QotW: The Caves of Nibin-Dum Results

We’ve made it to the end of the Core Set + Dark of Mirkwood campaign! This also marks the first month of the QotW project, which I have enjoyed a lot. By the looks of things, so have many of you, as new entries keep flowing in with each quest. For this week, you were tasked with clearing out the Goblins in the abandoned Nibin-Dum. All while trying to get to some achievements as well. Let’s see how you all did!

The Caves of Nibin-Dum Stats

Groups registered: 12

Total attempts: 14
Most attempts: 3
Average attempts per entry: 1.16

Total number of wins: 14
Win-rate: 100%. Great job everyone on winning every playthrough!

If you played this quest in campaign mode, there was an option to obtain a copy of Ranger Sense that you can use for future campaigns. In order to do this, you had to check whether or not the player with the highest threat exceeded 40. If all players are under this threshold, the players have rescued a retired ranger. Since this is the final quest of the campaign, his boon isn’t that useful anymore, except for the fact that you get to bring this to your next campaign as well! I personally really like this cross-campaign play, since it means that doing this campaign will have some value for future endeavors as well. Anyways, with the quest taking quite a few turns before you can win, it is not uncommon to end up with a high threat. But if you built around this 40-threat threshold, it shouldn’t be impossible to obtain this boon.

Average opinion on the quest: 3.67

Achievements

As always, there were two achievements to be obtained for this scenario. The first was meant to increase the difficulty of the Cracked Pillar on stage 3. This now scales with the number of players in the game, which is more fair for the scenario. Having to remove 4 damage per player in order to travel here does mean that players could spend more time at this stage than they used to. The second achievement has players discard encounter cards at stage 4 until they hit an enemy per player. This mirrors the effect of stage 2, but will hopefully make the final stage a little tougher to overcome. But with the weaker enemies in this deck, hopefully, it wasn’t impossible for people to beat.

Encounter card Opinions

For favorite encounter card in this quest, Cracked Pillar scored the highest. This is quite a unique take on a location and is the focus of stage 3. I also based one of my achievements around this location, as it otherwise wouldn’t be much of a challenge. Goblin Dungeon also scored high, mostly because you can get a free ally once it is explored. The lack of a Dark trait does protect it from the Cave Torch, so you will have to make the effort of traveling here in order to get that ally.

As for the most frustrating or unfair card, we get a three-way tie. Collapsed Mine slows down the game too much by limiting your progress. Crumbling Ruin is a tricky treachery that will really depend on the characters you have left ready, and the cost of the cards in your deck. Play too many expensive cards in your Hobbit-deck, and you might end up losing a hero to this effect. The final card that players found annoying was the Watchful Eyes. This is a staple of the Dwarrowdelf cycle as well, and really hinders the usefulness of your heroes. Especially in lower player counts, this treachery can suck. You could remedy this with a readying effect or a way to discard Condition attachments, but otherwise you need to keep the hero back or suffer the additional encounter card.

Cool moments that happened during the games

I made 132 progress on stage 4 (Astonishing Speed in a 4P Rohan fellowship) before dealing 39 damage to the Goblin Chieftain.

The dwarf deck started at 38 threat and ended at 7

Eight attack, Narya boosted Eagles of the Misty Mountains struck with Support of the Eagles boosted Grey Wanderer Gandalf to knock off the Goblin Chieftain.

I played with a swarm of Dwarves intent on reclaiming their ancestral home. I also applied the two Con achievements besides the two QotW ones.

Dain had Ancestral Armor, Dwarven Shield, and Armor of Erebor. I was playing the achievement where the Chieftain had 8 base attack on stage 4, and drew a shadow card which gave the Chieftain +3 attack. Thanks to his ability, Dain only took 1 damage from the attack and thanks to the Shield he actually gained a resource.

After about 10 rounds I managed to get 9 angry trees and two feisty hobbits out as allies, which made stage 3B a breeze.

Meme-decks made

Due to various schedules overlapping this week, fewer members of the community participated in this week’s quest. As a result, we did not get any meme-decks for Caves of Nibin-Dum. So please enjoy this gif as consolation: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/16tpaf/possibly_the_greatest_gif_story_line_ever_xpost/

Decklists used

https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/49162/elladanelrohirtacklethequestoftheweek-9.0

https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/19739/thefullmusteroftheriddermark-qotwcoredarks

A 5 Dwarf Start deck -Bond of Friendship dwarf deck with hero Bombur so it starts with 5 dwarves. And a grey wanderer Na’asiyah deck

Lore and Larceny 🥷🎶 https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/19550/loreandlarceny

https://ringsdb.com/questlog/view/50506/thecavesofnibin-dm-1player-2024-06-29

https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/224200

https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/19926/protectorsofthewild

https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/17160/wanderingelvenking-1.0 https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/32772/theburlybondsofswolvanion-1.0

Aragorn bond of friendship https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/524034

A Three Hunters Dwarven Mining deck with Spirit Dain, Tactics Gimli, and Gloin

https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/20012/thesecondcoming-1.0

While we promised that we would start the Ered Mithrin cycle after the Dark of Mirkwood was completed, we wanted to give players some extra time to get their decks together and prepare for a 9-quest campaign. So in order to prepare, we are going to face the latest Stand-alone scenario from AleP: The Siege of Erebor! This is a tricky quest with a lot of moving components but is a lot of fun to bring to the table. If you do not own this quest, play it digitally with some friends on DragnCards. Fill out this form when you are done with the quest: https://forms.gle/bRsV484qqbDwH6pJ9

I had to come up with some new achievements for this quest since I did not prepare anything in the book I wrote where all other achievements can be found. Hopefully, these two are not too difficult, and should be possible with the right decks! Achievements for this week are: