A bit of introduction to what's going on in the next card. I was racking my brains for an alternative approach to weather cards. Decipher's was very practical and appropriate (if not particularly good
) having cards that play on sites and cause trouble for the fellowship slowing them down. On a similar train of thought, I came across the idea of having weather minions that actually fought and tired out the fellowship to represent exactly the same thing.
So the next problem came about how to implement this. The obvious solution would be to follow the example of
A Shadow Rises and the Deceived Wizards of having conditions that turned into minions, which seemed to fit nicely in an already established
theme leading to a potential Weather/Wizard deck. This sort of thing you'll see in a later post; this post is just getting the controversial stuff out of the way first! :hey:
I needed a focal point for the strategy as well, for obviously while the weather assault seen in the Fellowship movie was instigated by Saruman he wasn't actually there and so he made a bad central minion (that and the fact that he can't fight!). The logical place to go therefore was the
Pass of Caradhras, and therefore the logical title was "
Cruel Caradhras". Unfortunately, I wanted it to be unique so there could be a super-weather minion "
Cruel Caradhras" but obviously the original is an event and so can't be unique. So, having played Magic the Gathering quite recently and having great fun creating Goblins out of nothingness, I thought that the MTG route was probably a good one. I believe that someone has already made LOTR DCs using this idea (perhaps EL?), but in MTG you often put "creature tokens" into play which act exactly as creatures act and have stats and all that.
Now, after all that preamble, let's look at the card!
Cruel Caradhras (V) Condition • Support Area
Weather.To play, spot Saruman.
Shadow: Remove
to put an unique
weather minion token entitled "Caradhras" into play. Caradhras is strength +4 and vitality +1 for each copy of
Cruel Caradhras in your support area.
"'Yonder stands Barazinbar, the Redhorn, Cruel Caradhras...'"1 V 124
2 points to mention:
1) Spotting Saruman should be easy with
Keeper of Isengard (V) returning himself to your hand and
Saruman's Reach (V) allowing you to spot him without him being in play. Also remember that the aforementioned Saruman recurs
conditions, which in this deck can by extension also mean minions!
2) As the card itself is non-unique, I felt I couldn't ignore the benefit for having more than one even though the minion you create is in fact unique.
So, let's hear your opinions then!
Thranduil