My Top Heroes

Heroes are the most important part of any LOTR LCG game, there isn’t any question about that. What is a more interesting question, however, is “what are the best heroes”?. This question is very debatable, as different players who enjoy different styles of play will give you different answers. There are definitely some heroes which are markedly stronger than others, but after the most obvious few “best” heroes it becomes a lot less defined. A player who enjoys playing Dwarf decks would probably say Dain Ironfoot is the best, while a player who enjoys Hobbits may say Sam Gamgee is superior. At this point, the question leans towards their “favorite” heroes rather than the objectively strongest ones. In this article, I’m going to list what my favorite heroes are (i.e. the heroes I enjoy playing the most, as apart from the strongest heroes), what I think the objectively best heroes are when examined in a vacuum, and what I think the objectively worst heroes are. Of course, my opinion is my own, and what I say here shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Everyone has different views of the value of cards, and it’s definitely possible that I forgot about some incredibly overpowered hero or overlooked an ability somewhere. Without further ado, let’s jump in to my favorite heroes:

Decklist: For the Shire!

Recently I’ve been playing a lot more pure solo games (as apart from 2 handed solo), and for this purpose I wanted to create a well-rounded and versatile deck that can function well against almost any scenario (obviously excluding those highly specialized quests such as The Siege of Cair Andros or The Battle of Lake Town). My original idea was building an Ent themed deck using the Gandalf hero along with Rossiel and the spirit version of Glorfindel. However, it ran into problems with the draw depending heavily on getting Gandalf’s attachments as well as Light of Valinor in your opening hand/mulligan. Without an optimal draw, it struggled in the early game against fast build-up scenarios such as The Massing at Osgiliath or The Battle of Five Armies. After playing a few games with it I realized that the threat cost was too high for such a slow-building deck. I scrapped the idea and gravitated towards a Hobbit themed deck, hoping that the low threat cost combined with the high versatility of Hobbits would make for a more suitable solo deck. After numerous rounds of (quite successful) testing, the (somewhat) final product emerged:

Welcome to Cave of Gollum

This is a blog about FFG’s Lord of the Rings Living Card Game (AKA LOTR LCG). I began playing LOTR shortly after the release of Khazad-Dum, and quickly began getting addicted. I’ve always enjoyed reading other LOTR blogs and forums, but my desire to share my own content and adventures has recently grown so much that I wanted to create a blog of my own. I hope it will eventually become a place of useful and fun resources for the community to use, as well as a place for discussion about the game. I’m definitely not an expert on the game (I’m actually a pretty bad player in my opinion), so if anyone wants to send articles of their own to me for publishing, please feel free! (Credit for the writer will of course be given).

Here’s some other great resources/blogs to check out:

Tales from the Cards: A great blog about the game, with a huge amount of content (this is what inspired me to start a blog of my own).

Hall of Beorn: Another great blog, has a lot of very insightful and unique articles.

Hall of Beorn’s Card Database: A database containing every card in the game, extremely useful for theorizing decks and browsing through the vast array of cards.

The Grey Company: A podcast about the game.

Thanks for reading and enjoy!

(Some proper content should be coming soon).