The Voice of the Trees

When I just had the core set, one of my greatest annoyances was a lack of combat power in the sphere. To reconcile this, one of the first purchases I made after the core set was the Three Trials. Idraen quickly became one of my favorite heroes, given how she embodies so many of my favorite aspects of the game:

• She is a dunedain, one of my favorite cultures of Middle Earth
• She interacts with locations, one of my favorite aspects of the game
• She has built-in readying, so I need't rely on ally swarming

However, Idraen has a flaw: I play solo most of the time, and so locations are a lot less common than in multiplayer. This deck aims to make Idraen usable, if not powerful, in solo.

Strategy

The overall goal of the deck is to manipulate the encounter deck into revealing locations as frequently as possible, avoiding enemies until the deck is ready for combat. Key cards for this strategy include Denethor and Shadow of the Past.

Questing

The deck utilizes location control in lieu of massive willpower. While this deck can struggle a little bit when it comes to questing for a lot, its control over the encounter deck means the encounter deck will usually reveal locations, which Lórien Guide, Northern Tracker, and Warden of Arnor can quickly get rid of. Strider's Path can allow the deck to ready Idraen in case you are engaged with an enemy, but have no active location. The Riddermark's Finest gives the deck point-and-click readying for Idraen in case of emergencies.

Defending

The deck tends to struggle with huge enemies, relying on chumping to defend against them, or trampling them with Ride Them Down before they can engage you. Denethor can block enemies with 5 or less thanks to A Burning Brand.

Attacking

Idraen is almost always ready come the combat phase, and her 3 paired with either a Wandering Ent or Treebeard is enough to dispatch most enemies in my two cycles. Larger enemies can take some time to build up to, but a Burning Brand makes it more or less safe to stay engaged with an enemy for multiple turns.

Resource Management

This deck does tend to struggle with paying for cards, as I don't really have any resource acceleration cards in or (outside of Grima). Song of Wisdom goes on Idraen, allowing you to pay for cards just a little bit easier. While it does take a couple turns for this deck to save up for some of its cards, the control it exerts over the encounter deck makes it a bit easier to wait.

Card Draw

Ancient Mathom is very potent in a location control deck such as this, and Erebor Hammersmith allows you to recur it a couple times. This deck doesn't need to dig for specific cards in order to work, so the sub-par amount of card draw doesn't hurt it that much.

Sideboard

As with all of my decks, the sideboard consists mostly of cards I have yet to test with the deck. The exceptions are Power of Orthanc, which is used for quests with nasty condition attachments, and Waters of Nimrodel, for quests with absurd amounts of direct damage. Most of the cards are for a Galadriel variant of the deck I wanted to try. While this version would be more interesting, fishing for Nenya might make the deck too hard to use.

• Galadriel
• [Lembas](/card/08064)
• [Mirror of Galadriel](/card/08118)
• Nenya