state is sufficiently built up to be able to achieve victory without aid.

There’s one further wrinkle worth mentioning: The Cross-roads itself. The Cross-roads is a Location that is added to the Staging Area at the start of the game. It has a meager 1 threat per player, and only 2 quest points, but the kicker is that as long as it’s in play, the current quest gains the Siege keyword, forcing you to quest with your defense stat instead of willpower. The Cross-roads must be cleared in order to complete the quest, but it can otherwise be left in the Staging Area the whole game, turning it into a Siege quest. Alternatively, you could try to clear it as quickly as possible, at which point the first stage would revert back to a standard willpower quest, while the second would be a Battle quest.

Deciding when to clear The Cross-roads is a key component in any strategy for The Blood of Gondor.

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

Building the deck

Some of the flavor text on the quest cards actually mentions that the mission was given by Boromir to Faramir and his rangers—so my first inclination was to run with that theme. Of course, since Faramir appears as an Objective-Ally in this quest, I couldn’t use him as a Hero. Once I excluded Faramir there were only two Gondor Ranger Heroes left—so I had to look for another Gondor Hero to bring me up to 3. I decided to go with Tactics Boromir to help me deal with the large number of Enemies in this quest.

After giving it a few tries, though, I wasn’t happy with how the deck was working out. It just felt like a less thematic, less effective version of the deck I used for Into Ithilien. There was one thing that did seem to be working, though: Tactics Boromir was super helpful for dealing with the hordes of Orc Enemies that this quest dishes out. Clearly, I would be more successful if I ditched the Rangers and went all-in on Faramir’s brother instead. Plus, I’ve never actually played a Boromir Blood / Fire deck before—maybe now is a good time to give it a try!

Note: This is probably a good place to mention that I was already halfway done with this blog post when last week’s bombshell of an FAQ dropped. Boromir’s text has now been errata’ed to limit his readying ability to “once per phase”. I’ve decided to finish the post as-is rather than start over with the new card text—so just keep that in mind as you read; I’m still using the original wording. But stay tuned! I’ll talk more about my thoughts on the errata next week.

Boromir already has access to the Tactics resource icon needed to play Gondorian Fire, but I’m going to need a Hero with a Spirit resource icon so that I can play Blood of Númenor. I want to stick with Gondor Heroes, so that leaves me with either Eleanor or Beregond. Beregond has higher defense—good for Siege questing—and his ability to reduce threat offsets Boromir’s tendency to raise it. He seems like the natural choice here.

The only thing missing is a way to generate extra resources quickly—and nothing generates resources like Steward of Gondor. That’s going to require a Leadership Hero, so why not make it the actual Steward of Gondor himself? Plus, Denethor can pass his excess resources off to Boromir to make him even more of a beast.

With statlines like that, it looks like I’ll be opting to keep The Cross-roads around as long as possible so I can count on Siege questing to get me through. That means I need to double-down on high-defense Allies like Defender of Rammas and Attachments like Gondorian Shield. It’s actually pretty easy to find efficient defense with a Gondor theme, and since I get to double-count it for both questing and combat it becomes extra valuable here.

The only missing piece is as much card draw as I can muster (without the help of the Lore sphere) so I can get my Blood / Fire combo set up as quickly as possible. When all is said and done, this is what it looks like:

Deck: A Fire in his Veins

Theme: Boromir

“Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten. By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West.”

—Boromir, The Council of Elrond, The Fellowship of the Ring

Hero (3)
Beregond (The Flame of the West)
Boromir (The Dead Marshes)
Denethor (Flight of the Stormcaller)
Ally (19)
3x Defender of Rammas (Heirs of Númenor)
3x Envoy of Pelargir (Heirs of Númenor)
3x Errand-rider (Heirs of Númenor)
2x Gondorian Spearman (Core Set)
3x Knights of the Swan (The Steward’s Fear)
2x Minas Tirith Lampwright (Encounter at Amon Dîn)
3x Squire of the Citadel (The Blood of Gondor)
Attachment (18)
3x Blood of Númenor (Heirs of Númenor)
3x Gondorian Fire (Assault on Osgiliath)
3x Gondorian Shield (The Steward’s Fear)
1x Heir of Mardil (Celebrimbor’s Secret)
2x Horn of Gondor (Core Set)
3x Steward of Gondor (Core Set)
3x Unexpected Courage (Core Set)
Event (9)
3x Captain’s Wisdom (The Thing in the Depths)
3x Desperate Defense (The Flame of the West)
3x Valiant Sacrifice (Core Set)
Player Side Quest (4)
1x Gather Information (The Lost Realm)
3x Prepare for Battle (The Mûmakil)
3 Heroes, 50 Cards

This deck on RingsDB

Strategy

This is a thematic take on the Boromir / Blood / Fire combo deck.

I built this deck before Boromir’s errata, but even post-errata it’s effective at handling large numbers of Enemies—and it can Siege quest with the best of them. It would be useful as a strong combat deck in multiplayer.

The key combo is to get Boromir set up with Blood of Númenor, Gondorian Fire, and Steward of Gondor. Then Denethor passes his resource over to his son for a total of 4 resources for Boromir each turn. Once the combo has been running for a couple of turns, Boromir becomes an unstoppable force. And if Steward of Gondor is a little late to the party, Boromir can use Captain’s Wisdom effortlessly, simply by raising my threat by 1 during the Resource phase.

Most of the Allies in the deck are primarily used for chump blocking in the early game before the combo gets set up. When combined with Valiant Sacrifice, they turn into card draw, too, to help find the missing parts of the combo, and when combined with Horn of Gondor they can help generate some extra resources to fuel Boromir’s engine of death.

The most important card in the deck turns out to be Gondorian Fire, since it’s the only major source of extra attack power in the deck, whereas every other part of the combo has some form of backup. For that reason, Gondorian Fire is the card for which I mulligan, unless I have a great hand that brings together all of the other parts of the puzzle. In practice, if I get Gondorian Fire, I can usually keep the momentum going for a while until the rest of the combo clicks into place.

The play’s the thing

Win ratio: 4 / 5

This is one tough quest! I managed to achieve a 4 / 5 win ratio, but many of these games were really, really close.

Two of my victories ended with me at 49 threat, and another ended with me YOLO questing while engaged with 8 Enemies after losing Denethor to an undefended attack. In one of those games, I finished with precisely the right number of progress tokens, too—about as narrow of a victory as you can get!

The key seemed to be to take care of the Black Númenorean as quickly as possible. Until I could take him out, I had to flip all of the hidden cards each round whenever the quest gave me the option, because raising my threat each round wasn’t sustainable with Boromir doing it too. Once the Númenorean was dead, however, I could let the hidden cards build up until I was forced to flip them (after which I was sure to be readying Boromir a bunch to deal with all of the new Enemies).

In the early game, I primarily quested with Lord Alcaron and used Faramir to help his brother kill an Enemy each round. I never used Alcaron’s ability, preferring instead to just tank any extra Enemies with Boromir, but Faramir’s would occasionally come in handy to chip away at my hidden cards if I happened not to need his extra attack. One strategy I discovered was to place a lot of the quest’s direct damage on these two during the early game—after all, I was going to lose access to those hit point pools once they were kidnapped during the second quest stage, so I might as well use them while I had them!

I always kept The Cross-roads in the Staging Area until the very last moment, only travelling to it when I was sure I would be able to clear the final quest stage. This ensured that I wouldn’t have to do anything other the Siege questing, since my deck has defense in spades but tends to be a little light on the other stats. As the game neared its final conclusion, I had to figure out when things were about to get too hot and I was going to need to move into that final quest push. More than once I lost Heroes to undefended attacks, and if The Cross-roads wasn’t already the Active Location at that point I was surely doomed.

The one game that I lost was quick and painless death: all three copies of Uruk Marksman came out on the first round, one as an encounter card reveal and two as hidden cards. There was no way I could put down enough hit points to soak up all of their direct damage, and things were over as quickly as they began.

The other Enemy I had a lot of trouble with was the Orc Trickster, who can’t really be killed—he makes an immediate attack after being flipped over, but just goes back to being a hidden card whenever he’s dealt damage. Most games I used Boromir to tank them round after round, but sometimes I found it useful to use a Gondorian Spearman to send them back into hiding. They were always a pain, though, and I often spent a lot of energy constantly trying to deal with them.

I leaned heavily on Boromir’s ability to ready multiple times during the combat phase to get me through this quest, which obviously no longer works with the new errata; but I don’t think it would quite have been impossible to beat this quest had I played it after the errata was announced. Certainly, the deck would have needed much more tuning. Perhaps I will revisit it someday to try again!

Final thoughts

The Blood of Gondor is a fun concept, with hidden cards adding a lot of tension to the quest because you never know just how many Enemies are lurking under there. It has several interesting strategic decisions to make, especially surrounding how and when you take on the Black Númenorean, how often you flip hidden cards, and when you travel to The Cross-roads.

That said, the sheer number of Enemies you have to deal with during the course of the quest can make it feel really unfair, and I suspect that despite the large number of strategic options built into the quest itself, there are really only a few deck types capable of handling the combat demands of Nightmare The Blood of Gondor. It’s possible that I’ve overlooked some strategy here, though, so I’d love to hear about how others are defeating this quest. Let me know of your favorite strategy in the comments section below!

Next week I’ll be talking about FAQ 1.9. I’ll share some of my opinions on errata in general, my thoughts on the most recent batch of errata, and I’ll be building a deck with some of our freshly reworded cards. After that, it’ll be back to business as usual with more Path Less Traveled and Thematic Nightmare goodness!