The One Ring
– The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth
Date Reviewed: December 29, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 5.00
Casual: 5.00
Limited: 4.37
Multiplayer: 5.00
Commander [EDH]: 5.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale: 1 is bad; 3 is average; 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
David
Fanany
Player
since
1995
This card was 1st on my Top 10 list.
We may have discussed the interesting fact that the Lord of the Rings novels don’t say explicitly what the powers of the One Ring would be if Sauron regained it. I seem to recall this is one of the things that led Brandon Sanderson to use spreadsheets and flowcharts when he writes magic; but personally, I prefer it Tolkien’s way. It feels a lot more mysterious and menacing – you know, the way magic feels in folklore and tradition and mythology. Also, it left a lot of space to design a powerful Magic card modelled on The One Ring.
They absolutely nailed the mystery and menace part. It reads like a very innocuous card, especially since we’re not used to looking at artifacts for devastating table effects in recent sets, much less card-drawing. The costs and interactions you need to repeatedly give yourself protection from everything sound high, especially when you overanalyze them and overlook the fact that protection from everything means exactly what it says. And that same overanalysis sometimes leads us to remember the explosive cards like Hydroid Krasis and underrate the cards that generate advantage more slowly.
I am quite impressed by everything about The One Ring. I won’t go over its lore-mechanics interactions again because my position on those is very clear by now; but we should all take notice of the fact that it uses only basic game actions and evergreen keywords, and nonetheless made an enduring impact in Magic’s biggest formats. Its position on our list shows that there are still plenty of times when you do best with Magic’s fundamentals.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.5
Multiplayer: 5
Commander: 5
This card was 1st on my Top 10 list.
This was, in a way, unexpected.
The One Ring dad’s look like the kind of card that would actually do a ton of damage to a format. It’s four mana and sorcery-speed, which are not good features for a spell that won’t win you the game on its own. But it turns out that the weapons to exploit this ability are way too easy to use…blink effects to reset the protection, and both recursion and additional copies to play to clear away the burden counters…both of these are effects that will pay off, and it can be a lot harder than expected to try and break through The One Ring once a good protection loop is set up.
This card’s shown its efficacy in a lot of formats…Modern, Legacy, and Vintage all showed that this card has a lot of impressive legs. It was always going to get eyes on it for being the titular artifact of one of the most famous fantasy properties, but it wound up far more flexible and powerful than any of us had imagined at first. It’s a strangely fitting top card for the year, and I was definitely a bit conservative with it at first.
Constructed: 5
Casual: 5
Limited: 4.25
Multiplayer: 5
Commander: 5
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