Black seems strong so far in LTR limited. Thoughts?
Still very early, but black is really performing pretty well for me. There are some really strong and synergistic commons in black. Most notably, [[Mirkwood Bats]] and [[Mordor Trebuchet]] paired with any goblin or amass/orc enablers is just absolutely devastating.
Black has the cleanest and strongest removal, and a lot if is also at common. [[Bitter Downfall]] (Uncommon) and [[Claim the Precious]] are both great, [[Lash of the Balrog]] is not difficult to run.
Other commons like [[Dunland Crebain]] are performing well. [[Gollum's Bite]] hits a lot of targets. And there are a few really efficient combat tricks that effectively double as removal in [[Orcish Medicine]] and the slightly worse [[Shelob's Ambush]].
I think it can be beneficial to take some of these commons early imo but I'm curious what anyone else's thoughts are.
It kinda baffles me that there's not a LoTR set constructed format on Arena.
And yeah, Crebain is a remarkable card.
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Just played sealed the other day, I played a Grixis spellslinger deck, but it had trouble getting rolling, but if i could get [[Bilbo, Retired Burglar]] out I could ramp pretty well into my late game with [[Gandalf the Grey]] and [[Lorien revealed]]. My buddy pulled a lot of really strong black cards, [[Call of the Ring]] felt especially brutal. Simic elves made an appearance and were especially brutal, the scry payoff between [[Galadriel of lothlorien]], [[Elrond lord of Rivendell]], and [[Elrond, master of healing]] is insane. Other pieces of the pie definitely have some pretty brutal synergies. I think black feels especially strong because some pretty strong synergies, like Mirkwood Bats and Mordor trebuchet, are in common, and claim the precious is a very strong removal spell in this set.
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