Favor of the Valar

Unique. Playable during your organization phase. Shuffle your hand and your discard pile into your play deck (site cards remain in the discard pile). Draw a new hand of 8 cards. Remove Favor of the Valar from the game.

The first of these is just shuffling your deck in general. This can be both good and bad; you have no way of knowing except with special cards like Palantiri (the perfect combo for this card is Palantir of Minas Tirith and it).

But that's just one feature. Another is that it restores your discard pile to your deck. This is useful for several things. First, if you've had to discard a really good card because you were building a killer combo, you can now restore it. Second, in a ring deck, if you've lost all your Gold Ring Items (like I did in the Cirdan game) you can use this card to restore them and be able to use them again. This also works for (I think) some unique cards. This is also useful if you've just lost a really good character, or had a really good hazard attack neutralized (but not beaten; then it would go into the marshalling point pile instead).

The third and final feature of this card is that it lets you discard your current and draw an entirely new hand. This is extremely useful if you're trying to get just one needed card (not as part of a combo but by itself) to make it possibly come faster (though then again, you could just end up putting this card on the bottom of your deck and making it take even longer). So that ability is sort of a double-edged sword.

There are also the usual array of disadvantages of this card. First, it gets placed out of play when used. You can't recycle it, can't do anything with it after you've played it once. Secondly, it doesn't recycle sites, though if it could do that it would completely upset the balance of the game (because there would no longer be any need to get to the good sites first, you can just recycle them with this). Though I suppose Dwarven Ring of Durin's Tribe does the same thing.

Overall, though, this is an excellent card, though you should be careful how and when you use it because if used wrong it can upset your entire strategy.

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