Reducing it to
Quest-bound would take it halfway there for sure. Theoretically that could work, so long as cards that generically refer to "Spot a
Quest-bound Elf" are fine working on Feanor and Luthien and Elrond all at once. It would probably work initially, and then in the event that additional storylines got converted it would start to buckle on itself.
If we look for a moment at the theory behind
Ring-bound, I think it was an effort to create one set of cards that worked on Frodo and Sam, and another set of cards that worked on Merry and Pippin,
without saying "Spot Frodo or Sam" or "Exert Merry or Pippin". It was an attempt to make a mechanic rules-based while preserving some
subtlty about the intent, and leaving the door open for later companions with the distinction of "with Frodo" and "not with Frodo" (as we see with Smeagol).
They then ran into the same issue with the Ithilian Rangers and Aragorn. They couldn't just say "spot a Ranger" as that would work on Aragorn, and they wanted those cards to be thematically dissimilar (for whatever reason). So they decided (apparently) to co-opt the
Ring-bound keyword, since Faramir and co were "with Frodo", while Aragorn was "not with Frodo".
Honestly tho, it just meant that they should have made a new keyword, such as
Scout or something. There's a lot of cards that say "Spot a
Ring-bound Man" and it's like "you guys obviously don't want this to work on Aragorn or Eomer or Boromir, so you tied yourself in knots with three keywords where one would do". They avoided this mistake in RotK when they introduced
Knight, rather than hamstring themselves with "Spot a non-
Ranger unbound
Man (except Boromir)".
Likewise, I anticipate the same problem with using just
Quest-bound. Initially it would work great; taking The Hobbit as an example, Bilbo and the other Dwarves would all be
Quest-bound, while Gandalf and Bard and Beorn would not, so you could design a card around the concept of "in the Company" vs "not in the Company" without playing musical keywords.
However, then let's say someone releases sets for Beren and Luthien. And then Turin. And the Silmarils. And then the Fall of Numenor. The "main characters" of each of those sets are all
Quest-bound, while the "side characters" are all unbound. Where before we could just say "Spot a
Quest-bound companion", we now have to specify "Spot a
Quest-bound Elf who's not Luthien or Celegorm or Curufin" if we want to indicate "someone in the Silmaril set" without permitting Luthien to get all the bonuses intended for Feanor and co.
At which point the obvious objection is "why bother with the keyword at all, if your intent is to segregate sets so that you can't use cards from one set to synergize with another?" And the answer is, to permit
both powerful, specific cards
and weaker, less specific cards.
If I make a card that reads "Spot a
Quest-bound Elf or exert an Elf companion to make an Elf strength + 4.", the idea is clearly to utilize Main Character elves and not random splash (in which case the card is nerfed: an exertion for strength, instead of free strength). This card is fine under both designs, and is clearly meant to work both in this set and other sets without much stretching.
With the more complicated design in the OP, if I had a card that was designed specifically for Beren's story it might state "Skirmish: Spot an exhausted Man companion and exert a
Quest-bound:Tinuviel Elf twice to cancel all skirmishes and advance to the Regroup phase."
There are a few ramifications here:
- We avoid listing all relevant specific cards. The example could just say "Spot Beren, exert Luthien twice" but where's the fun in that? This permits you to instead use Celegorm or something, granting flexibility in deck design while still clearly using flavor inspired by the story.
- Plus, not all Quest-bound sets involve small groups like Beren and Luthien; I don't want to have to list all thirteen members of the Erebor Company just to avoid future problems with a "Balin Retakes Khazad-dum" set.
- Later sets do not have to take all of the most powerful cards into account. If we later release a Silmaril set that has, I dunno, a Feanor with 8 vitality and a Man with 1 vitality, we haven't shot ourselves in the foot and made a broken combo.
- Nine sets later if we want to expand the ideas of a previous set, we can do so. Let's say for example that, for whatever reason, the set based on The Hobbit didn't have all thirteen company members as companions. If a later set decides to fix this, they can easily do so just by making a version of Fili or whatever that is Quest-bound:Erebor and it is automatically compatible with that earlier set.
TL;DR the intent is to grant card designers the ability to be backwards-compatible or not,
and the ability to be forwards-compatible or not. Powerful, questline-specific cards are possible without being a headache to other quests, other sets can easily be made as "expansions" by using the same specific keyword, and set-crossing less powerful cards can all co-exist, all using the same framework.
(I
will grant that
Quest-bound:Tinuviel and the like uses a lot of card space. Perhaps a symbol could be created, so it is printed more like
[Q]:Tinuviel just to save space.)