The Doomed Park Rangers 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Intro

This deck first started as an attempt to make Faramir work, and the obvious answer was to weave him into an Ent deck. I then decided to unite this combination with the Doomed synergy, creating The Doomed Park Rangers, one of my favorite all-purpose decks that is a ton of fun to play against a variety of scenarios.

General approach

The key to this deck is getting Treebeard out on the table as quickly as possible, so you should absolutely mulligan for him. Through Gríma's ability, you can get him on the table in the first round. Here's where Faramir's ability first shines: in case you have or want to engage an enemy in that round, Treebeard will ready up, and you'll have a powerful defender (3 , 5 ) or attacker (4 ) available right away.

In subsequent rounds, Treebeard's resources – specifically paired with Gríma's built-in cost reduction – can bring more and more powerful Ent allies of any sphere onto the table, almost always one per round. Since you do not want to be fully reliant on Treebeard to play the Ents, there is Herald of Anórien. Synergizing nicely with the Doomed focus of the deck, he can help you play any 2 cost ally through his ability. A Very Good Tale fulfills the same purpose, offering you yet another way to get your allies of all spheres into battle quickly.

Aragorn, first and foremost, is present for his ability, allowing you to fully capitalize off the "threat turned resources" approach of the Doomed cards in the deck. At the same time, he also unlocks Sword that was Broken's ability which is particularly powerful given the ally swarm you will soon amass on the table. The Sword also helps smooth resources, allowing him to use his resources to pay for cards as well. He can also become a pretty respectable defender through A Burning Brand and Protector of Lórien, the latter of which offers a nice, useful way of getting rid of duplicate cards, of which there can be quite a few in your hand at times.

Additional remarks

Resources are rarely a problem in this deck. Treebeard generates his own Ent resources, and Gríma's ability essentially gives you an additional resource each round as well. Keys of Orthanc provides even more steady income, since you will be using Grímas ability virtually every planning phase.

Card draw is provided by Deep Knowledge and Entmoot. Of course, you could always put three copies of Daeron's Runes in as well, but I've honestly grown a bit tired of it and thus did not include it here.

Action advantage comes, as mentioned above, from Faramir's ability. In addition, there is Wingfoot to go on either Aragorn or Faramir, and Treebeard could also use his resources to ready himself or some other Ent ally in play. Lastly, Quickbeam has a built in readying effect for when he enters play.

Healing for your Ents is is reliably provided by Wellinghall Preserver. Being an ally, he fits much more comfortably in this deck than attachment- or event-based healing. Elrond provides a way to heal your heroes, too, although given their comparatively large pool of hitpoints (and the fact that Ent Draught boosts the latter even further), this is not really a necessity most of the times.

Conclusion

While far from perfect, this has proven to be a pretty resilient deck that performs well against a variety of different quests. It can handle combat and questing well thanks to the powerful Fangorn gang, it gets your deck going very quickly, and excels at providing you with action advantage when needed most. Hope you enjoy it!

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P.S.: The card pool this deck is based on includes all of the Hobbit and LOTR saga expansions as well as all cycles up until (and including) Angmar Awakens. If there is any cards in later cycles that might fit well here, I'd love to hear about them in the comments so I can keep them in mind and potentially update the deck later down the road. This was my first true attempt at building a deck myself, so please forgive any obvious errors / wrong judgements made.