Torque of Hues

Unique. Tap Torque of Hues and its bearer to cancel an attack against his company. Bearer makes a corruption check.

2 corruption isn't much worry if it's the character's only item (or there's one more that's not too high on corruption), and it's enough to keep most characters from needing much more.

And 2 marshalling points is useful, but small compared to this card's main ability. It can stop attacks. Any attack, any location, it stops. Just one, yes, but if it's your opponent's high-powered mega-attack (like a Pale-Sworded, Fell-Beasted Witch-King in my case) it can really save the day. Now you can move to Mount Doom with much more safety (unless of course your opponent's got many Nazgul and is planning to use several of them with Fell Beasts, in which case your Wizard's in trouble anyway). But even then this can take out the best one. If it wasn't unique, you could use it even more, but since it is and there's no way I know of to untap an item in the middle of a turn (though you can untap the character, that doesn't untap the item as well, and you need both untapped) you can only use it once per turn.

Think of the other uses, too. It's rare that a turn will have more than one "attacker chooses defending characters" attack (unless your opponent's got lots of Fell Beasts and Nazgul or both Daelomin and Smaug), so you can pretty much protect your Wizard forever with this. In fact, with Gandalf and Radagast, this makes a nice combo anyway, with a corruption check that cannot fail unless modified (without an extra +1 at least, you can fail if the dice/draw yield(s) a 2). It's therefore extremely good with Hobbits, with their huge corruption check modifiers.

Plus you can even use this on particularly bad auto-attacks, like the dragon sites or some of those dark-holds (though in those there are usually things far more dangerous).

There is the one matter of the corruption check, as I mentioned before, which can cause major headaches in characters with lots of other corruption points, but it's easy to avoid troubles with by just picking carefully when to use it.

And the reason it's better than Secret Entrance, BTW, is that it can be re-used, which can sometimes be better than cancelling all strikes in a Dark-Domain (though not always, consider Mount Doom for example).

Overall, Torque of Hues is a very useful resource item, one of the best in the game.

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