Nightmare Into Fangorn

You’ve captured the Orc captain, Mugash, in the mountains above Isengard. But as you make your way down Methedras, your captive escapes and flees east into Fangorn. You pursue Mugash into the ancient forest to find that the trees themselves seems to be attacking him. Without thinking, you hack at the tree branches to rescue your captive. That is when you first sense your own peril…

My errand for Saruman has taken me deep Into Fangorn to pursue the fleeing Mugash, the Orc who I captured last time. But Fangorn is no ordinary forest! Ancient beyond the memory of men and full of peril, even the trees in this place seem to possess a sinister malevolence.

Blocking Huorn by Katy Grierson

The only Enemies to be found in this quest are Huorns, wild living trees whose anger towards outsiders is indiscriminate. They all possess the Hinder keyword, which means that instead of attacking normally during the Combat phase, they simply remove a progress from the main quest. That’s pretty tame by itself, but each Huorn also has another ability that triggers if they’re still around during the Resource phase. These abilities vary wildly, ranging from exhausting your Heroes to raising your threat and all manner of other nasty things in-between.

The upshot of this is that you get a chance to attack these Huorns first, but if you don’t kill them in one round they’ll start to slowly destroy your board state. Killing them isn’t easy, however, since the lowest number of combined Defense + HP to be found on a Huorn is 9—and it can go as high as 12! There are quite a lot of them in the quest, too, with several effects that retrieve extra ones for you to deal with; it’s probably not a good idea to let them build up.

Just to keep you on your toes, there are a handful of quest effects that can cause the Huorns to attack you anyway. The Forest’s Malice is a Treachery that causes all engaged Huorns to immediately attack, while Dark Corner of Fangorn is a Location that causes all Huorns to lose the Hinder keyword if it gets stuck in the Staging Area. And these trees hit like trucks, so don’t let your guard down!

In addition to watching out for scary trees, the focus of the quest is to gain and keep control of the Mugash Objective who starts the game Guarded by a copy of Edge of Fangorn. Once you clear whatever’s Guarding him, you can exhaust a Hero to Attach Mugash to that Hero. Any time that Hero takes damage, he goes back on top of the encounter deck and you have to start the cycle over again.

The quest cards use Time counters to ensure that you have 4 turns to capture Mugash and make the requisite amount of progress before he’s shuffled into the encounter deck, forcing you to wait until he shows up again. There are a few quest effects that are meant to hasten his return whenever this happens, but ultimately if you let him slip away you’re at the mercy of the encounter deck to return him to you.

But that’s basically it—capture Mugash, place the required amount of progress on the quest stages, and don’t get mauled by a maple and you’ve survived Into Fangorn.

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

Deck: The Forest Wakes

Theme: The march of the Ents

“To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;
Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars – we go to war!
To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come;
To Isengard with doom we come!
With doom we come, with doom we come!”

—Treebeard, The Two Towers

Hero (3)
Folco Boffin (The Dungeons of Cirith Gurat)
Quickbeam (The Crossings of Poros)
Treebeard (The Treason of Saruman)
Ally (13)
3x Booming Ent (The Antlered Crown)
3x Derndingle Warrior (Escape from Mount Gram)
1x Leaflock (The Dungeons of Cirith Gurat)
3x Wandering Ent (Celebrimbor’s Secret)
3x Wellinghall Preserver (Across the Ettenmoors)
Attachment (15)
3x Ent Draught (The Treason of Saruman)
3x Good Meal (The Redhorn Gate)
3x Healing Herbs (Foundations of Stone)
3x Self Preservation (Core Set)
3x Song of Wisdom (Conflict at the Carrock)
Event (22)
3x Boomed and Trumpeted (Escape from Mount Gram)
3x Don’t Be Hasty! (The Antlered Crown)
3x Entmoot (The Treason of Saruman)
2x Heed the Dream (Flight of the Stormcaller)
3x Mithrandir’s Advice (The Steward’s Fear)
2x Needful to Know (The Redhorn Gate)
3x Peace, and Thought (Shadow and Flame)
3x The Dam Bursts (The Crossings of Poros)
3 Heroes, 50 Cards

This deck on RingsDB

Inspiration

This is the only quest in the game to date that takes place in Fangorn Forest—so obviously I have to bring Ents.

Fortunately, we just got a new Ent Hero in the form of Quickbeam, so now seems like a great time to try him out. And while I’m at it, I might as well take this opportunity to use Hero Treebeard as well, with whom I have never managed to actually build a deck yet.

Of course, there are actually quite a few downsides to using these two as Heroes in an Ent deck—the biggest one being that their Ally versions are among the best Allies in the game! This deck has to focus more on getting good mileage out of the Heroes than on quickly amassing a large pool of powerful Ent Allies.

Furthermore, both Heroes have high threat, and require a lot of healing to work well. In order to accommodate these two, my third Hero was going to have to be low threat and preferably from the Lore sphere. Bonus points if that Hero has the Hobbit trait, letting me try out the new The Dam Bursts card, too.

“Lore Hobbit that hangs out with Ents” points me solidly in the direction of Pippin. So how did I end up with Folco?

I decided to lean on the power of…

…thematic concessions!

Early drafts of the deck did, in fact, use Pippin instead of Folco. And he worked fine. He quested every round, diligently contributing his 2 willpower and his Lore resources. But he never got to trigger his ability, since the other two Heroes started me out with such a high starting threat.

Furthermore, since Into Fangorn can have a “waiting for the encounter deck to give me my Objective back” section, I had a few games where I actually threatted out just waiting for Mugash to show back up. By that point my deck was all set up and ready to go, I was just building up a useless pile of resources and going through the motions.

It was then that I realized how perfect Folco would be in Pippin’s stead. He’s around to help generate extra resources in the beginning of the game, but once I have a small army of Tree-men stalking about my Hobbit can safely slip away to buy me some more time, and I won’t even miss him.

His threat-lowering ability actually won me 2 extra games—but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me explain how the deck actually works!

Strategy

This is an Ent deck that covers for the Allies’ slow start by focusing on big Heroes.

Getting some repeatable healing out early is absolutely vital for preventing this deck from burning itself out. I look for either Self-preservation or Wellinghall Preserver in my first hand, aiming to get it down on round 2. Ent Draught is a good card to see too, since I can pay for it and still afford one of my 3 cost cards the next round.

I prioritize getting extra hitpoints or healing on Treebeard first, and Quickbeam second. Treebeard is the star of the show here, with his ability to excel at either questing or combat, depending on what is needed at any given moment. Boomed and Trumpeted is my favorite way to ready him, allowing him to perform both roles in one round. And if ever I send him on the quest and end up wishing that I had reserved his beefy stats for the Combat phase instead, Don’t be Hasty! has me covered.

My favorite combo in the deck is exhausting Quickbeam (along with Folco) to help pay for Peace, and Thought, and then just readying him right back up again with his ability. A little damage on an Ent is a small price to pay for drawing 5 cards!

Once the deck gets going, with a small army of Ent Allies and multiple healing effects in play, I don’t really need Folco Boffin‘s extra resources or stats anymore, so I’m happy to send him on his merry way as soon as there’s any danger of threatting out. He provides plenty of extra breathing room for my now-enraged Ents to bulldoze whatever’s left of the quest.

It’s pretty awesome to see just how hard this deck hits from round 1—and it just keeps applying the pressure until nothing can stand in its way.

The play’s the thing

Win ratio: 5 / 5

It has been a very long time since I last had a 100% win ratio for a Nightmare quest. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the fact that I managed to score 5 out of 5 wins here is really a good sign.

I liked what they were going for with this quest, at least in theory. It’s a neat twist having Enemies that don’t attack during the Combat phase, but who cause trouble in other ways instead. In practice, though, because the quest gives you a chance to kill those Enemies before they can do their thing, it ends up being a little too easy to game the system. You can either just keep them in the Staging Area and quest past them (and the threat values aren’t very high in this quest) or build up enough attack power to be able to clear them as they come out.

My initial willpower output wasn’t high enough for me to clear the quests fast enough to prevent Mugash from escaping into the encounter deck, but that was okay. My Heroes were able to clear out at least one Huorn Enemy each round, meaning that I just had to be patient and wait for him to return. In the end, that felt very Entish. In my own personal headcannon, I think my Ents were subduing the Huorns rather than killing them.

Final thoughts

I was really hoping that the Nightmare version of this quest would do something to make this quest tougher and more interesting, but unfortunately that does not appear to have been the case. I did appreciate the greater variety of Huorn Enemies (although, side note: I have no idea why they removed the Deadly Huorn from the original deck entirely—it actually seems pretty nasty to me) but the new cards don’t seem to have changed the difficulty of the original quest all that much. In fact, because the deck is 30% bigger you’ll see The Forest’s Malice less often, which arguably makes it easier, not harder.

Sadly, Into Fangorn makes for a bit of an anticlimactic end for the Nightmare Voice of Isengard quests. But the cycle is only getting started! Perhaps the quests of the Ringmaker cycle will pull things around? Only time will tell!

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Next up on Darkling Door…

It’s back to the mines for me as I finish the last quest of the Khazad-dûm expansion, Flight from Moria, for my Path Less Traveled series. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the quest as well as my final verdict on the box as a whole!