Ent smashes Orcs 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

After having played around a bit with Messenger of the King I decided to use it with Skinbark. His abilty allows him to ignore the defense of Orc enemies when attacking alone, what is very useful in a lot of quests. Hall of Beorn shows that there are 123 enemies with the Orc trait and 4 or fewer hitpoints and they can almost all be smashed by him without any boosts. If you add two Dúnedain Marks, you can get almost all of the two 200 Orc enemies in the game, except for those with toughness, immunity to Player Card effects and the 5 with 7+ hitpoints.

So if you Play the right quests (more on that later) you start the game with a 9-threat hero that can handle attack from round 2 on pretty much on his own. So the rest of the deck should handle the defense and questing. I wanted Leadership acces to use the Dunedain Marks because I prefer double-sphere decks I went with Gildor Inglorion and Erkenbrand. That way I have some quest power , Card draw and a strong defender.

Quest power is hatd to muster with these spheres, but including the best unique allies from these spheres, Sneak Attack+Gandalf and Faramir this deck can do okay, especially later in the game. You will often find yourself questing unsuccesfully on the early rounds until you have established your allies, but you should be fine if you don't get location locked. A well timed Gandalf or Wait no Longer (you are normally happy to engage enemies) can help you break through an active location.

Because I wanted Dunedain Mark for Skinbark and the Dúnedain Remedy to heal Erkenbrand, I decided to go with a signal sub-theme with the Weather Hills Watchman. With the Sideboard you can go for more combat or willpower fokus. Dúnedain Cache is here for multiplayer, where this deck can be build in general more combat focused and another deck can handle most of the questing and could include readying for Skinbark.

So what quests are a good match for Skinbark? Obviously those with Orcs, but I already mentioned that toughness can be a Problem, so taking down Isengard lokks pretty hard (which is sad from a thematic point). On the other hand, the Goblins of Khazad-dum are so squishy that a hero like Thorin Stonehelm would be just as good as Skinbark.

The Orcs with really high defense we find in the Lost Realm. The 3 generic Orc enemies that appear throughout the cycle all have 3 defense and 3-5 hitpoints so they are pretty good targets for Skinbark. WIth two Dunedain Warnings you can even one shot an Orc War Party.

Here are how my first Playthroughs went:

• Intruders in Chetwood: 1 attempt, 1 Victory, with 48 threat! Used Gandalf to help taking the War Party Out, got out Faramir and pushed to Victory, being luck to reveal no side quests.
• The Weather Hills: 2 attempts, 1 Victory, this time with 46 threat. Locations where a bit of an issue, but between Steward of Gondor and the Remedy I had healing covered and managed to win

I went through some other quests with tougher Orcs:

• Tower of Cirith Ungol: Needed 3 attempts to beat this one. Skinbark isn't optimal because the better strategy in this quest is to avoid engagements and let the kill Orcs each other. But it was pretty satisfying to take out Shagrat with two Warnings on Skinbark. And Oh, I was again at 45 threat in the end.
• Race across Harad, 2 attempts, I once managed to reach stage 4, staying just 1 round ahead of the Orcs for the entire game. In the end the willpower just wasn't enough and they outpaced me. I think this one is be possible in multiplayer with a more quest focused deck.

While this deck isn't top-Tier by any means and needs specific quests to work I enjoyed it a lot. It is just so much fun to smash Orcs with a single Ent.