My "solution" for fixing The Ring mechanic in LTR (from a non-game designer)
My "solution" for fixing The Ring mechanic in LTR (from a non-game designer)
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.
That's a good point, I hadn't fully considered all the cards with "TRTY". Not really sure what the best way to include that would be (if there is one). It's definitely trickier to change these things after the fact.
Re: removal, though, that's kinda the point - you can have a powerful creature at times, but it only takes one spell (or an unfortunate block) and the Ring is gone.
The Ring isn't gone, though, just lost until it decides to be found again.
It's definitely weird that there can be multiple ring bearers on the table but that's a phenomenon that's existed in Magic for a very long time, ever since the many revisions to the rules around the legendary supertype. You could play your own [[Jace, the Mind Sculptor]] just to kill your opponent's Jace. There's only one Jace, after all.
It seems to me that the ability to have more than one ring bearer is a mistake, I like the idea of making it swappable. Basically if the ring tempts player 2 and they get a new ring bearer, player 1 loses theirs.
Somewhat sideways to this - and I haven't looked at these decks at all so idk if this is already in them - I think the errata-free solution would be to have a bunch of potent, cheap effects that target ringbearers. Then the "temptation" is to make your ring bearer powerful, but also make them extremely vulnerable.
I hadn't really considered all the "TRTY" effects, tbh. It seems a bit frivolous if it's that easy to get the Ring back. Maybe if you don't have a ring-bearer, you draw a card instead? Or Scry 1-2? Not sure.
What happens when one player is playing with TRTY cards and the others aren't? There's too much parasitism in the possibility of the ring bearer being stolen and doesn't mesh well the rest of Magic.
a bunch of potent, cheap effects that target ringbearers
More parasitism, I'm afraid.
I like this as a simple fix.
My own idea for how to model the ring is similar:A good way to make the ability both more flavorful and more mechanically interesting would be if the emblem worked more like the monarch, with only one player able to have it active at a time. There's only one ring, after all, so if your ringbearer dies then your opponent gets the ring and their emblem turns on while yours turns off. Having the ring would also require having a creature to hold it. And every time you're tempted while you have the ring, your ringbearer gets a burden counter (as used on the one ring card) and once you hit the final level of temptation you have to pay life equal to your ringbearer's burden counters each turn, or they're sacrificed and your opponent gets the ring and a wraith creature token which becomes their ringbearer.Obviously with that change you could also make the ring payoffs a little better too.