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?
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.