Elf Guide

Event. Cost: 0.

Action: Return a Silvan ally you control to your hand to choose a hero. Add 1 resource to that hero’s pool.

...soon Haldir turned aside into the trees and halted on the bank of the river under their shadows. —The Fellowship of the Ring
John Howe

Mount Gundabad #114. Leadership.

Elf Guide
Reviews

Silvan resource smoothing. Nice simple card for something you will do all the time with silvan's.

That being said, it's a weaker Wealth of Gondor. Silvan is a powerful trait, but clearly the Gondor card is more flexible especially for early game acceleration. It's horrible compared to Unlikely Friendship, but that card needs a dwarf and we haven't had dealings with dwarves since the dark days. Still it's a usable card, and certainly not overpowered, so that makes it a good addition.

I find that Elf Guide is often one of the final few cards to get cut when I'm building a new Silvan deck, but it does have some solid utility in quests that force you to hit the ground running. For all their diverse tools, the Silvan reliance upon boosted allies tends to delay the establishment of their board state. Elf Guide might not single-handedly fix this problem, but it does help to give you access to that one extra resource (how many times do we find ourselves needing just one more resource to play what we need?). The fact that it is is an added plus, since you are almost certainly running Celeborn in a bouncy Silvan deck.

It also combos quite nicely with Naith Guide, especially if you have O Lórien! on the table: 1) Use Elf Guide to pull back the Naith Guide to gain a resource, 2) trigger O Lórien!, and 3) spend that new resource to play the Naith Guide again. Not only is this thematically appropriate, but it is quite fun to pull off.

Overall, Elf Guide may be a second-tier Silvan event, but it certainly has its place in certain situations. I think it's a solid card.