Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
—Aragorn, The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cycle: Oaths of the Rohirrim [ALeP]
Can you catch the traitorous Rohirrim Ealdwulf before all-out war engulfs all of Rohan? Can you survive not one, not two, but three different Dunlending clans who’d trade their last horse for a chance to lay low a people they despise? The final confrontation proved to be the ultimate test for many players in this week’s Quest of the Week! There’s Blood in the Isen!
Blood in the Isen’s Stats
- Groups registered: 8
- Total attempts: 31
- Most attempts: 4
- Average attempts per entry: 3.9
- Official difficulty: 9/10
- Community-rated difficulty: 8.8/10
- Total number of wins: 11
- Win-rate: 40.5%
- Average opinion on the quest: 3.7
Many got to experience the careful balancing of card cost and threat with the Narrow Crossing Ford objective.
Achievements
Here are the achievements we had for this quest:
2 Edge 2 Knife
Never put more than 10 resource tokens on Narrow Crossing.
Isen Intensifies
Add 1 threat to the staging area per resource token on Narrow Crossing.
Of the 8 groups who registered plays for this quest, with 11 wins among them, only 2 completed the achievement that limited your total in-play card cost to 10 before having to raise your threat by the difference. No one, it seems, wanted to take on the challenge of adding up to 15 threat to the staging area every round for bragging rights.
Encounter Card Opinions
The Favorite
There was one clear winner for favorite encounter card in Blood in the Isen: North-South Road. Getting to add a resource token to the Fords objective without having to resolve the Forced effect is a huge win, especially when there are 3 in the deck and none have Victory! If you can bring these back often enough, not only can you get Narrow Crossing chock-full much faster, you can also keep some gas in the horse (so to speak) for Hasty Pursuit.
The Non-Favorite
Rohan Renegade was the least favorite card for this Quest of the Week. Don’t let that measly 3 Attack and 2 Defense fool you. Not only can you reach his engagement level fairly quickly with the quest objective, but his attacks are effectively undefended! Hope you brought plenty of disposable allies or our good friend Beorn! Better yet, this traitorous rider would be better served feinted or trapped.
Things worth sharing from the games
I discovered there was a card that have +2 attack of the defending character was a noble the hard way and lost Thengel, but I was able to stabilize and pull out the win. Making sure to lose enough cards from the board to avoid threating out in stage 3 was quite the puzzle!
Ioreth is defitly the GOAT for this quest !
A Mithril shirt fetched by Riddle-game allowed me to ignore most the direct damage that this quest put out so frequently, Pallando with You Cannot Pass! defended everything and Beorn brought in by TImrahil killed all the enemies (One Dunlanding Beserker who killed another copy of it also helped). Was especially fun to play Word of Persuation on the Rohan Renegade from stage 3. That also allowed me to Sneak Attack Gandalf thrice without dying from too much damage. In total it took me 22 rounds but it was a win, without needing 5 of the tokens on the Fords Objective even, so I crossed having completed 2 Edge 2 Knife.
I tried it first (blindly) with a Silvan deck. It took a couple of tries before I got to the third stage. I was really looking forward to dropping my threat from 46 once Grimrede was destroyed. But then I flipped to 3b. Silvans can’t take that much direct damage! That one ended up with Ealdwulf having only 8 HP left, but I had two or three other enemies piled up and more coming, while by board state was being whittled down and I succumbed. I then decided to take not one, but two degenerate playstyles to beat the quest, combining Outlands allies with Blood of Numenor and Gondorian Fire. That worked very well, and it’s been a lot of fun using that deck against this quest. Kind of like how I just kept playing Nurn with the same deck once I’d cracked it, which I also enjoyed a lot.
ALeP, please don’t repeat the mechanics of this quest. I get that you wanted to restrict the board the player can get, but the Fords mechanic is awful. I’d rather have Time to prevent turtling, or unfair encounter cards like Attack on Dol Guldur that massacre allies. I’d even prefer attachment hate over this! Anyway, thanks for all your work! Love you!
Intense. After X losses I had given up on the Rohans, but the knowledge of it being possible, I swapped a few cards around and gave it another go (thank you discord!).
I got the Gamling-Escorts combo online early as well as managed to get and keep Snowmane on Thengel. Important for questing. I was one progress short from progressing from 2B with Grimrede already damaged, so I played Astonishing speed to push over, threat and damage starting to amass. Over the game I could build up my attack power with the Riddermarks knights and Eomer on Firefoot. I took a threat increase from the Hasty Pursuit on my last round, to ensure enough progress, having already placed 6 progress on the quest – it was now or never. With two progress to spare, I could engage him and put in the 16 attack needed! (So much could have gone wrong, I was lucky in my draws from the encounter deck and with the shadows, as well!)
Elfhelm was a silent MVP being able to throw him in to tank an attack or by being discarded to Worthy of Rememberence to defeat a dunlending.Mechanically, I thought this quest was solid and was a great test as final quest of the cycle. Thematically, I thought it a bit of a miss as the previous quest was spent mustering the Rohirrim to your side and then in this scenario you’re heavily punished for having a healthy board. So, I thought the quest was an interesting design and effectively countered certain deck archetypes, but just thought it did not mesh with the theme of the cycle as much. That bothered me more than the difficulty.
Decklists Used
https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/647573
https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/648806
https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/65422/mithrilintheisen-2.0
Custom deck for this scenario (because it calls for it) https://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/65420/bloodandfireintheisenoutlands-2.0
Galadriel, Imrahil and Lothiriel trying to cheese the quest. Spoilers: did not work
The Rohan forces come and go (Lothirel, Thengel, Éomer) – https://ringsdb.com/deck/view/649162
Sackmoneys deck with Outlands, Blood and Fire and Erestor
Rohan Hunters (Éomer, Fastred, Herubrand)
If you haven’t yet voted on the difficulty of the quest over at the LOTR LCG Quest Companion, feel free to do so here: https://lotr-lcg-quest-companion.gamersdungeon.net/#oaths-of-the-rohirrim-quest-blood-in-the-isen
If you want to share in the discussion of this quest live, join the Cardboard of the Rings discord and look for the Quest of the Week channel: https://discord.gg/5tkTeSCdxc
Vision Of The Palantir 