So, what is in the box?

Éowyn, Shieldmaiden

is card draw and token generation on a stick. It is so easy to achieve having six or more humans on the board thanks to her first triggered ability, that card draw in a Boros deck is not a problem at all. In fact, it’s a good thing

Thought Vessel

has been reprinted to help you with that suddenly overflowing hand.

The deck runs 38 lands which I tend to think is a bit much since I lean towards around 34 lands in homebrewed decks. However, that being said, I didn’t find the deck flooding. And since I was drawing so many cards all the time off Eowyn, any pockets of things I didn’t want didn’t hang around long.

There are 31 Creatures in this deck, most of which are Humans, making it very easy to trigger Eowyn. There are 6 Enchantments, 8 Sorceries, 4 Instants and 12 Artifacts of which 2 are Equipment.

When I played the deck, I think only one of the 9 pieces of removal came out to play but it really didn’t matter anyway. Some of the new cards are,

Palace Jailer

and

Court of Ire

which is really more of a burn card doing direct damage. There are general sweepers like

Earthquake

and then there are pieces of general removal like reprints of

Banishing Light

and good old

Swords to Plowshares

.

For ramp there are 3 cards;

Verge Rangers

,

Weathered Wayfarer

, and

Wayfarer’s Bauble

which is another reprint.

In this deck there are 6 mana rocks which certainly come in handy, but don’t rely on them too much, the Sauron deck has the means to steal them. (Of course, he does). They are all the usual suspects in the form of

Sol Ring

;

Thought Vessel

;

Arcane Signet

; and

Commander’s Sphere

to name 4 of them.

One of the things this deck does very well, is that it makes tokens. Eowyn is a Token generating machine with her first triggered ability but apart from her there are also 10 other cards that make tokens.

Faramir, Steward of Gondor

;

Prince Imrahil the Fair

;

Oath of Eorl

;

Increasing Devotion

and

Visions of Glory

are worth mentioning here.

Another part of this deck’s mechanics is giving creatures counters. I was a little worried that this deck would try to do too much with the token creation and adding counters of top of it, but it seems to work well for some reason. There are 12 cards that give counters either to other creatures or to themselves. Some even allow you give your creatures Lifelink or menace and things like that. Cards worth mentioning here are;

Gilraen, Dúnedain Protector

;

Beregond of the Guard

;

Éomer, King of Rohan

;

Gimli of the Glittering Caves

and

Marshal’s Anthem

.

Now we have mentioned card draw already but that was just to gush over how cool Eowyn is as a commander. There are other cards that supply some card draw. There are 3 to be exact 1 of which is

Boromir, Gondor’s Hope

. There is also one card that offers you the option to scry and that is

Denethor, Stone Seer

.

All this has been quite what you would expect in a precon deck but now we come to the truly fun part, what I’m calling The Bag of Combat Tricks. Yup, this deck has come with a whole lot of ways of messing with your opponents, which makes it so very, very cool. From stealing their creatures with

Call for Aid

to Goading the lot of them with

Taunt from the Rampart

, there’s something fun to do in this deck for one and all.

I especially love

Bastion Protector

buffing up Eowyn and making her indestructible. That certainly comes in handy. It’s also always fun to give attacking creatures menace with

Frontier Warmonger

and to get an additional combat round when you need it most with

Combat Celebrant

, another awesome reprint.

Aragorn, King of Gondor

plays into the Monarch mechanic of the deck and allows you to stop your opponent’s creatures from being able to block and

Champions of Minas Tirith

forces opponents to pay tax to attack you. However,

Shared Animosity

has got to be my favourite of these options because it buffs all your creatures by the number of creatures you’re attacking with of the same type. In a deck just packed full of Humans, you’re buffing by five or six with no effort at all. It’s wonderful.