Contest: New Fellowship Hero

The guys over at Cardboard of the Rings are hosting several contests right now (ending on Tuesday, the 4th) and one caught my eye: design a new fellowship hero. Samwise Gamgee's brief stint as a ring-bearer was a great moment that I wanted to take a crack at capturing.

First, off to deviantART to scrounge up a fitting picture. Almost right away I found a beautiful picture by Yuuza.*

I then downloaded the latest batch of Hero templates for Photoshop, courtesy of GeckoTH, and began the fun part of thinking through the Hero's abilities.

What captures the essence of Sam as a ring-bearer? To me, it was his ability to sneak past enemies, avoiding their attacks, and being able to dispatch them as needed. So I wanted to try having him reduce the stats of one enemy for the duration of the phase. If I leave Sam's stats the same as his Leadership iteration in The Black Riders, this might make willpower questionable but serves to make his attack and defense usable (assuming you can ready him, which is very doable these days). But something that powerful needs to be costly. Exhausting Sam + The One Ring insures this ability can only be used 1/phase (until an attachment-readying effect is released, that is). Each of the current iterations of Frodo have a cost of 1 Fellowship resource to trigger the effect, so that seems fitting. Then there is a second negative to Frod's abilities (either revealing another card or raising each players threat by 2). I went for raising the first player's threat by 3.

For the flavor text I wanted to go for the quote about Sam's bravery. But watch out! With Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring now older than a teenager (what?!?), the internet is full of quotes from the movies (even on Goodreads).

And, with all the pieces in place, here is my finished submission:

What do you think: thematic and solid or totally overpowered?


* Out of respect for the artist, I highly encourage you to cite them on your fan-made cards.