Silvan Alliance 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Silvan Alliance or "Taste the Rainbow!"

Fresh out of the new pack we've got the long requested Thranduil, a hero people have been demanding forever.

Thranduil brings some more defensive options to the standard Silvan fare, another feature that the community has been asking for since the Ring-maker cycle ended.

Here we're fully embracing the four-colour Silvan shenanigans, and trying to have our cake and eat it. As well as turning Celeborn with his very unique stat-line among heroes in the card pool, into a questing and attacking monster.

Opening Hand:

The mulligan for this deck isn't very different from our standard, Leadership, Spirit, Lore decks. We want our O Lórien! and because you REALLY don't want to be digging for Nenya for too long, having that in the opening hand is a huge help too. So long as you have any one Leadership or Spirit Silvan ally, and a bounce event, you should be good for the first few turns.

At the Table:

The Elvenking is a great new addition to the Silvan arsenal, for when absolutely need to get a Silvan back to your hand to play one next turn, or you need another defense out of Thranduil. If you're paired up with a really good deck with a sentinel defender you can make a good argument for crowning Celeborn, but solo especially you're going to want to take care of defending multiple attacks before getting extra value from your attackers.

We're going to ideally be loading Celeborn up with a Mirkwood Long-knife and Orcrist, or just 2 Long-knives if the Guarded keyword on Orcrist is too risky, and a Light of Valinor. Questing for 4 and attacking for 5 is nothing to sneeze at.

Thranduil is still a little squishy for a defender these days with only 3 defense, but the extra hitpoint over a lot of other 3 Defense characters will help if we can secure ourselves a Silvan Tracker nice and early to offset his defense with some healing. Failing that we've got a couple of defense boosts for him with Ancestral Armor and Cloak of Lórien

We're still the Silvan combo deck everyone loves to play, but with a little more combat focus, and leading in to more of a "swarm" style in the mid/late game as we'll be keeping more and more of our allies in play, and ideally bouncing, Galion, Galadhrim Weaver's and Greenwood Archer's to keep us ticking over with ready heroes and recycling our bounce events like Island Amid Perils and Feigned Voices

We can freely use cards like Captain's Wisdom or Galadriel's card draw ability earlier in the turn and then readying them with a Greenwood Archer. For Galadriel that's especially handy so you can get use out of Nenya in the same turn.

Sideboard:

The sideboard is mostly to just adjust for taste. I think Quicker than Sight could work but I think when you're tight on space I'd rather have some threat reduction from Island Amid Perils than hold it to cancel a shadow all game.

I don't like Steward of Gondor but it's a solo deck with 2 leadership heroes and I know it's a lot of people's go-to first pick when building a deck. I've played through Escape from Umbar and Treachery of Rhudaur a few times with this deck and to be honest Steward was overkill, between the Captain's Wisdom and just the smoothing provided by Thranduil's ability, having him or Celeborn sat there with 9-10 resources you don't need to spend was kind of pointless