QotW: The Withered Heath Results

Jumping into the cycle of Adventure Packs with The Withered Heath, players will start to notice that games are going to take more rounds as the quests will force you to take additional turns before being able to advance the quest stage. This is also something that the campaign mode doesn’t fix for this quest. You still need to find a couple of Dragon Signs before being able to kill the dragon of this quest. Let’s see how our team of dragon exterminators have done this week!

The Withered Heath Stats

Groups registered: 10 (gonna be close to single digits soon, sadly)
Total attempts: 18
Most attempts: 4
Average attempts per entry: 1.8

Total number of wins: 10
Win-rate: 55.5%

Average opinion on the quest: 3.4

Campaign Mode

Encounter cards added for Growing Threat: Lost in the Wild, Dragon Hatchling, Giant Spider, Deadly Cold

Achievements

With this being a pretty long quest with various mechanics working together, it wasn’t too hard to come up with some more achievements. On top of my own, we also get a new achievement from the campaign mode to find the dragon before it can heal during stage 3, which is quite difficult and will require a fair bit of luck.

Make Haste

Complete the scenario in less than 13 rounds.

Dragon Hoarder

Complete the scenario with 4 Dragon Signs in the victory display.

There Is No Escape [Ered Mithrin Campaign Guide Achievement]

Win The Withered Heath without letting the Cold-drake heal any damage from stage 3.

Encounter card Opinions

The favorite encounter card for this quest was by far Creature Den. This allows you to search for a Dragon Sign, without having to get lucky with the Caves deck. You do need to fight off an enemy to get the objective, but that’s a far better route than trying to find it amidst the terrible locations of the Caves deck. It also makes the quest go by a little faster.

Being such a long quest, it is understandable that you accumulate quite a few cards in your hand that you’re saving up for. It would be a shame if you happened to draw into Lost in the Wild. This will discard your entire hand after you play your next card, so it earned a pretty clear spot on our “Least Favorite Encounter Card” ranking.

Cool moments that happened during the games

After four attempts I was finally able to assemble my combo pieces without getting ruined first, and I was able to pull off the There Is No Escape achievement. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this quest anytime soon.

I was able to add the maximum number of boons to the campaign pool, but it also gave me a stress headache. Hopefully worth it.

Ents synergize pretty well with this encounter deck: ruined supplies, deadly cold, and high falls all damage characters which actually boost damage output from ents.

Ents FTW in looooong quests

In one of the last rounds with my board state built up, I needed to take an extra attack, so I decided to chump block. I used Gaffer Gamgee to defend, but the shadow dealt him one damage, so the attack was now undefended. Pippin had Celebrian’s Stone, Grimbeorn was how I was defending against and destroying the cold-drake, and Thalion at this point was a hero with leadership and lore spheres and built-in action advantage, so Sam followed his dad out. I like to imagine they just went off for some father-son time. A couple rounds later and I won.

Decklists used

Gondor deck with tweaks + pre-built elf deck

🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎 https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/20177

Dale Don’t Fail https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/528487

Thranduil, spirit Legolas, Celeborn & lore Pippin, tactics Merry, Treebeard

Doom Silvans – Council of the Wise (Celeborn + Galadriel + Saruman)

Celeborn, Spirit Legolas, Thranduil & Treebeard, tactics Merry, lore Pippin

“That’s A Trap!” https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/499575

https://ringsdb.com/fellowship/view/20058

https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/528434

“Galion, Fetch more Wine!” https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/48428/eredmithrinelvesorgalionfetchmorewinerco-1.0

With the dragon slain and Urdug found, it is now time to find his equipment so that he can help you on your quest to Gundabad. For next week, you will be going up against Roam Across Rhovanion. If you’ve completed your game, please fill in the following form: https://forms.gle/VPtCKKGLmVrRhQ7s7.

The achievements during your trek through Wilderland will be:

Such Helpful and Loyal Companions

Defeat four or more enemies using only Urdug and/or Tiny.

Worthless

The Urdug objective-ally gains: “Forced: At the beginning of each round, exhaust Urdug.”
The Tiny objective-ally gains: “Forced: At the beginning of each round, exhaust Tiny.”