The what makes it tick series has become one of the most viewed elements on my site and its also quickly become my favorite type of article to write.  Today we begin yet another What Makes It Tick series on Lord of the Rings the Living Card Game by Fantasy Flight Games.

Now this is a game I really struggle with and its because it is a brutally hard game, in a sense, anyone playing it is an eternal noob as there seems to be no good way to truly master it.  This is without question what draws me personally to this game and since like so many out there I too am always looking for any tid bit of information, advice or just tips, I thought why not pass on what little I have learned.

As with all the articles in this series I’m going to assume you are familiar with the game, this series has always been intended for existing players rather than “I want to learn what this is” type of thing.  We are going to start right in the middle with our first article and tackle a tough and common topic of discussion.  The already infamous Adventure Quest “Conflict At The Carrock”

This is one tough quest and I struggled with it for a very long time before not only beating it but figuring out what the hell your even supposed to do to succeed.  Let’s get right into it!

Very important note here.  This series is about SOLO play, unaltered, straight up solo play.  Much of this advice would probably be quite different if I was making the assessments for 2 or more players.

The Lay Of The Land

Conflict At The Carrock is a 2 stage quest, though this is incredibly deceiving because there is so much more to it then that.   The two stages are Grimbeorn’s Quest & Against the Trolls.   The first stage of the quest, Grimebeorn’s Quest is mostly benign and non-descript.  You set aside the 4 Trolls you will be facing later and to complete the quest you simply need to attain 7 progress.  In the second quest you basically need to defeat these 4 trolls.

The first quest (Grimbeorn’s Quest) is simple enough but this is where the bulk of the work to be successful in the quest must be completed.  Its not about what it says, but about what it does not say.

Grimbeorn’s Quest 1
Setup: Add The Carrock to the staging area. Remove 4 unique Troll cards and 4 copies of the “Sacked!” card from the encounter deck and set them aside, out of play. Then shuffle 1 “Sacked!” card per player back into the encounter deck.

Forced: After placing the 7th progress token on Grimbeorn’s Quest, The Carrock becomes the active location. Discard the previous active location from play.

Against The Trolls Quest 2
When Revealed: Place the unique Troll cards previously set aside into the staging area.
Players cannot defeat this stage if there are any Troll enemies in play.

The core difficulty of Conflict At The Carrock is that the Trolls that drop into the staging area in the second quest, when faced simultaneously are all but impossible to defeat and because they have the same Engagement Cost, if your threat is above theres they will all drop on you simultaneously.  If this happens, In all but the most rarest circumstances, you are probably going to lose in the very round they drop on you.

Hence the obvious strategy here is to control your threat so that when stage two begins, they remain in the staging area.  While this is definitely part of the strategy, its far from the whole picture.

The Real Stages of Conflict At The Carrock

I mentioned that the first quest, Grimbeorn’s Quest, is all about what it doesn’t say though there are some clues given.

To truly defeat and control Conflict At The Carrock with any reliability you need to accomplish 4 things prior to completing the first stage of this quest.

First, you must find Grimbeorn the Old and claim him on your side.  He is your 4th hero, a powerful one, especially equipped to help you defeat the Trolls.  Without him, completing Conflict At The Carrock is very difficult to say the least.  Finding Grimebeorn however requires you to go through the Encounter deck and get Bee Pastures to the table.  This brings our second element.

Secondly you must control the Encounter top deck.  Whatever deck you build, its vital that you know what the top card of the Encounter Deck is and have the ability to get rid of it.  This is because there are several really tough cards in the Encounter deck that can end your game rather abruptly.  There are various approaches here, the one I ultimately used was Denethor.  This is because he can both look at the top card and move it to the bottom deck if you don’t like it and then in later stages, help defend with his 3 defense.  There are plenty of other ways to do this, suffice to say you must have some encounter deck control.  If you leave it to chance, bad things will happen.

Cards like Muck Adder can surprise you and take out one of your heroes easily if you are not prepared.  A poorly timed A Frightened Beast can dramatically raise your threat, which is something you really need to control given that you must stay under 34 threat to ensure the Trolls can’t engage automatically when stage 2 arrives.  In fact its more reasonable to say you need to be well under 34 to be successful as you will gain threat during the big fight as well.  Finally you really need to avoid the Sacked & Roasted Slowly combo, its going to end your day in an instance.  Those are just the cards from Conflict At The Carrock to, there is all manor of death in the other decks that are part of the quest including Hill Troll who can do a lot of damage to your threat.

The third element needed for success is a good army.  You really need a lot of stuff on the table ready to fight and quest.  Some utility here is also a good idea to assist with all other elements.  You want the units to be cheap, so that you can get them to the table, but fighty so that they can put some damage on the board.  The choice here is wide open, though I personally found that the Leadership and Lore Spheres worked the best here.  You have lots of allies that are cheap enough (2 or 3 resources) and offer great utility like card draws and boosting effects.  The most important part though is getting a good solid force so that you have both some sacrificial lambs and can do sufficient damage to take out one Troll per round which typically means doing about 12-14 damage.  That’s a big damage requirement but between hero’s and Grimebeorn, you should be about 2/3rds of the way there, so your army needs to fill in the rest.

The final element is what I like to call “fishing for cards”.  This is usually done through different types of utility allies or cards, but you must find the threat control cards in your deck like Gandalf for example to keep that threat down.  Remember you MUST be under 34 threat when you go to stage 2, going there with a threat higher than that is pointless, odds of you getting wiped out in short order are almost 100%.    Hence getting threat control into your hand is a priority and that means drawing cards effects & other effects that allow you to pull cards or filter through them.

Ok so you can see why this particular quest is so difficult.  A lot has to come together in order to succeed.

The optimal position you should be in when going into stage 2 of this quest are as followed.

1. Below 34 Threat (preferably 30 or bellow)
2. Sufficient Allies & Heroes on the board to do 12-14 damage per round when attacking.
3. Grimebeorn is a must in most cases, it helps with the above, but more importantly he can take a lot of damage for you without being sacraficed so your forces aren’t being diminished.

How I did It

I’m reluctant to simply post my deck.  I understand that this is a common practice in the community but as I was trying to defeat this quest, I didn’t want someone to just hand me the answer for the test.  This is a game of discovery, its part of the fun and I’m not going to spoil it for you.  I will however give you some tips on cards that where key in the success of this quest.

I used Leadership and Lore for my two spheres.  While I believe there are many hero’s that can successfully traverse this quest, I believe Denethor was the key to my success.  Really I think this is one of my favorite heroes to use for any tough quest because the truth is that if you can control the Encounter Top Deck, you have given yourself a massive advantage.  It requires him to exhaust however so I always make sure to put something in the deck that allows me to ready him in an emergency.

Gandalf is was also key to my success mainly for his threat control but he is expensive.  This is partially why I used Leadership, so that I could get Steward of Gondor and ultimately have enough resources to pay for Gandalf.  Its also an important card to get Grimbeorn the Old into play. One alternative is of course to use Sneak Attack to bring out Gandalf.  This is a dirt cheap way to leverage Gandalf but requires the drawing of two cards at the same time, not exactly a reliable way of doing it.  Steward of Gondor is a reliable card that helps with Gandalf and a lot of other things, so with Leadership to me its just an auto add most of the time anyway.

Finally I think Henamarth Riversong played an important roll, it was just that extra measure of control, Forest Snare can be helpful, though I didn’t use it for the Trolls, but more for controlling the board during the preparation portion of the quest in the first stage.  By the time your fighting the Trolls you shouldn’t need the snare, if you do, something has gone terribly wrong.  Burning Brand was also really important, the Trolls are tough enough without Shadow Effects.

The Victory

Beating this quest was not easy, my final score was 182, not exactly a massive victory, but the satisfaction of logging this quest was pure bliss.  It was a tough challenge, even with all the right moves the final stage is still tough.  Those Trolls are tough to beat and you still have to contend with the rising threat, questing and adds that can appear as you fight them.  In the end it was about keeping that threat under 34 and killing the Trolls one at a time.

The bet advice I can give when it comes to approaching any quest in Lord of the Rings but in particular this one, is that you have to pay close attention to your loses.  What is the root cause.  Is it threat, is it monsters, is it questing.  Identify it and then adapt your strategy to strengthen that portion of your deck.  I ultimately beat the quest because I didn’t “start over” with an entirely new deck each time I lost.  I simply went back to the deck and made small adaptions.  In the end it took over 15 attempts before I beat the quest, but now I’m certain I could beat it at least half the time which is about as good as it gets with a tough one like Conflict At The Carrock.

It was a fantastic experience, without question one of my favorite quests so far.  I hope you found this article helpful, good luck in your questing!