Best of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth – Green!

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Mike Carrozza - June 19, 2023

Hello! Welcome to my set review of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth, where I will pick five cards of each colour and discuss my favourite cards from them.

Given that the set also comes out with a set of preconstructed Commander decks, I’ll also be covering my favourite new cards from there in another article.

Without further ado, here are my favourite Green cards!

Last March of the Ents

It feels like a bit of a cop out to pick the bombiest bomb of the bombs in the set as my top card but I mean, look at it.

First of all, your investment is protected because Last March can’t be countered. The fail case is that your biggest creature gets removed and you draw cards equal to the next biggest creature. Even if you have no creatures, if you’ve got a grip full of creatures, you’ll be putting them all into play for “free”. With you being in green, you won’t have trouble getting to eight mana in no time. Prep some pump spells and then smack this on the stack. Have fun Treefolk decks, Spider decks, and Ikra Shidiqi, the Usurper decks.

Elven Chorus

This feels like one of those cards I can’t believe is real. A sort of Vizier of the Menagerie on an enchantment paired with Cryptolith Rite.

Turn your creatures into Birds of Paradise which can be achieved for two mana with Rite, but that extra bit of hand extension can get really silly when you’re mostly creatures. Pair this with Season of Growth to manipulate the top deck so you don’t get stopped and can keep the creatures coming. A token deck of creatures that enter with little friends is the perfect spot for this. This is a card that seems like it’ll enable so, so much. Test this in every green deck and see how it runs!

Delighted Halfling

A one mana mana dork that taps for colourless can be useful when you’re running Eldrazi Displacer, but what’s even more important and useful is Delighted Halfling’s second ability which is Cavern of Souls for legendary spells.

The Ozolith? Uncounterable. Your commander? Uncounterable. Yawgmoth’s Vile Offering? Uncounterable.

This is all on a body that’s better than a Llanowar Elves and serves similar purpose with a little more protection. This is massive for decks whose pod keeps countering their commander.

Peregrin Took

Peregrin Took is a token creation replacement effect that gives you a Food whenever you create a token. How this works with Academy Manufactor or other replacement effects is that they only trigger once each so it won’t chain together constantly, but you will get a decent amount of tokens. Let’s say you play Strike it Rich into Manufactor and Peregrin Took, you can choose to prioritize Manufactor then PT and get a Treasure, a Clue, and two Food tokens. But if you go the other way around, PT then Manufactor, you get a Treasure and Food which becomes two Treasures, two Foods, and two Clues. Just be sure to figure it all out.

That said, you’ve seen how easy it is to make tokens and, in a deck that makes a ton of tokens like my Will the Wise and Mike, the Dungeon Master deck, Peregrin Took is about to draw an absolute monster truck load of cards.

Entish Restoration

So this isn’t an instance of total and direct power creep of Harrow. Remember Roiling Regrowth? It’s Harrow but the lands enter tapped instead of untapped. The other big difference is that sacrificing the land is part of the spell resolving and not an additional cost. This means that if Harrow is copied, you sacrifice one land and get four. If you copy Roiling Regrowth, you sacrifice two lands and get four.

Entish Restoration is just great in decks that don’t care about copying the spell and have a creature with power four or greater to beef this up to three lands. Roiling Regrowth has been power crept for sure.

The Gitrog Monster is where this will be played most but basically any deck running Harrow right now that might have a four power creature out often will prefer this to Harrow.

Honorable Mentions:

Dunedain Rangers – Landfall Ring temptation as long as you don’t have a Ring-bearer.
Elanor Gardner – Turn your Food into delayed Rampant Growth with Elanor. I really like her especially in decks that Deadly Dispute or find other ways to incidentally sacrifice artifacts.
Fall of Gil-galad – This is pretty solid for two mana. Scrying is fine, pumping a creature is good, but drawing two cards and removing a creature via fighting? Neyith is excited.
Fangorn, Tree Shepherd – Grand Warlord Radha goes mono green Treefolk theme. This is pretty cool and likely will lead many a deck despite Treefolk being centred in Abzan.
Galadriel, Gift-Giver – I really love this card. ETB and attack modal versatility. That’s blinking or multiple combat! You can choose the same one over and over. You can pump a creature, get a Food, or a Treasure. Just lovely.
Legolas, Master Archer – You have to talk about Legolas if you’re doing Lord of the Ring. Is there an Aura deck in here somewhere?
Long List of the Ents – Six chapters on a Saga and they’re all the same. That’s hilarious. I hate this card though.
Many Partings – Lay of the Land gets another power crept version with a set mechanic or theme. Sure!
Meriadoc Brandybuck – There are only 44 Halflings (https://scryfall.com/search? as=grid&order=name&q=type%3Ahalfling+%28game%3Apaper%29) and a handful of Changelings. So many of them are from this set. I hope we get ourselves a creature type errata to enable more.
Quickbeam, Upstart Ent – Treefolk Overrun legend. Cool. Good, not great.
Radagast the Brown – The trend that I guess started with Volo, Guide to Monsters where you want a bunch of different types of creatures isn’t for me at all, but I can appreciate the deck restriction being fun to build around for some. But man, I don’t care for it at all.
Shortcut to Mushrooms – If you have synergy with putting counters on creatures, this triggers at your end step for two mana and only requires a permanent you control to leave play. Not difficult to make happen!
The Ring Goes South – This is a Ring temptation right away so you’ll have at least one legendary creature to flip lands for. This is best for Partner creatures. Jodah, the Unifier is great and this will work for those decks big time.