Having spent yet another month in this incredible community, it is time to wrap up yet another Poll. For the month of October, I asked you guys your top 2 most used Dwarf heroes. This was done in part because the new Dain hero got announced (yes, that has already been a month, crazy how time flies right?) but also because the Dwarves have a host of heroes, and I wanted to know which see play most often. I can’t say I am surprised by the results, but it is nice to share the results with you none the less.
A total of 106 votes have come in, giving us little margin for error. I would like to thank all of you for filling the poll in, and will invite you to fill in the next one as well, which will be up by the time you see this. With that said, let’s get to our results.
All hail the King under the Mountain. Dain Ironfoot has taken the poll by storm, getting more than 30% of the total votes. I did expect Dain to be high on the list, though I would have placed him second to Bifur. Dain is of course the cornerstone of the Dwarven swarm synergy, boosting allies across the board on both willpower and attack. He is an easy buff to add to any deck, and you really notice it when your Dwarf deck doesn’t run him. I am curious to see how the introduction of the Spirit Dain (shortless Dain) will change the way Dwarf decks work. Spirit Dain claimed 5 votes, and having seen some decks with a proxy of him work fantastically, I hope he can find a place in Dwarven mining decks (or even outside those as a decent defender).
Like I said, I really though Bifur would take the first place during this poll. He is very splashable in my decks and offers resource smoothing for your deck across the board. His stats are nothing to write home about, but he makes for a good Lore hero in a two-sphere deck (or a tri-sphere with expensive Lore cards). Bifur is also most of the time the hero I play Unlikely Friendship with, since playing him with Silvans makes decent sense from a deckbuilding perspective if you are not running Galadriel. Bifur still made it to a solid second place with 20% of the votes.
The next two heroes on the list are Core Set classics, Gimli and Thalin. Both have been in the card pool from day 1, so players will have played with these heroes at some point. They have fallen into the background a little, though with new attachments like Vigilant Guard, Gimli can be made into an absolute powerhouse. As long as you can buff his hitpoints and carefully plan how much damage he takes, you are looking at a very tough attacker. Thalin is more common as he conflicts with no uniques. Thalin is also a key character for any serious direct damage deck, as his ability knows no equal. To this day I find myself enjoying putting 1 damage on every enemy as they are revealed from the encounter deck.
Looking at the bottom of the list, we find 3 Dwarves without any votes. These are no surprise, as not all Dwarven heroes are amazing, and some are just better than others. Dori has been the black sheep of the Dwarven family ever since he came out, as his ability is just not very good. I would rather play something like Tides of Fate to boost another characters defence than use his ability. Bombur makes sense too, as his only real use is to be in a Dwarf dedicated deck, where he can serve as a decent defender once you slap a Burning Brand on him. He also is nice to have when you are playing Trouble in Tharbad/Nin-in-Eilph, since you start with Nalir as your 5th Dwarf, giving you the bonuses from the beginning. However, these are cornercase situations, and I don’t know many people who would like to play Nin for this reason, or at all for that matter. Dwalin was the final Dwarf without any votes. While his threat reduction is nice, there isn’t much to use in sphere with him, since Dwarven weapons are in Tactics. And if you are running Tactics, those heroes will probably be more fit to handle combat. Add to this the racial restriction of Orc enemies, and you have yourself a méh hero.
With enough beards out of the way before we move on to no-shave-November, here is the next poll for the next month. By this time, we are around the halfway point through the Ered Mithrin cycle, with 2 APs released, and the next 2 already announced. A lot of new archetypes have been getting cards already, and some older archetypes were given new toys. I am wondering to what faction you are looking most forward to that gets developed in this cycle. This can be one of the newer synergies (Beornings, Dale) or one of the older synergies that will receive new cards (Silvans, Dwarves). For this poll, you will only get to vote once, so vote for the one you are looking most forward to seeing the development in this cycle. The poll can be found in the sidebar to the right -> or below the article for mobile devices.
Vision Of The Palantir 