Rituals of the Destroying Flame

Games Spirit Island
1

My group played with this scenario for the first time this last weekend.  And it was awful.

Normally, we play at about difficulty 8-9, and we tend to do very well: we usually don't flip the Blight card, and when we do, it's usually very late in the game.  Since Rituals of the Destroying Flame is a 3, I picked a difficulty 5 adversary (one of the Jagged Earth ones; I'm a playtester).  We got absolutely brutalized.  By the end of round 4 there were maybe 3 lands on the entire board that weren't blighted, and the next Ravage was pretty much guaranteed to end the game by a massive margin.

We tried again, this time with the same adversary dialed down to difficulty 2.  We haven't played anything as low as a 5 since the first couple of months we played the game.  And it was still really, really tough.  We won, but the blight card again flipped in round 4 or so, and there were only about 6 Blight left on the card (in a 4-player game).

We tried different kinds of spirits; in our first game we focused on spirits that didn't really mind Blight, and in our second game we focused on spirits that got a lot of energy and were more about controlling than destroying.  Both were bad.  Is there a trick to this scenario that we just didn't grok? Or is it really much harder than a 3?

2

We've only played this scenario once, but it didn't make too big of an impact from what I remeber. It was a 3 player games with Spread of Rampant Green, Serpent and Sharp fangs. I can't remeber the advisary but aiming for difficulty 7 total.

Green stalled while Serpent and Sharp fangs prioritized getting flame markers down. I think by turn 3 we had a marker with 1 of all but a couple of lands and the game was normal from there. Though the extra presence destruction of the ritual let Serpent grow rather quickly. I remeber Serpent picked up Blazing Renewal which did a lot of work that game. I know we flipped the blight card a little early but got no where close to running out completely. 

Getting the markers down early seems the key to me, Serpent can easily forget Gift of Flowing Power early and Fangs just getting a minor with Fire turn 1 only to forget it the next.

3

We also went for early markers, but losing range and adding blight that early was a big problem.  I don't own Serpent yet, maybe it would have helped.