I’m a Merchoid fan, as regulars will now, and they surprise me often with merch.
This time they’ve surprised me by crunching the numbers.
The geeky retailer has a Lord of the Rings and a Game of Thrones section. For good measure, they’ve added in the Wheel of Time. The second season of the Wheel of Time is on the way.
While Merchoid cannot know the actual number of combatants in each fantasy army, here are some estimates based on the whole Game of Thrones timeline, Lord of the Rings’ War of the Ring, and The Wheel of Time’s The Last Battle, for the five strongest armies in each series.
They also considered which individual army would win if the strongest from each category battled head-to-head.
Here are the stats!
Lord of the Rings army
At the height of the War of the Ring, LoTR’s five strongest armies comprised more than 50 separate warrior groups, totalling a little over 317,000 troops. While Gondor’s armies are the most diverse of the five, with at least 14 different combatant types, they cannot compete with the sheer volume of Orcs, making Mordor’s army the most powerful in the Lord of the Rings universe.
Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon army
Including a limitless pool of White Walkers felt too much like cheating, especially when you consider that without them, the top armies of Game of Thrones comprise just over 189,000 men – far less than the top five armies of Lord of the Rings. The Targaryen troops narrowly defeated the Tyrell army in size; their strength was helped by the presence of three dragons on the team and the gathering of Dothraki and Unsullied warriors.
Wheel of Time army
It’s reasonable to assume that The Wheel of Time has some massive warrior legions, but the Aiel clans have the most powerful army, with roughly 480,000 fighters. 480,000 Aiel warriors, with a reputation for being exceptionally nasty fighters, are not something we’d like to find waiting for us on a dark night. When The Wheel of Time’s top armies are united, you get a truly fearsome 860,000-strong militia, which is more than five times the size of the UK’s present full-time armed forces and has more active personnel than California, Texas, and 15 other US states combined.
The winners! Wheel of Time
What the clans of The Wheel of Time lack in dragons and giants, they make up for in sheer volume. While variances in magical powers across each series could/would alter the outcome of straight combat, we’re crowning the Aiel, Tear, Illian, Andor, and Legion of the Dragon as the fantasy battle winners in our hypothetical face-off.
Any hope of one franchise being proclaimed the undisputed champion is contingent on warring groups within that franchise banding together to overcome a shared foe. Merchoid decided it was fair to determine which army would be the outright winner in a three-way battle between the strongest tribes, as Orcs and Elves joining forces is highly unlikely.
Compared to Mordor’s defences and the Aiel clans, the Targaryen army looks relatively weak, despite having three dragons to accomplish much of the hard lifting. Looking at each franchise’s military scale, Aiel from The Wheel of Time outnumbers Mordor’s troops by more than 3:1 and Targaryen’s by more than 7:1.
Even with Merchoid’s estimate that 100 Aiel are required to repel each dragon, it still leaves roughly 470,700 Aiel vs 58,000 Dothraki and 8,000 Unsullied.
Regarding streaming clashes, Merchoid is not convinced that The Wheel of Time could have held its own against The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon if the new series had gone head-to-head (-to-head). However, in our fantasy battle, it’s evident that this series comes out as the most formidable fighting force.
Quick Links
- Merchoid’s Who Would Win?
🤖AI Disclosure. Software helped create images in this post. Geek Native's AI Content Policy.
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