Endure Ephemerals

The next archetype I wanted to showcase is They Who Endure. If you've played at all in the last 4 months you've probably seen some version of this archetype, but it's still worth discussing as

1. It's extremely newcomer friendly both in terms of its budget and play style
2. It's a much more open and diverse archetype than archetype than most players realize. In fact, I'm going to provide 3 different variants which will highlight a total of 6 different champions.
3. It's effective

The "They Who Endure" archetype encompasses an assorted variety of different decks that all share a common strategy: use Shadow Isle's ability to generate cheap fragile minions that die, then drop a juiced up They Who Endure and either swing in for lethal via overwhelm or go straight to the nexus with Atrocity. For the sake of simplicity I'm going to group these decks into 3 main variants; let's break them down individually.

Endure Spiders

This was the origin of the archetype pre-Rising Tides when Brood Awakening was only 5 mana. This is the weakest and least popular Endure variant right now, but don't let that fool you--this deck can still hold its own. Most significantly: this is the best Elise deck right now, so if you're looking to build a competitive decks using mostly your starting collection (and you didn't care for the Casino TF archetype I previously showcased), you should be very interested in this deck.

Endure Ephemerals

As you can probably guess, this deck basically substitutes the spider package for ephemeral units.  This personally is one of my favorite decks right now because I love leveling my boys Maokai and Hecarim; the They Who Endure feel almost like a contingency plan rather than the main focus of my gameplay. I'm actually impressed with how consistently I am able to level Maokai with this deck, which is always fun.

Tempo Endure

This is essentially a hybrid deck that marries the early-game aggression and long-term inevitability of the ephemeral deck with "just good" cards like Sejuani and Neverglade Collector.  If the Neverglade sticks it is especially punishing, as its ability will progress L1 Sejuani and trigger L2's frostbite.  This is the most powerful of the three variants; Bruised By God recently won a Giant Slayer Fight Night Legends tournament using this particular deck list.

Substitutions

Since these decklist are so diverse, I'm going to go over the individual champions and which cards you'll want to support them--feel free to mix and match accordingly.

Elise: The good news is that you received 2x Elise for your starting collection. The bad news is that spiders are the weakest variant so you really need to run 3x plus a large spider package to increase your chance of leveling her and getting more value. You can easily combine 3x Elise + spider package with any of the other champions except Hecarim.

Thresh: Thresh is mostly used as a tempo play in these decks. He'll often feel like he's not doing much due to your opponent removing him before he levels, however you have to remember that he's often giving you card advantage and/or some much nicer attacks. You can easily combine any number of Thresh with any other champions except perhaps Maokai.

Maokai: Maokai is so underrated in this archetype--he almost doubles the amount of allied deaths and he provides an alternative win condition, and he does it without any additional support. You can easily combine any number of Maokai with any other champions except perhaps Thresh.

Hecarim:

Kalista:

Sejuani: