A New Ringlord :: MEWH :: stage resource permanent-event :: 3 sp :: r3
Playable on your Fallen-wizard if he has The One Ring at one of your Wizardhavens. Only one A New Ringlord may be played in a given turn. Make a roll during each of your end-of-turn phases if your Fallen-wizard is bearing The One Ring and is at a Ruins & Lairs where Information is playable. Add 1 for each A New Ringlord you have in play. If the result is less than 6, your fallen-wizard is eliminated. If the result is greater than 9, you win the game.
Art by Steve Otis
I still get a tingle whenever I look at this card, for some reason. It doesn't simulate anything that actually -happened- in Tolkien, of course, but it's so close to what might have been. Reading LotR, Sauron is just a spirit in a tower far away, but the possibility of the Ring doing in somebody else was present every single step of the way. Gandalf wouldn't be Gandalf if he, too, wasn't just as susceptible to that threat as anyone else . . .
Be prepared for a rough ride if you want to dunk the Ring as a fallen-wizard. "Dunking" per se no longer applies - I'll leave it to others to invent a new idiom. A New Ringlord results in a One Ring strategy that's somewhere between that of heroes and minions - the ring is harder to test than it is for a hero, easier than it is for a minion, and what you have to do afterwards isn't as difficult as what heroes must go through, but it isn't the minion cakewalk of leaving a parcel post at Barad-dur's door.
First, a few brief thoughts about testing the ring as a fallen-wizard. All fallen wizards have a -1 as -player- to their ring test die rolls, so even though you can use the hero rings (which have better odds in general), you're still crippled. The only real gold ring option for a fallen wizard is the precious gold ring, which, all by itself, will test right on an 11 or 12. That's nowhere near good enough, of course. Fortunately, again, a fallen wizard can snag the hero Scroll to gain a plus two, giving you a success on a 9-12 - much better, but still a long shot. Even with a Wizard's Test and hence two rolls, the chance of testing successfully on 9-12 are -not- in your favor.
Two factors can offset this. Depending on your wizard of choice, you can get access to some pretty impressive cycling abilities that will allow you to test rings with much greater frequency than other alignments. Even though you'll be stuck with only 2 Wizard's Tests and 2 rings, with cards like The Grey Hat (for Gandalf) or Saruman's Ring (for you-know-who) you can get the crucial elements back into your hand with relative ease. The big choice, then, is whether to go for multiple ring-tests until you get it right, or just bite the bullet and head down to the Under-grottoes, where 2 checks at 7-12 should be enough for all but the unluckiest dicemeisters.
But once you have the big O, what then? Here's where things start getting tricky. First off, before you can even think about winning the game, you have to get to one of your wizardhavens. It's not until -after- you're there that you can start playing A New Ringlord at -all-. It's this slowness, this long process even after the ring is tested, that makes things tough for fallen wizard players. Unlike the others, you -have- to test the ring early - you can't wait to test it at Mount Doom or Barad-dur. This leaves you vulnerable to corruption, big time, for a long time.
But there are ways to cut down on this. For a fallen-wizard, home is where you put your feet, and if you take care to test the ring in the right place, you can make that place a wizardhaven that very same turn. Let's say you play a Precious Gold Ring at Gladden Fields. During the next org phase, you successfully test it, play the One Ring, hand it to your wizard (preferably he should already have it - no sense making more corruption checks than you have to) and (drum roll) play -Hidden Haven- to turn the spot into a base camp immediately. That would allow you, without pause, to play your first A New Ringlord on your fallen-wizard right then and there. That's the ideal way to go, and while it's not going to happen every game, you should be prepared to take advantage of it.
Once you've played your first A New Ringlord, you have a difficult choice. The final step will be to make a dash for Weathertop or some similarly informational ruin and there, at the end of the turn (you don't even have to enter the site, so it's relatively safe), make the roll that will make you or break you. Or make you break even - the process of becoming adjusted to all that power could take a couple of turns. Once you've left the wizardhaven, you don't want to have to go back for another A New Ringlord. You should stay at the haven, turn after turn, piling up to three of them up - IF you have the time. That will depend on how close your opponent is to cycling his deck, and how many marshalling points he has. More often then not, you probably won't have the luxury of waiting around for extra A New Ringlords, but if you do, they can clinch your chances of success.
Keep in mind that each A New Ringlord boosts your corruption and skyrockets your stage points, so if you don't have a way to keep cards like Inner Rot off your wizard, don't even begin playing this game. Each one gives you a +1 boost to your bomb roll at the information site, so here's how those rolls breaks down:
ONE A New Ringlord:
2-4 = eliminated. A fluke, but by no means an unreachable fluke. You're not allowed to blame the dice on this one.
5-8 = nothing yet. This will be the majority of rolls, so if you can at all avoid it, make sure there's a 2nd A New Ringlord to help out, or you could end up losing the game with the One Ring in your hand.
9-12 = win the game. The second most likely roll of these three.
TWO A New Ringlords:
2-3 = eliminated. If you're not the sort of person who blames the dice all the time, you're allowed to blame the dice on this one.
4-7 = nothing yet. The oft-rolled 7 is still in this stretch, but things are looking better.
8-12 = win the game. A decent chance of success, now, but still not a greater than 50% chance.
THREE A New Ringlords:
2 = eliminated. Yes, you are allowed to blame the dice.
3-6 = nothing yet. Fairly unlikely.
7-12 = win the game. Finally, and -only- here, are the odds in your favor.
As you can see, to be really comfortable, you have to successfully test the ring with THREE turns to spare before the odds rest solidly in your favor. Which brings up the weird statistical question: assuming you have the three turns, is it better to play 3 Ringlords and get 1 chance at rolling for the win, or to just play 1 Ringlord and get 3 chances at rolling for the win? Or 2 and 2? Would the people with degrees in statistics please step forward, because this level of math is beyond my ken . . .
With all that's involved, A New Ringlord may well be the most difficult way to win the deck with the One Ring. But while minion players only get one really crucial roll (the test), and hero players get one, maybe two (the test, Cracks of Doom), fallen-wizard players get a whole BOATload of rolls to make. If you're into that heart-thumpin', table-poundin', this-die-roll-determines-whether-I-go-to-Nationals kind of rush, then there isn't anything like it in the game.
Gimli
Reader Comments
Findegil: As requested, the breakdown of the options when you have three ANRs in your hand and three turns available:
----------------------------- Death Survival Victory
1 ANR, 3 attempts: 31,1% 17,1% 51,8%
2 ANR, 2 attempts: 12,5% 25% 62,5%
3 ANR, 1 attempt: 2,8% 38,9% 58,3%
Interestingly, the greatest chance of victory comes with playing 2 ANRs and getting two attempts, although this also carries a greater risk of dying than playing all three. Of course, this doesn't include the risk of sitting around with gobloads of corruption without a chance at winning yet, set against surviving the rolls and sitting in a risky Ruins&Lairs with gobloads of corruption.
Original card review taken from : http://fan.theonering.net/morgulrats/
With the authorization of the webmaster.
The reviewing team consisted of Gwaihir (Chris Farrell), Gimli (Nathan Bruinooge), Ohtar (Charles E. Bouldin, Esq.), Radagast (James Kight), Joshua B. Grace (Beorn), Martijn Steultjens (Fram Frumgarson), Jason Klank (Saruman) and Jeffery Dobberpuhl (Wormtongue)
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