honestly, my results with his hero have been pretty solid. the gameplan is to quest with the heroes while fighting with allies and events, and theoden bringing 4-5 willpower to the deck is a pretty good addition to it. him, eowyn and hirgon bring 11 willpower on turn 1 for a mere 27 threat, while being able to play a defender of rammas and an attacker due to hirgon's ability (or a 3-drop and a feint)

not a gamebreaking hero by any means, but pretty fun to mess around with (and the art is pretty great)

I know Ents dislike axes, but this review is a hatchet job.

Leaflock is the worst of the Ents. There is no Ent card that I would hold back on so I could play Leaflock. What's that? He can have 4 for 3 cost, you say? While that's true, that simply isn't enough to redeem him.

Let's compare him to the most vanilla of the Ents, Wandering Ent, a 2/2/2/3, 2-cost ally. Both enter play exhausted, cannot have restricted attachments. Both have identical , , and . The differences lie in their willpower and their cost. If you have the misfortune of drawing Leaflock early, before you have Ents to stack damage on, he's a more expensive Wandering Ent with less willpower. That's no good. So obviously you want him late, right? Well...

Let's see at what a good board state for Ents looks like. Besides other unique Ents such as Quickbeam and Treebeard, there's a nice combo between Derndingle Warriors, Booming Ents, and Wellinghall Preservers. The Wellinghall Preservers take care of questing, the Derndingle Warriors, possibly with an Ent Draught for really high attack enemies, take care of defending, and the Booming Ents are very good at tearing enemies apart. If there's no source of direct damage such as archery, then damage will only reliably be placed on Derndingle Warriors, Quickbeam, and Beechbone. But you don't want the damage on the Warriors to stick around, you want the Preservers to heal that damage during the refresh phase (or by readying through other means such as Narya) so that your defensive solution remains solid. The Booming Ents don't have a problem with this; the damage stick around long enough for them to attack. But by the time you reach the quest phase, that damage should be healed, and Leaflock will be left a more expensive Wandering Ent.

So that leaves quests where there is archery and other direct damage, and you can spread ticks of damage to your Wellinghall Preservers, Booming Ents, and Wandering Ents, causing your Booming Ents to rival the ferocity of Boromir holding a torch. But in those quests you simply need healing all the more, so Wellinghall Preservers are the priority. By the time you have enough of them and other prioritized Ents out to have resources for Leaflock, you simply don't need the extra willpower. To really rival the usefulness of the other Ent cards, he should probably start with some willpower, maybe 2, and have a higher willpower limit, such as 5 total willpower, to give you a dilemma in which Ent to play.

In summary, he's a more expensive version of the pile of stats that is Wandering Ent in the early game, and even when he does get all 4, he's simply not needed. Unfortunate for one of the eldest surviving Ents, but in a way thematic given the fact he's grown so "tree-ish" lately.

basically 1-cost for 2 extra willpower or attack, which is a very efficient use of resources, but there are plenty of amazing restricted attachments competing with it (weapons, gondorian shield, armored destrier, etc)

This version of faramir is very good for one thing: multiplayer battle questing. I've played multiple games of into ithilien where his 6-10 questing on turn 1 was a huge factor to our victory.

Outside of that, he requires way too much setup to even match other heroes. Beorn and bard can hit for 5 right out of the gate, and multiple other heroes can get there with a 1-cost weapon (like rivendell blade)

So faramir's condition for matching them is to leave multiple enemies in the staging area, which requires a few turns to do in single player, so good luck with early combat, and also makes you deal with more threat, archery, or enemy abilities.

The threat can be mitigated by ranger spikes (if you draw them) but that means youre spending fewer resources building your board; same for playing healing cards to deal with archey, etc

There are definitely worse heroes out there, even among the ones released in the gondor cycle, but there are so many awesome lore heroes to play around with that i find it hard to open a spot for him

bifur was amazing when he came out, since leadership cards were pretty bad back then (and there weren't many good lore heroes to compete with) he could fit nicely in a 2-player setup and allowed people to use the underwhelming leadership resources to pay for the much better lore cards

however, the hobbit saga released 3 dwarf heroes who are much more valuable than him (one of which is lore) and we got many great lore heroes over the years that pushed him further and further down the list.