Mount Doom

[Thranduil]

Sites on the adventure path (and support areas) are active--good thing too, or cards like Lost in the Woods won't have as many keywords to spot. I guess the part I find strange is that Steward's Tomb and Mount Doom are both active, but "Tomb rules" are in effect only while the fellowship is there, while "Mount Doom rules" are in effect even if the fellowship never sets foot upon it. However, "You cannot replace Mount Doom - EVER!" (...or any other sites in the same region) is a whole lot cleaner than the alternative.

The reason is because the default for sites is "only happens when the fellowship is here". But, Mount Doom says "Until the end of the game" which is why it is always in effect, because it specifies.

Thranduil

[Olorin]

thanxxx!

Yeah, Mount Doom is a very interesting card indeed.

[jdizzy001]

So, barring steward's tomb or the site that wounds your characters when you move to it, what good does restricting site replacement do?  I never understood the value of Mount Doom.

Well, apart from the fact of being a mountain underground battleground, which is a very powerful combination of keywords, it also prevents your opponent from doing silly things like Neekerbreekers' and such things. If you see that your opponent is continually replaying these annoying sites like Caras Galadhon or Crags of Emyn Muil, then you can put Mount Doom on the table to stop them doing it.

Thranduil

I thought you had to play 9 different sites?  How can someone play the same site twice?

[ephen]

when the fellowship moves you place a site like neekerbreekers' bog and they have to exert, then you use something like ulaire nelya, totnr to replace the site with another one of your sites, putting neekerbreekers' bog back in your adventure deck so you can place it next time they move.

[jdizzy001]

So when you replace a site, you stick the previous site back in your adventure deck?!  How did I miss that ruling.  THAT IS SO AWESOME!

[Elessar's Socks]

Too awesome. I've always thought it's kind of funny that such an iconic location became a counter card, but at least it's a good one.

[jdizzy001]

By the way, where can I find that ruling.  Is it in the officail rules thread?

[Elessar's Socks]

You mean for site manipulation?

Some cards allow a player to play the next site on the adventure path at times when the fellowship is not moving. These may be used even when the next site is already there. In such cases, the new site replaces the old one; put the old site back in its owner's adventure deck. The new site takes the same site number the old site had, so that there is always only one site 1 in play, one site 2, and so on. When a site is replaced, all cards played on or stacked on the old site are moved to the new site.

Nelya TotNR switches the fellowship's current site but the principle is the same; the replaced site goes back in its owner's adventure deck.

[jdizzy001]

I found what i was looking for, thanks.

[Phallen Cassidy]

Looking through the forums, this is the closest thing to a conclusive discussion about Mount Doom that I could find. Unfortunately, I think they landed on the wrong spot -- Elessar's Socks had it right the first time. Clocking in at almost 12 years this is, without a doubt, my greatest necromancy feat. Beat that, Sauron! Here's my understanding of how the card works:

active
During your turn, only these cards in play are active:

    sites on the adventure path,
    sites in any player's support area,
    your Free Peoples cards,
    your copy of The One Ring, and
    your opponents' Shadow cards.

...

Sites are always active. A site's game text cannot be used unless the fellowship is there, although some cards may copy and use that game text.

While Mount Doom is always active, until its game text is used (the fellowship is there) sites in the region *can* be replaced. This means if all players are at site 3, you can't use Traveled Leader to put Mount Doom at sites 1 or 2 and lock the rest of the region in place. Likewise, if a player uses Pathfinder to play Mount Doom in the regroup phase and doesn't move to it, the next player can still replace it (and any other site in the region) until a fellowship is there.

The Steward's Tomb example is a good one. We all know that it would be insane if that game text was active all the time, but there's nothing in the rules that makes an exception for Mount Doom. After all, it doesn't say "While the Fellowship is at this site..." (although Streets of Bree does, for no reason at all). That Mount Doom says "Until the end of the game" specifies how long the text applies after it has been used, the same as any other game text. Relatedly, this is why Harrowdale's text still applies if the Free Peoples begins their turn on it and moves to another site: it was used when the Fellowship started their turn at Harrowdale. It would not apply if the Shadow player uses Ulaire Toldea, Eight of the Nine Riders and played Harrowdale as the next site (for whatever reason) because no Free Peoples would be there to use the text.

Sites are unique in that it's possible for them to be in play without their text being used. If the sites themselves weren't always active then you wouldn't be able to spot any site other than the current one. A lot of good Lost in the Woods would do then! But that doesn't mean the game text is always active.

[Tbiesty]

That all makes sense, and I agree.
If we don't question the intent the card designer meant to have the cards do, and interpret them strictly "as written", then yes, this is correct.

In later sets, there were some cases where intent vs rules were not matched up and had to be address via clarification/CRD. (e.g.  Nurn).
That's why, for me, Harrowdale just feels like it was a wording oddball. As worded, does the card designer really intend for this site to have a persistent triggering effect after the fellowship moves from it? That would be brand new territory. I just don't know. All other cards that cause a minion to be unable to gain fierce until the regroup phase, refer to "until the regroup phase" as how long the minion cannot gain fierce.  By putting, "Until the regroup phase,..." on Harrowdale, did the designer intentionally mean that the persistent effect of causing a minion to lose fierce and being unable to gain fierce until the regroup phase should also persist? This would be the only time a site does something like that. But maybe it actually was intentional, and that is precisely why it was worded that way.

My view on this is based on whether we think the card was worded exactly according to the intent.
1) Yes, the designer worded it "Until the regroup phase, each minion skirmishing a companion loses fierce and cannot gain fierce." because he or she explicitly wanted both the effect and the inability to gain fierce to persist until the regroup phase.
2) No, the designer actually meant "Each minion skirmishing a companion loses fierce and cannot gain fierce until the regroup phase." and the existing wording was written up and proofed without realizing the difference. Oversights happen.

I personally think that #2 is more likely and fits with how all the other previously created sites worked.  However, we don't have the evidence, only speculation, so if we want to go with #1 in the absence of that evidence, that is fine. That's one of those things a PC could decide on, and provide its reasons for doing so.

[TelTura]

Either way, all cards with such a dichotomy between their wording and their "intent" should have their game text (and implementation) altered to match one or the other.  There's no reason in this day and age to play musical semantics. 

[Phallen Cassidy]

I don't see any dichotomy between the wording and intent of Harrowdale, I think that #1 is the way to read the card and the way it was intended. It's not the only one either: in addition to Mount Doom, Steps of Edoras persists (as well as the phase action on Rohirrim Road). Why is so outlandish for a site to negatively affect minions for an extended duration as opposed to positively affect companions or other sites in the region?

There are many cards that do something unique. Some people think (or perhaps just wish) that Birthday Present wasn't intended to work with only one event in the discard pile, or that Savagery to Match Their Numbers wasn't intended to carry the strength boost to the regroup phase, or that Neekerbreekers' Bog wasn't intended to exert minions. Birthday Present in particular shows that Decipher was more than willing to lean into their rules to achieve certain effects and the 11th hour errata in the last CRD shows that Decipher was still capable of changing cards to line up with the intent behind them.

This, along with the fact that the card is from set 11 and not set 17, makes it seem unlikely to me that there is any divide between intent and effect. Where I can say there may be a divide is when looking at edge cases; Decipher intended for Corsair Marauder's text to be usable if he gets killed upon being played, but gave it up when they saw that doing so broke the rules. Swiftly and Softly may be intended to prevent all wounds if the Hobbit took one before the event was played, but that's not how the card is worded. Arguing that Decipher intended this card to work differently in mainstream use is more of an uphill battle from where I stand.

[TelTura]

I'm actually going to push back on the interpretation canonized by this thread, that Mount Doom only activates once a player steps on it. I can appreciate the historical effort in squaring the circle, but I think that besides being unintuitive in effect, it's not actually based on a solid and consistent rule.

In the previously quoted Active section, we have this, including the example right after:

Sites are always active. A site's game text cannot be used unless the fellowship is there, although some cards may copy and use that game text.
If the game text of a site has a Shadow special ability, you may use that special ability only when the active fellowship is at that site and you are a Shadow player.

Section on "game text" :

Game text includes all the text in the box below the card type line. . .Any boldfaced keyword that appears in this box (such as Easterling, Fierce, or Defender +1) is game text.

So: keywords (as game text) cannot be "used" unless the fellowship is at that site.  "Use" is not defined, but if by "use" it means "spot" (which is about all you can do with unloaded keywords), then this section completely breaks Lost in the Woods and Brutality and a small host of other Shadow cards from sets 11+ that spot keywords on sites.

Note that this does not say "once a fellowship steps on a site, the keywords are now permanently active", which is approximately what would be required for keywords to remain in force for LITW to be able to spot once a fellowship has passed it.  If that line is taken seriously, then LITW etc can only spot at most 1 forest, the one that (might) be the site that the fellowship is currently at.

But let's take this community ruling and run with it.  Even if the above issue wasn't in play, the MD ruling does not distinguish between pending sites that are "in front" of the fellowships vs pending sites "behind" the fellowships: if one were to use Traveled Leader to put a forest site behind all fellowships, it would result in a permanently unspottable forest, since no one could ever step on it to activate its game text.  I doubt however that anyone ever has decided to track un-initialized forests to make sure LITW counts one less than one would otherwise assume by counting the keywords on the adventure path.

So what's broken here?  Frankly, that section of the Active entry.  It is out of date, and was never updated to reflect the realities of the Shadows cards that it would otherwise alter the behavior of.  Never mind the release of a site from Hunters era, long after rules maintenance was a job nobody had anymore.

If that section is broken, then the community ruling based on it is bunk, too.  It can't actually be consistently applied without breaking about a dozen other cards, as shown above.

The most intuitive reading of Mount Doom is simple: as soon as it's played, the second half of its game text activates, the same way that everyone treats the first half (the keywords) as being spottable (and thus, well, active).  I agree that in a perfect world, this would be explicit: "When you play Mount Doom, for the rest of the game, all sites in this region cannot be replaced".  But sites have limited space, and clarity was often sacrificed for brevity's sake at all stages of the game's history, never mind Hunters block. 

It's the world's most softball ruling request possible, but the sheer timidity of TLHH to ever add to Decipher's canon got in the way, and instead now we have a rules-lawyering unwritten ruling that has to be explained to every new player who trips on it and (justifiably) reports a bug.  After all, who would have ever guessed that "cannot" means "can, actually"?  Walks like a bug, and quacks like a bug.



I would propose issuing an errata to the Active section as follows:

Sites and their keywords are always active, and so can always be spotted (even if controlled in a player's support area). Other game text on sites is inactive by default unless the fellowship is currently at that site, and so can only trigger or be activated during that time.  Some cards may copy and use a site's game text independently of whether that game text is currently active (see Uruviel, Maid of Lorien (1C67)).

If the game text of a site has a Shadow special ability, you may use that special ability only when the active fellowship is at that site and you are a Shadow player.

Exception: Site text is not active when the starting fellowships are played.

If a site's game text specifies a trigger relating to the state of the site itself, the trigger still activates even if the fellowship is absent.

Nurn (17U148) reads: While you control this site, each of your hunter minions is strength +1.  This trigger activates as soon as the site is controlled, even though no fellowship is currently at it.

If a site modifies whether it or another site can be replaced and does not otherwise specify a trigger, that game text activates as soon as that site enters play on the adventure path.

Mount Doom (15R193) reads: Until the end of the game, sites in this region cannot be replaced.  This game text activates as soon as it is played, preventing it or other sites within its region from being replaced, even if no player has yet arrived at that site.  (This is a reversal of a long-standing community ruling.)

[Orophoin]

To me, all this makes a lot of sense. It's a very clever addition that it needs to have the text 'this site' or equivalent to be always in effect.

Though I'd say it's technically been an issue since before Shadows. It's obvious that Leod should be discarded if an opponent controls Uruk Camp, but I don't think the rules as they currently stand technically allow it.

Even in Fellowship Block, in not incredibly sure about how cards like Voice of Nimrodel should work with allies. The rules say they are always at their home site, so can you use Voice of Nimrodel and exert Elrond (who by that logic is at the river Ford of Bruinen), when the fellowship is at Slopes of Amon Hen?