And In The Darkness, One Card To Bind Them All

March 17, 2023 9:50 AM

As part of the promotion of their upcoming Lord of the Rings set later this year, Wizards of the Coast has announced that there will be a special rare card - The One Ring, of which only one will be printed.

The announcement has collectors in a frenzy, with bounties of $100k for it already announced. If you would want a more common rare, the set will also have themed Sol Ring variants - the elven variant capped at 3,000 cards, the dwarven variant at 7,000, and the human variant at 9,000.

posted by NoxAeternum (28 comments total)

I avoid gambling because playing Magic in the 90's made me realize I am susceptible to getting my money liberated.
posted by miguelcervantes at 9:56 AM on March 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

If I stole the card from its owner and threw it into a volcano, no court would ever convict me.
posted by allegedly at 9:56 AM on March 17, 2023 [62 favorites]

They should pay a bounty to me and my friends for coming up with this idea in 2001.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:58 AM on March 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Easy way to find the card: light their card production factory on fire and pick it up un-damaged from the ashes.
posted by miguelcervantes at 10:00 AM on March 17, 2023 [32 favorites]

there will be a special rare card - The One Ring, of which only one will be printed.

Specifically there will be an art variant of the card of which only one will be printed. It will be mechanically identical to versions that will be readily available (e.g. a different alt-art version is guaranteed in every box of the bundle and gift bundle). It's just a collector's edition.
posted by jedicus at 10:02 AM on March 17, 2023 [13 favorites]

I see that the card text is written in the language of Mordor, which I will not utter here. What does the card actually do, in gameplay terms?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:04 AM on March 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

What does the card actually do, in gameplay terms?

Here's the plain English version.
posted by jedicus at 10:06 AM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here's all the LOTR cards revealed so far. The One Ring is the one in the lower right corner.
posted by hypnogogue at 10:06 AM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Reddit is saying two things:

1. "If I pull this I will definitely yeet it into a volcano"
2. "If no one opens it and it sits unfound for years, that is true flavor"
posted by hypnogogue at 10:13 AM on March 17, 2023 [11 favorites]

Speaking as a lifelong collector of various types of things, it seems like the main challenge for collectible manufacturers is determining how far you can push things in terms of playing your customers for suckers. Every now and again a given industry will push things past that line and the result is the comic book and sports card crashes of the 1990s (I was one of the customers both industries lost).

I'm expecting the vinyl record ecosystem will eventually get to that point and while it's not there yet, I was in a store yesterday which was selling a "deluxe" anniversary edition of a Three 6 Mafia album for $62 (CAD). No offence to Three 6 Mafia (I'm similarly baffled every time I see the umpteenth reissue of something like, say, Led Zeppelin II), but this sort of thing seems like a physical manifestation of irrational exuberance.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:16 AM on March 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

It will likely fall into the hands of a Martin Shkreli-style Gollum figure.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:16 AM on March 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

One Ring card also comes with an unreleased Wu Tang album

edit: lol mandolin conspiracy
posted by gwint at 10:20 AM on March 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

The card seems reasonable. Risk, reward, thematically seems fine. It really should be indestructible except to Lava Burst though.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:30 AM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh hey, Aragorn is Black!
posted by saturday_morning at 10:58 AM on March 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

Aragorn is Black

Oh yeah that's the other things redditors are saying, and not nicely, but at least in their own shithole subs.
posted by hypnogogue at 11:30 AM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm similarly baffled every time I see the umpteenth reissue of something like, say, Led Zeppelin II

A holy grail among audiophiles and vinyl record collectors is the Robert Ludwig master of Led Zeppelin II.
posted by Ber at 11:30 AM on March 17, 2023

"If no one opens it and it sits unfound for years, that is true flavor"

Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:52 AM on March 17, 2023

the other things redditors are saying, and not nicely

Just once I’d like to see a CEO respond to that kind of “controversy” with a nice, plain, straightforward “you’re clearly a bigoted idiot, and you can go fuck yourself”
posted by aramaic at 12:03 PM on March 17, 2023 [15 favorites]

If I stole the card from its owner and threw it into a volcano, no court would ever convict me.

Presumably as you would be canonically next into the furnace, and it's difficult to convict overdone meat fragments.
posted by biffa at 2:14 PM on March 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Played AD&D in the '80s. I regularly play D&D 5e nowadays. I tried Magic the Gathering via a console video game version, thinking it might ease me into the basics...

I couldn't understand it for the life of me. I guess I'm not cut out for card games of any kind.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:58 PM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The problem with the video games is that there's a ton of edge-case rules and turn phases and opportunities for the other player to interrupt what you're doing with a counterattack, and so on. When you're playing with real cards and another person, whatever doesn't apply just gets skimmed past, because you both know you don't need to worry about that right now. But in the video game, all those possibilities have to be provided for in the interface, and it becomes a clusterfuck. It's navigable if you already know how to play, but it's no way to learn.

Pretty much the only way to learn is to find someone you know who plays and have them teach you.
posted by rifflesby at 3:36 PM on March 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is an episode of Leverage: Redemption. First season. Noah Wyle is game as hell in a GRRM costume.
posted by humbug at 3:41 PM on March 17, 2023

The announcement has collectors in a frenzy, with bounties of $100k for it already announced.

I'm 100% sure someone could crowdsource more than $100k for the volcano plan. If everyone in this thread pitches 20 bucks, we're like 0.4% of the way there!
posted by saturday_morning at 3:52 PM on March 17, 2023

M:tG cards: The Original NFTs!
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:09 PM on March 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

The announcement has collectors in a frenzy, with bounties of $100k for it already announced.

Wow... Talk about completely missing the point Tolkien was making, across multiple books, about material possessions owning those who try to own them.
posted by swr at 6:41 PM on March 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

SoberHighland, I hear ya. I never got into Magic, partly because of rule obtuseness, but mostly because I could see right off the bat that they had chained their very game design to their business model, that it was being used ultimately a way to increase the value of printed pieces of cardboard, and I had a moral opposition to that, one that persists to today in fact. Paid DLC that just unlocks disk content I'm also against in a similar way, although I do buy them once in a while because what u gonna do?

If you/someone else might be interested in this sort of style of game without the exploitive aspects, you might want to look into picking up a good Deck Building game, maybe the base set of Dominion. It seems to scratch some of that Magic itch, but in a non-collectable way.
posted by JHarris at 1:17 AM on March 18, 2023

Just when I think I’m out they drag me back in. Just look at those basic land cards! Look at them!

> Oh hey, Aragorn is Black!

I imagine this is an excellent way of making the set more inclusive while simultaneously discouraging the types of people you don’t want associated with your game. A win win.

There is also a Doctor Who on the horizon.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:46 AM on March 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I thought I'd mention something kind of interesting:

So in the online MTG community there is this meme where they refer to people who play control-style decks as "Gandalfs" and eventually even some of the more well known control deck archetypes have been referred to as "Gandalf Decks" (blue/white control for example).

.... so now with the release of this set, you can play Gandalf in your Gandalf deck (if you splash for red mana)... I'm going to assume that there is another Gandalf card or two in the set that have yet to be spoiled, and I'd be surprised if one of them is not a blue/white card.
posted by some loser at 9:34 AM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]