Treebeard's Army 1.0

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• 2.0
• 1.0

Investigating a disturbance outside Erebor, Bifur and a team of dwarves smartly put away their weapons upon encountering a mysterious creature known as an Ent. Observing this, the scout Hirgon and his allies offer an alliance to combat the threat of their common enemy: the Orcs.

The main "trick" to this deck is playing a 2 cost Lore card, followed by using Hirgon's ability to put a 2 cost tactics ally into play upon successfully questing, essentially getting 1-2 allies into play on most rounds. It is highly effective for most quests. On other turns, Bifur allows you to play 3-cost lore cards by taking Hirgon's resource.

Priorities are getting Wellinghall Preserver in asap, and putting Ent Draught and Self Preservation on Treebeard so he can really shine. In these cases, Treebeard is so tough he essentially becomes another defender because he can take most attacks undefended and shrug them off. The dwarves and Defender of Rammas are there to cover the Ents while they are exhausted early in--this offsets their drawback and they are good attackers and defenders (respectively) in their own right.

Of course, as with any Ent deck, once you get enough Ents on the board, you become an unstoppable forest of death, so the trick is getting you there as quickly as possible, with enough tricks to evade the speedbumps that prevent it. That is where Henamarth Riversong and Firyal, arguably two of the best Lore allies in the game, come in for scrying and Encounter card shenanigans. Add full-cost Out of the Wild (it's still worth it, trust me) and Scout Ahead judiciously and the deck will be considerably de-fanged in short order. For locations, you have Strider's Path and Secret Paths for cheap work-arounds to keep the location from getting out of control.

Use Gandalf mainly for threat mitigation and clutch questing, since combat should be usually well in hand with all that bark and beard on your side. Put the additional Ent Draught on your Defender of Rammas or Derndingle Warrior to make them defensive superstars, and Raiment of War on Azain Silverbeard, one of the dwarves, or even the quest ally if you can to keep them alive. Always go defensive first, since once the Booming Ent show up, you will be banged up enough that they will WRECK whatever is on the board in quick time.

Lórien's Wealth and Gléowine are there for additional card draw...dont worry about the cost; with Hirgon saving you so much in resources, you will have plenty of resources for them, and they both have the advantage of being usable on other players. Which reminds me, this deck is good in solo and multi, especially defending with the Derndingle Warrior and buffing other players with the above defensive attachments.

Healing is well handled by the usual stars Warden of Healing and Ioreth, which is great both in multi and to heal your non-Ents that the Wellinghall Preserver dont get to.

Have fun with this one. It is the end result of a lot of tinkering with the Ent trait. All-Ent decks are nice, but the Ents are so slow that early game is often a problem for them, as is threating out. Thry often cant get ahead of the Encounter deck. This deck is my solution to those drawbacks...I have put everything else in it for the sole purpose of mitigating their drawback of being so slow so that they can really shine.