With all those Ruins and Lairs, it nice to have a card than "unruins" the sites.
Rebuild the Town - Resource - Permanent-event
Playable on a non-Dragon's lair, non-Under-deeps Ruins & Lairs. The site
becomes a Border-hold and loses all automatic-attacks. Discard Rebuild the
Town when the site is discarded or returned to its location deck.
Well, Rebuild the Town is a nice little card, but is most useful with a card that can untap sites. In fact, with Durin's ring, it can be quite abusive.
It's effect is simple, making a site an auto-attackless border-hold. Why would you want to do this? Perhaps you have a small company which is mostly tapped out after a hard road, and you would like to bypass the auto-attacks and just grab an item. This can be very useful for hobbit companies which haven't gotten their cancellation engines working yet.
While this can be quite useful, it is even more useful if you can untap the site and really reap the benefits. You can go all-out and play this card along with Durin's ring and crank out the items, leaving a character there when you need to run back to a haven to unload your corruptive items. This would be ideal at Dragon lairs and Under-deeps, if it weren't expressly forbidden, but it can work wonders at The Stones, where you can crank out greater items (and have more characters untapped for Thorough Searches). Also, if you have a sage or two, you can use Fireworks on your new border- hold to untap it a couple of times (this is best done with a high-mind sage). Wizard's Staff can help out here by bringing Fireworks (a ritual) back, and wizards are the best (tied with Elrond) at playing Fireworks. You can also play this card an an info site like Stone-circle and then play Look More Closely Later (which can also be retrieved by Wizard's Staff). Another good combo to use this with is Quiet Lands to turn a Shadow-hold into a Ruins & Lairs and then make it all the way to a Border-hold.
There are just a couple of drawbacks to this card. The first is that it can't be played on a Dragon's lair or Under-deeps site. This is okay because there are plenty of other good Ruins & Lairs, and if you COULD play this there it would just be too overbalancing. Another disadvantage is that it only lasts while the site is in play, which also means that in order for your opponent to use it, he has to get there while you're still there. The other bad thing is that it becomes an attractor for Slayers, Assassins, and the like. There are, however, more and nastier Ruins & Lairs creatures than Border-hold creatures.
Thus, Rebuild the Town is a good card, worthy of any deck which would rather not face the auto-attacks at a site.
| Ratings for Rebuild the Town: | |
|---|---|
| Isildur: | 7.0 |
| Farmer Maggot: | 9.0 |
| Gandalf: | 7.5 |
| Frodo: | 8.0 |
| Strider: | 4.0 |
| Legolas: | 4.0 |
| Eonwe: | 7.0 |
| Samwise: | 6.8 |
| Wormtongue: | 5.5 |
| Average: | 6.5 |
Card names and text copyright 1996 by Iron Crown Enterprises, all rights reserved. This document copyright 1996 by Trevor Stone. Permission given to duplicate so long as no profit is made and the copyright notice is kept in tact, blah, blah, blah.