At first glance, one might think: “What?! ALeP gave Tactics its own Unexpected Courage? And at exactly the same cost? OP!” At a second glance, however, comes the realization that this is an encounter action, which makes it much more tricky to use. So, what is this card good for? Well, firstly, it is reliable action advantage for Tactics, and having a Warrior hero in that sphere is not that unlikely. So, you could use it on a questing hero with good combat stats, enabling them to contribute to both, but finding a suitable questing hero with the Warrior trait isn’t as easy as you might think (especially in a tactics deck, which this card seems to be made for); and Théoden already has his own action advantage in Snowmane, although that is off-sphere, so this can be a good alternative if you don’t play spirit. Glorfindel comes to my mind as a good option if you’re running a Tactics-Lore deck so that his bloated stats are not wasted, and of course the new Glorfindel released in the same pack with Onward into Battle (he just loves tailor-made attachments, doesn't he?). Then, there are the Siege and Battle quests, where this card can be extremely useful. The problem with those keywords is that your heroes (and allies) have to do double duty with their combat stats, so the characters you send for questing are also the ones you want to manage combat with, resulting in those unfortunate moments where you have to decide whether to lose because Beregond has to defend and thus cannot quest, or because he was questing and thus couldn’t defend. Onward into Battle helps with these quests, so that’s nice; but outside the Against the Shadow cycle and some rarer occurences of the keywords, situations where you want to quest with your Warriors are few and far between. So, what else is this card good for? Well, this card makes sure that combat heroes will be available for combat. That may sound a bit strange, since there are no obvious reasons why they shouldn’t be seeing as they did not quest (and there are no Warrior heroes with self-exhausting abilities that I remember). But very often, one can find themselves in a situation where their combat hero had to be exhausted prior to the combat phase. To give a few examples:

• An enemy made an attack outside of the combat phase (a classic!). This can often throw your most careful plans out of the window, as those enemies are often already nasty ones you want to defend with your big hero defender; but then, this defender will usually be unavailable to defend a regular attack. Think about the many enemies making an immediate attack after they have engaged you. With Onward into Battle, your defender will be able to defend both their attacks.
• You made an attack outside of the combat phase. Arguably less common, but still a grat use case for this card. Quick Strike and Hands Upon the Bow are classic examples of cards allowing you to make an attack outside of the normal framework. Since both these cards require a single character to attack, that means it will often be a beefed up attacker like Legolas. Now, killing an enemy without having to defend it first is great in and of itself, but it’s even greater if you can ready your big attack guy and deal with another enemy the normal way.
• Shadow insurance. There’s one shadow effect that has been popping up more and more in the later cycles. “Shadow: Defending character cannot ready until the end of the round.” This can be really problematic, because that means your defender won’t ready in the refresh phase, so you won’t be able to use him in the next round. That often means having to chump or take an attack undefended, which can be harmful to your board state. But with Onward into Battle, your defender will be up and running again once the encounter phase comes.
• Various sporadic uses. Action advantage is always useful for travel effects requiring you to exhaust a hero, and Onward into Battle is no exception. It is also great for the racing tests in Challenge of the Wainriders, so that the hero with the big numbers in the of or department can do the test and will still be able to fight. Also good for sailing tests, because when sailing, ever body is needed.

All these cases are helped by Onward into Battle, which makes it a very versatile addition to the card pool, and it’s also a very fun card to find various uses for. It is not an Unexpected Courage clad in red, but that’s a good thing in my book. Nevertheless, it can often make your life that crucial bit easier. Give it a try in your tactics deck, and you most likely won’t be disappointed to draw it!

TL;DR: This is 100% a "build-around" card, but if you do build around it, it's incredible.

I usually don't like temporary stat-boosting cards unless they have the potential to make a big impact. Scouting Party is that 100%, but it isn't something that you can just throw into any deck - you really have to build around it, which is why I never used it at first. But it so happened that one day I noticed that I had two Scout heroes in my collection that I hadn't used yet (Idraen and Lanwyn), so I decided to make a Scout deck and give it a go. (Edit: You can find the deck here.)

While building this deck, I kept thinking that this card is more restrictive than it looks! It turns out that out of a lot of the questing allies that I usually like to use, such as West Road Traveller, aren't actually Scouts. But I took this as an opportunity to dig even further into my collection and pull out things like Sailor of Lune and Mirkwood Explorer that I also rarely use or have never used before.

The first quests I played with this deck were The Caves of Nibin-dûm and the first two Dream-chaser quests in a 2-player fellowship. And every time Scouting Party came up in the game, it made a HUGE impact - it ended up boosting my by 10 or more every time I played it! It's balanced pretty well - it's restrictive to play it, but if you build your deck around it, it's incredible.

However, like most other temporary stat-boosting events, there were a lot of times where my stats were already good enough that I simply didn't feel like I needed it. Though to be fair, the other deck in the fellowship was playing Prince Imrahil with A Very Good Tale and Captain's Wisdom and was spewing out allies left and right, so that might not be this card's problem, lol.

Also one thing to note: This card is obviously best when you go as all-in as possible with your questing. This is not a bad thing, but this factor alone makes the card much better in multiplayer than in solo, because then you can go all-in with your questing while the other players handle the combat. One of the reasons that made me not use this card for a while was the fact that I play true solo about 60% of the time.

The variant of Fatty Bolger is a card that I wanted to work for so long, but it is hard to argue that the is quite underwhelming which is a shame considering his (relatively) important role in getting the hobbits out of the Shire. I am happy to say that this Fatty Bolger does not feel like the hindrance of his incarnation. He is in fact a good hero.

Let's talk stats first. Ok, so the stats leave something to be desired. Fatty Bolger has the same stats as Fatty Bolger which are not geat by any means. 1 and 1 mean he won't be contributing much to questing and attacking. The 2 and 3 means he can be used as a decent defender with cards such as Staff of Lebethron and Hobbit Cloak. His can be further increased by cards such as Bill the Pony and Boots from Erebor. It is worth noting that he has nearly the same stats as Bilbo Baggins, and all the same points regarding his stats as described on the Bilbo page apply here.

The stats aren't great, but does he have an ability to compensate for the subpar stats? Yes! Indeed he does.

Basically the ability is to raise your threat by 4 and exhaust Fatty to CANCEL a non-unique enemy just revealed and add it to the victory display. Everyone and their mother should know how strong card cancellation is with cards like A Test of Will, Hasty Stroke, Eleanor, A Stout Heart, and The Door is Closed! are. Also note that the cancelled card is not replaced. In single-player this means effectively no cards are revealed for the questing phase. In multiplayer, this means one less card is revealed. An incredibly useful ability.

Now part of the cost to use the ability is to exhaust Fatty which isn't really much of an ask as his stats aren't great anyways. His ability has obvious synergy with the victory display archetype. He provides an easy way to put an early card into the victory display. Using this ability has many benefits for these decks. (Assuming that the enemy chucked in the victory display shares a trait with other enemies) Rossiel gets a +2, The Door is Closed! receives an eligible target to be cancelled, Keen as Lances has its cost reduced by 1, Buckland Shirriff can be put into play for cheap, Horn-call of Buckland can give an engaged enemy -1 and -1 and ready the attached hero, and Woodland Sentry has a potential target to discard. So many options are opened up from one enemy placed in the victory display.

Another thing to note is that Fatty starts the game at 5 instead of 7. This makes his ability effectively raise your threat by 2 to use. (If Éowyn had a similar cost, she would be much more balanced). Now in my experience, it is generally best to use Fatty's ability sooner rather than later to get sooner use out of the victory display cards. Starting the game at -2 makes it much easier to play secrecy cards such as Resourceful, Risk Some Light, Out of the Wild, Fear! Fire! Foes!, and Needful to Know. Effectively, it allows for easy secrecy for 1-2 rounds before we activate the ability to get some of these cards out.

Fatty Bolger is a success. He has a very strong ability to cancel an enemy and allows for easier play of secrecy cards. The art is incredible as well (with equally fun favour text).

Sidenote: Fatty also works well in traaditional hobbit decks as they tend to struggle with early combat which Fatty solves. He does have stiff competition for the hobbit hero slot with Pippin and Folco Boffin. While both of these are probably better choices, Fatty is still a very serviceable option.

I must admit: I was not particularly impressed with this card upon release. It was kinda overshadowed by the other trap cards in this cycle such as Celador who makes questing easier and provides a consistent means of threat reduction, It Should Be Spared which allows you to move your traps from weak enemies, and finally Spring the Trap which allows to get a ranger ally in for (potentially) cheaper and after encounter cards have been revealed.

For all of these, the use and improvements were fairly easy to understand. With Live Bait however, this was not the case for me. Blanking the text box of an enemy is undeniably useful, of course, but just how useful is not obvious to those who have not used the card yet. Anyone who uses the card Revealed in Wrath or Thrór's Key knows how useful enemy text box blanking is. Seriously, how often are you in a situation where you don't know how to deal with an enemy soley because of the text box? For me, it's not uncommon. (I woud also like to point out that Live Bait blanks the text box until the end of the ROUND while Revealed in Wrath does until the end of the phase. Allthough, I feel that this is justified because Live Bait is more restricted in using it.)

In addition to the text blanking, it also requires that we attach a unattached trap to that enemy which triggers Celador for a -1 or ready and Damrod for a card. Note that this allows this card to function as a way to move unattached traps to engaged enemies which is quite useful for traps like Ambush, Entangling Nets, and Outmatched. This is also great for the Emyn Arnen Ranger as it allows us to give an enemy a trap before questing to get the + if there was no eligible enemies. It can also be used with ally Faramir to give an enemy a trap, play Faramir, engage that enemy, blank its text box, and deal 4 damage to it.

Ok, so the text blanking is great, but what else is there to the card? Well, there is a restriction that you must have an unattached trap in play. This leaves us with a few scenarios when this card would ideally be used.

1. Planning Phase - Because the blanking lasts until the end of the round, we can use it on the enemy before questing. This allows us to play a trap unattached, blank an enemy in the staging area (or engaged with a player), then attach that trap to the enemy! Normally the traps have to wait until the questing phase to attach and you have no control over what it attaches to. This allows both for us to control exactly which enemy gets a trap as well as the benefit of blanking the text box. This is very useful for traps such as Followed, Poisoned Stakes, and especially Ranger Spikes.
2. Encounter or Combat Phases - If no enemies were revealed from the encounter deck this round (admittedly quite rare in multiplayer games), then we can use this to move traps to engaged enemies to make combat easier.

All in all, this card has been the unsung hero in many of my trap-based games. It blanks enemy text boxes and allows for the freedom to choose what a trap will attach to. The restriction of playing is fairly minimal for trap decks, and is justified for this card. And you get all of this for a cost of 0! If you aren't currently using in your trap decks, you should. You won't be dissapointed. It is definately my favourite new trap-based card that ALEP has introduced. Wonderful job, ALEP team!

I recently played this in a 2-player fellowship in a Prince Imrahil deck that had both Fornost Bowman and Marksman of Lórien in it. I noticed that the Bowman and Marksman are both Ranged allies that cost 3. I compared the two and realized, if you're not playing the Dúnedain playstyle of trying to keep enemies engaged with you (which I wasn't), then the Marksman is much better than the Bowman - you don't need to do any work to give it high and it has a useful enters-play ability. But, if you are playing a Dúnedain deck that cares about that playstyle, then the Bowman is much better - not only can you reliably get it to 3 or sometimes even more, but it also has the Dúnedain trait which is much more easily taken advantage of, such as by using Heir of Valandil to bring it out much more easily.