Alternate Ring-bearers in Decks

[eomund]

Do any decks use alternate ring-bearers as regular companions (ie, not as the ring-bearer)? I find it strange that Decipher made sure to give all of them twilight costs so that they could be put in the draw deck, but many of them are designed so that they don't have any useful abilities unless they're wearing the One Ring.

[Tunadan]

I have toyed with using Boromir BOC's discarding ability as a normal companion, but it never panned out. Ig they decided to add costs so free companions won't work.

[Phallen Cassidy]

The only serious deck I've seen with an ARB played normally is a Hobbit deck in Movie block, where Bilbo is in the starting fellowship to take advantage of Practically Everyone Was Invited and be an extra point of strength for Great Elf Warrior. If his text becomes a liability you kill him off. This works around the biggest downside of using Bilbo as your Ring-bearer, which is that Sam can't take the ring from him. I don't see the list posted here though. My main suggestions would be A Talent for Not Being Seen so that when you meet the twilight requirement for Bilbo you're really only giving 1 extra twilight, and using Master Proudfoot to meet the twilight requirement and get some cards out of the deal. Or better yet, The Red Book of Westmarch would go nicely here and then you can abuse initiative with A Light in His Mind and Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom to remove any burdens that Bilbo is adding -- and then some.

Come to think of it, I want to say I've seen another take on this using his burdens as fuel for The Shire Countryside with Samwise the Brave ensuring that opponents don't break the scale. Might be thinking of a different deck though. At any rate, Practically Everyone Was Invited is probably the reason to do it. Chance Observation is also a natural fit. Although, even without the allies, Chance Observation being a +5 looks attractive to me. Anyway, there's not space for everything here in any one deck. Lots of meaningful directions one could take a deck that starts with Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Bilbo instead of Sam.

For the others... I could see someone, somewhere building a silly deck off Gimli, Bearer of Grudges and Fallen Lord? Maaaybe throw Isildur, Bearer of Heirlooms into a Knight deck with Frodo as the Ring-bearer for corruption? Even in those cases, you don't really gain anything since you have to protect a substantially weaker Ring-bearer. Any cards you save on countering corruption you lose there. Frodo has the rule that you can't use him unless he's the Ring-bearer, the rest just have no reason to try.

[eomund]

Interesting! I'm not surprised that they're only useful in fairly niche cases, but I might actually try some of those ideas out to see if they can be made to work. If anyone has decklists I'd love to see them!