I used her in a thematic deck I built to beat Nightmare Peril in Pelargir for my blog: http://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/5761/have-you-tried-mercenary-work-it-might-suit-you-1.0 It's not really a general purpose deck; it would work as a combat deck or a battle-questing deck, though.

Yup, each Surge keyword is meant to reveal an extra card, regardless of whether it was the first or second reveal. The cards you would have revealed anyway don't fulfill the Surge keyword.

I used a brothers deck all through Grey Havens / Dreamchaser. It's great in multiplayer too, often defending an obscene number of enemies at a time, although it relies on getting Elven Mail early and doesn't quest much at all. http://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/3834/warriors-of-the-west-3.0 I also once built a thematic Erestor deck for my blog that had Elladan in it just for his Tactics icon. It was actually a really fun deck if I recall, and I would definitely put ally Elrohir in it if I were to revisit it. http://ringsdb.com/decklist/view/5002/the-path-of-wisdom-1.0

The front page shows the deck with the highest popularity score for each of the four spheres. So you're not actually competing with *all* the decks people are posting, just the ones who share the same dominant sphere.

For what it's worth, the Arkham Horror Deluxe expansion that debuted at GenCon (The Path to Carcosa) is now available to the general public. Maybe LotR won't be far behind...?

Lovely job! I'm envious.

I think it makes it a little easier to miss those keywords, but I don't think it's always wrong. I would say it's to be avoided when possible, but if you really need that quote to pull your theme together properly, then I think it's acceptable. It might be possible to wordsmith it a bit to get it all to fit, though. You could probably save a line by changing the word "creatures" to "things" or moving "Uta Falkenwrath" to the end of the quote. You might be able to save some space in the "Forced" effect, too, depending on how it looks on its own line.

I just came across this relevant snippet from the Black Riders rulebook when I was looking through it today:

Yeah, Doom Hangs Still works great in this quest--you basically buy yourself another round. The Black Gate gathers its tokens during the Quest Phase, too, so it would even skip accumulating +1 encounter card that round.

Those are my 3 favorite quests from the Dreamchaser cycle! I'll be placing my order tonight...

The alt art card and playmat are exclusive to the Fellowship event, but the quest will be available as a Print on Demand quest later I'm sure. That's what they have done for every quest up til now, no reason to change it this year.

Woo! I think I'm going to prefer the original Galadriel artwork (it's hard to beat Magali) but that playmat is fantastic.

Ha! Well now I have to try it. I think the biggest problem is going to be questing successfully enough to not threat out too fast.

I assume you mean Spirit Pippin? Hmmm... It might if you had some way to deal with stuff in the staging area. Threat is definitely one of the many common ways to lose, but maybe if you mostly ignored combat you could find a way to survive a few more rounds? Might be worth a try.

Caldara is actually what I'm trying to use right now. I like her ability to bring out another 4 chumps to survive one more round