Problems
Personally I’m pretty unimpressed with the mechanics behind “The Ring Tempts You” in the latest UB set. Lore wise, the One Ring promises great things, but never actually delivers anything other than ruin and the mechanic doesn’t deliver on that. While I understand the argument that being a removal magnet is a downside on it’s own, I don’t really buy into it and at the very least, it’s not enough of one on its own. As it stands, The Ring is simply all upside as far as I see it.
Additionally, the allowance of multiple ring-bearers (one for each player at the table) is a huge flavor fail. It’s The One Ring, not The “Everyone gets one” Ring. This leads to my resolution of these issues -
Solution
My quick and dirty fix is that the Ring should be a unique effect per game that only one player can hold at a time, and an exchangeable boon like Monarch is, changing sides as the bearer is killed off.
It could still power up like it already does and obviously benefit the player controlling the ring-bearer, but adding the possibility of unwillingly giving that benefit to your opponent is very in line with The Ring lore-wise. This would also add some practicality to killing the ring-bearer instead of just removing the biggest threat on the board, which is the de-facto play in any game of Magic.
As I said, I am no game designer so I’m probably overlooking things, but I feel like this would work much better than the mechanic that we got. And while I obviously don’t foresee any errata’s coming from WotC for this, if I do play with LTR casually in paper, I’d probably suggest this fix as an improvement over the rules as written.
What do y’all think? Would this be an improvement? Or do you think the mechanic is better as-is?
My guess is that they are aiming for this set to be very casual friendly. There are a lot of people interested in this set who haven’t played magic before and new players are scared of downsides.
It’s hard to imagine that they didn’t play around with the idea of having it work similar to the monarch. As flavorful as it is, I’m not sure if would play well. You’d need to change a lot of the design of the set. So many cards have the ring tempts you and if there can only be one player with the ring, that means it either swings back and forth every turn or the cards do nothing most of the time depending on the there can only be one rule works. It also makes removal extremely powerful. Your opponent wouldn’t even need LOTR cards in order to benefit from the ring, they just need to doomblade your ring bearer after you tap out.