As you descend into the catacombs beneath Carn Dûm, you find yourself overcome with terror. Still, you press onward, knowing that Iârion’s fate—and perhaps the fate of the north–lies in your hands. Daechanar’s powers of sorcery and necromancy are strongest here, in the capital of the Witch-realm where the lord of the Nazgûl once resided.
Having defeated Daechanar’s undead captain, Thaurdir, at the Battle of Carn Dûm, our Heroes have but one final test remaining: they must find and defeat the evil sorcerer himself, putting an end to the terror rising in The Dread Realm. If The Battle of Carn Dûm is the climax of the Angmar Awakened cycle, The Dread Realm is an extended denouement. What fresh Nightmares await us as we follow this cycle to its conclusion?
Be warned: there are some story spoilers below, so continue at your own peril!
Something evil’s lurking in the dark
In this quest, Daechanar turns your own deck against you using a new mechanic called “reanimating”. When one of your cards is reanimated, it is placed face-down in front of you and counts as an Undead Enemy called Reanimated Dead with 2 threat, attack, defense, and hit points. Many effects in this quest result in you having to reanimate cards, meaning that it won’t be long at all before you’re swarmed with tons of small Enemies.
Worse still, when you kill a Reanimated Dead it goes to your discard pile—and then there are a bunch of cards in the encounter deck that punish you for having too many cards in your discard pile. The worst of these tends to be Dark Sorcery, which (by discarding each Ally in play which has a copy in your discard pile) can obliterate a solid board-state with the flip of a single card.
The second key theme is that there are many encounter cards with the Sorcery trait which become Condition Attachments causing all manner of annoying persistent effects. These tend to build up while you’re trying to gather the 18 progress required to complete Stage 1, and unfortunately that stage transfers all of the Attachments that it has accrued onto Stage 2 so that you still have to deal with them. It’s super helpful to have Condition removal along with you for this quest, but it’s not strictly necessary because of the mechanics of Stage 2.
When you reach Stage 2, the sorcerer Daechanar (having taken possession of the body of poor Iârion, the Objective-Ally from the first quest of the cycle) greets you at the Altar of Midwinter. The Altar becomes the Active Location, forcing each player to either reanimate the top card of their deck or reveal an extra card during the quest phase each round. Unfortunately, it cannot be cleared until Daechanar is defeated—and he can’t be damaged if there are Sorcery cards in play. That doesn’t make trying to damage him fruitless, however, since each time he would be dealt damage you get to discard a Sorcery from play instead. This makes direct damage cards extra useful in this quest!
Unfortunately, defeating Daechanar isn’t enough to win the quest—upon his defeat, you advance to Stage 3 during which the catacombs begin to collapse, and you must escape with your life! To win, you need to clear all Locations in play, while taking 1 damage on each character in play at the end of each quest phase. Fortunately, any damage you place on the quest can be redistributed onto Locations in the Staging Area—so now is the time to break out the heavy questing! The Nightmare card to watch out for during this Stage is Inner Sanctum, which can’t have progress placed on it while it’s in the Staging Area. A poorly timed Inner Sanctum can force you to quest through another round at Stage 3, enduring its massive direct damage and possibly costing you victory right at the very end.
If you manage to clear all the Locations in play, your Heroes have escaped the catacombs of The Dread Realm! Between the massive number of small Enemies, the heavy use of Condition Attachments, the big boss fight in the middle and the quest-hard-or-die-trying ending, The Dread Realm tests decks in multiple arenas at once. Any deck which hopes to take this quest on is going to need to be well-rounded with a strong endgame!
Deck: The Muster of Annúminas
‘I have thirty with me,’ said Halbarad. ‘That is all of our kindred that could be gathered in haste… We rode as swiftly as we might when your summons came.’
Halbarad, The Passing of the Grey Company, The Return of the King
Theme: The Rangers of the North
Hero (3)
(MotK) Súlien (Messenger of the King Allies)
Amarthiúl (The Battle of Carn Dûm)
Thurindir (Race Across Harad)
Contract (0)
1x Messenger of the King (The Land of Sorrow)
Ally (23)
3x Fornost Bowman (The Dread Realm)
3x Guardian of Arnor (The Battle of Carn Dûm)
1x Halbarad (The Flame of the West)
3x Misty Mountain Journeyman (The Fortress of Nurn)
3x Ranger of Cardolan (The Wastes of Eriador)
3x Sarn Ford Sentry (The Lost Realm)
1x Thalion (Fire in the Night)
3x Vigilant Dúnadan (The Sands of Harad)
1x Warden of Annúminas (The Lost Realm)
2x Wild Stallion (Roam Across Rhovanion)
Attachment (6)
1x Dúnedain Remedy (The Drowned Ruins)
2x Heir of Valandil (The Lost Realm)
3x Outmatched (Fire in the Night)
Event (19)
3x A Test of Will (Core Set)
3x Daeron’s Runes (Foundations of Stone)
2x Descendants of Kings (Escape from Mount Gram)
3x Hasty Stroke (Core Set)
3x Heed the Dream (Flight of the Stormcaller)
3x Knowledge of the Enemy (The Fortress of Nurn)
2x Will of the West (Core Set)
Player Side Quest (4)
1x Double Back (Escape from Mount Gram)
1x Gather Information (The Lost Realm)
1x Prepare for Battle (The Mûmakil)
1x The Storm Comes (The Sands of Harad)
3 Heroes, 52 Cards
Check out this deck’s description on RingsDB for info on how to play it.
Inspiration
My favorite racial archetype in the game is Dúnedain. Ever since they came into their own during the Lost Realm / Angmar Awakened cycle I’ve enjoyed playing them in multiplayer. There’s something deeply satisfying about being engaged with 9 Enemies and having someone at the table say “Woah, you need some help with those? Looks like you’re in trouble over there!” and being able to reply “Nah, I’ll be fine, this is no big deal.”
They’re a little harder to swing in solo because they can take a few rounds to get going (you generally have to engage at least two small Enemies and get some tech out to be able to keep them around safely round after round before your Dúnedain cards can start to do their thing) and because they lack access to high-Willpower Heroes for early game questing. Throughout the entire Thematic Nightmare series, I’ve been looking for opportunities to make solo Dúnedain decks work.
One of the key problems to solve in any Dúnedain deck is being able to afford Allies. 3- and 4-cost Allies are the norm, and you’re probably going to want to pull them from multiple spheres of influence to get access to the well-rounded stats you need for solo play. Way back in the Dwarrowdelf days, I built a deck which relies on finding Heir of Valandil early and stalling until I can get it up and running. Earlier in this cycle, I built a deck which uses Grey Wanderer for smoothing and Timely Aid for an explosive start instead. Every Dúnedain deck is going to need some sort of engine that allows it to get its Allies out efficiently.
For a long time, I’ve been trying to make a Thurindir + The Storm Comes engine work—the idea being that if I can clear The Storm Comes in the first couple of rounds, I get the benefit of resource smoothing, making it way easier to play expensive Allies from any sphere by combining the resource pools of all three of my Heroes. This engine is especially alluring since several other Dúnedain cards rely on clearing a Side Quest to activate their abilities as well—instant synergy!
But it’s a tricky engine to get right because you need strong questing power right out of the gate so you can clear the Side Quest early—and Dúnedain Heroes don’t start with much willpower on the board. This compounds with the fact that your best questing Allies cost 3-4 resources—and getting them out is the very problem you’re trying to solve in the first place! Fortunately, two cards have recently sprung into existence which seem to be exactly what this archetype needed to get off the ground. One was the Contract Messenger of the King, which turns a Unique Ally into a Hero, allowing me to start with the 3-willpower Súlien as one of my Heroes. The other came in the last Adventure Pack of the game: Misty Mountain Journeyman, who only can be played for only 1 resource if I’m engaged with an Enemy. Since The Dread Realm starts you out engaged with a Reanimated Dead, I’m always going to be able to play him round 1.
Once I slotted these puzzle pieces into the deck, everything finally clicked! I could reliably clear my chosen Side Quest in a round or two, and I was able to get the archetype working well.
The play’s the thing
Win ratio: 4 / 6*
There are a few things which are unusual about this win ratio.
First off, the asterisk. There’s a controversial ruling that moved Contract Setup from where the rules booklet says it should happen to happening after Quest Setup effects instead. It’s… not entirely clear to me that this ruling solves any more problems than it creates, and the asterisk represents one of the weird side-effects of this ruling. In one game, I drew my starting hand, mulliganed away my one copy of Súlien (who is still in the deck at this point, due to Messenger of the King not having kicked in yet) and drew a second hand. No Súlien this time. So far so good. Then the Quest Setup instructions had me Reanimate the top card of my deck. I did so. Then I searched through my deck to bring Súlien into play… only to discover that she wasn’t there—she had just been reanimated by the Quest deck, and I now had to play with one fewer Hero.
“I’m not counting that one!” I exclaimed to myself, reshuffling all my cards for another go. And thus, the asterisk was born.
After playing my five games I was sitting at a 3-out-of-5 win ratio, my usual signal that it’s time to stop tweaking the deck and write the article. But there it was. The asterisk. Just sitting there. Staring at me. “You actually only have a 50%-win rate,” it sneered. “Because in reality you’ve played 6 games, no matter how much you don’t want to count the Setup mishap as a loss.”
“Ugh, fine,” I snapped back. So, I played and won another game, bringing me up to the unorthodox 4-out-of-6 ratio—and above my preferred “greater than 50%” win rate, no matter how the games were counted.
Let’s talk about those games
My victories were long, epic battles while my losses were utter defeats. No single encounter card was responsible for giving me trouble; danger was everywhere. One of my losses was fast: I revealed Daechanar’s Curse on both rounds 1 and 2, denying me card draw in the critical early game and giving the encounter deck the time to overwhelm me before I even got a chance to get off the ground. My other loss was surprising, happening mid-game while I was vying for control over the board state: I lost my Ally defender to Shadow Effect paper cuts (+1 attack here and there) and was forced to defend the last of 9 Enemies with a Hero. Disaster struck at the final moment when the Shadow Effect on Cursed Halls felled him, forcing me into a death spiral.
I very nearly lost a few games to Inner Sanctum, too, either when it came out in the early game and made it difficult to clear my much-needed Side Quest or when it came out late in the game and forced me to spend an extra round at Stage 3. There’s nothing like dealing 1 damage to each character in play and watching your hard-earned Allies evaporate before your eyes!
I always spent a lot of time on Stage 2, tanking Daechanar’s attacks round after round and dutifully poking him back to get rid of a Sorcery card each round. Depending on how long it had taken me to build up my board state to get there, I generally had anywhere from 2-7 Sorcery cards to get rid of this way, and Shadow Effects and encounter reveals often brought me more. Without any direct damage in the deck, it often took an exceedingly long time to whittle him down.
The first couple of games, this was tense and exciting. Just when I thought I had finally worn him down he’d hurl another Sorcery my way and the fight was still on! But by the fourth and fifth games, the never-ending boss fight began to wear thin, and I found myself groaning every time I revealed another Sorcery, delaying my victory by yet another round despite having everything well in hand.
Final thoughts
All in all, I think The Dread Realm is a fitting capstone for a difficult cycle, and the Nightmare version does it justice by doubling down on what makes the quest unique: finding interesting ways to bring Reanimated Dead and a myriad of Sorcery Conditions into play. The narrative arc of the quest is strong, and while it’s not quite as difficult as the previous quest in the cycle (and thank the Valar for that) it’s still got plenty of bite to not feel like a let-down. The trick of having you escape the collapsing catacombs after defeating the boss is an interesting and memorable twist to finish things off!
It’s not something I think I’ll return to often—since it really does become an unwelcome slog with repeated plays—but it’s worth keeping in the rotation of difficult-but-fun quests when I’m looking to break out something a little different from the standard fare. And I’m quite pleased that I was finally able to get the Side Quest-based Dúnedain deck to work!
In my next post, I’ll spend a little time looking back on this cycle, highlighting the best decks I got out of it and my favorite Nightmare quests from this leg of the journey. After that, there’s only one official Nightmare cycle remaining before taking on the Sagas, and it’s my favorite cycle of the game: The Grey Havens / Dreamchaser! I’d say I’m hoping for smooth sailing from here on out… but somehow, I don’t think that’s likely.
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