Deck: The Bear’s Revenge

For obvious reasons, Beorn is my absolute favorite hero. Unfortunately the metagame seems to have moved away from him of late. Whereas older quests had more 2 and 3-attack enemies, it has become all too common to see 3, 4 and even 5 attack enemies as the “front-line” troops of the encounter deck. While it was fine to have enemies of this power as “boss” enemies, it puts a much greater burden on a defender with only 1 defense to see these enemies throughout an entire scenario.

What’s worse, shadow effects seem to have become more and more dangerous. The game has added quite a few powerful attachments to combat these bigger enemies and nastier shadow cards – but to no avail. As a bear, my giant paws are better suited for mauling Orcs than donning armor. Besides, a shield would be a silly thing to cary when you are endowed with tough hide and monstrous size. Not to mention that the other skin-changers would cast aspersions on my character if they heard that I needed man-tools to protect myself.

Fortunately, there are some new cards to help keep a bear in fighting shape. Honour Guard in particular is very popular with giant bears. Since his ability targets the damage being dealt and not the character being damaged, he can be used with Beorn. With so much direct damage running out in current quests, the ability to prevent damage is invaluable, even if Beorn is done with defending duty. Damage preventing, combined with healing effects makes a Tactics/Lore deck particularly good at survival. It also means that this deck excels as a support deck in multi-player games.

On the other side of combat, there are two new cards which can reduce the attack strength of enemies. This is welcome news to my fury ears, as it allows me to more easily defend against multiple enemies and take advantage of my built-in action advantage. For the larger enemies – the ones that hit like a Misty Mountain avalanche – we always have Feint and chump blocking in an emergency. Derndingle Warrior with an Ent Draught can help serve as a backup defender.

Horn’s Cry is the best of these new events, as it reduces the attack strength of all enemies in play. If you happen to be a 40 threat or more (giant bears do tend to attract the enemies attention), you can reduce your engaged enemies attack by 3 for the rest of the phase. When you have a hearty who can block multiple attackers, reducing the attack strength of each of your enemies is an incredibly powerful effect.

A slightly more limited option, but one that supplements Horn’s Cry well, is In the Shadows. Unfortunately, the effect only targets engaged enemies with an engagement cost higher than our threat, but it can still be quite useful in the early game. Pippin’s passive ability does help with this a bit, and the sideboard includes Take No Notice if we want to pursue this strategy further. As long as a scenario does not include too many low-engagement enemies, this can be a very effective strategy.

With one Hobbit and one Ranger hero, we are only paying 1 for In the Shadows, and its limitations seem less onerous at that discount. As an added bonus, it also reduces the defense of the affected enemies, making it easier to finish them off on the counter-attack. The ideal goal of this deck is to create one epic turn where we use Horn’s Cry and Shadows give way to effectively nullify the enemies’ attack. With Beorn not exhausting to defend, and surrounded by an army of angry Ents, we want to overrun our foes.

By including Ents, we get access to an underrated attachment Ent Draught. While we unfortunately cannot attach this card to the bear himself (I’ll stick with mead, thank you very much), Dori is a great substitute. With healing and the extra hit points, it should be possible to keep our primary defender alive for the entire game. In the rare cases where the encounter deck overwhelms us, we have Landroval to bring Beorn back from hibernation.

If all else fails, we can resort to the tried and true tactic for dealing with troublesome enemies and attach Song of Wisdom and A Burning Brand to Mablung. Along with a Shield, this makes him a great support defender for those situations where we don’t want to needlessly risk ursine lives. Regardless of the Burning Brand we will want to get the Song attached to Mablung as quickly as possible. His built-in resource acceleration is a great fit for a deck without much else beyond Ally Treebeard to help in that regards. The deck is skewed a bit heavier to Lore cards than it should be with two Tactics heroes, so this will help tremendously with resource smoothing.

Surprisingly, Horn of Gondor is not a good fit for this deck.  With such hearty characters, and multiple cards dedicated to keeping those characters alive – we hopefully won’t have anyone leaving play. It just doesn’t make sense to pay for an Ent, wait a turn to be able to use them, and then chump block with them just to blow some silly horn. The horn-blowing in this deck will be limited to our amazing new event card. This deck is my attempt to bring my favorite bear back into relevance in the modern metagame, so I hope you like it and I look forward to your feedback in the comments.

Heroes
Beorn (TH:OHaUH)
Mablung (NiE)
Pippin (TBR)

Allies: 23
Derndingle Warrior (EfMG) x3
Honour Guard (TWoE) x3
Galadhrim Minstrel (TiT) x1
Quickbeam (ToS) x2
Warden of Healing (TLD) x2
Beechbone (TBoCD) x2
Bofur (TH:OHaUH) x1
Dori (TH:OHaUH) x2
Rivendell Minstrel (THfG) x1
Wellinghall Preserver (AtE) x2
Treebeard (TAC) x3
Landroval (AJtR) x1

Attachment: 12
Song of Wisdom (CatC) x2
Gondorian Shield (TSF) x3
Elf-stone (TRD) x2
Ent Draught (ToS) x3
A Burning Brand (CatC) x2

Events: 14
Daeron’s Runes (FoS) x3
Entmoot (ToS) x3
Feint (Core) x3
Horn’s Cry (TToR) x3
In The Shadows (TLoS) x2

Side Quests: 1
Gather Information (TLR) x1

Sideboard: 15
Elrond (TRD) x2
Rivendell Minstrel (THfG) x2
Song of Battle (TDM) x2
Secret Vigil (TLR) x3
Book of Eldacar (EaAD) x2
Thicket of Spears (Core) x2
Take No Notice (TBR) x2