With a new month comes a new hero to spotlight. I had a difficult time choosing this go around, mostly because the Hero I wanted to use was just as new as Treebeard and I like to cover older Heroes more often than not. But then I said the heck with it and decided to do it anyway! It shouldn’t be a surprise, at least if you read the title, but August’s Hero of the Month is none other than Meriadoc Brandybuck or as he is more famously known… Merry.

Though the Tactics version of Merry may be my favorite of the two (simply because I enjoy combat) I can’t help but notice just how powerful his Spirit counterpart is. Aside from a certain Frodo Baggins, Spirit Hobbits have left bad at worst and awkward at best tastes in the mouths of the players (I’m looking at you Fatty Bolger). So I won’t deny that at first I was confused about this card, my mind immediately throwing him in with the lot of Fatty and Spirit Pippin. But then I heard others discuss his uses, threw him in a quick deck and was blown away.

Merry opens the doors to many new deck archetypes and dramatically changes already existing ones. Boromir players now have one of the best and most reliable threat reduction abilities to counteract Boromir’s threat raising readying ability. Hobbit players now have access to a Spirit Hobbit that can keep their threat at secrecy levels (and can help them stay there as well). What I truly enjoy about Merry is that he may replace the almighty Glorfindel in some cases. That isn’t to say as a representation of power Merry is an easy swap, but all too often I hear and read people discuss that they needed a low threat Spirit Hero and just throw in Glorfindel for that reason first and his awesomeness as a bonus. With Merry, players can keep their low threat and try different strategies.

Being of the Spirit Sphere and having the Hobbit trait gives Merry access to a fun amount of cards and interactions. But I’ll cover those in a later article bound to come out sometime before the end of the Weekend. Let me know in the comments what you think of this new Spirit Hobbit and how you’ve used him since his release!

Until then, take a look at some decks I’ve posted in recent articles that contain this very new and exciting version of Merry, Esquire of Rohan and Master of Buckland.

-The Secondhand Took