Weather Hills Watchman

Ally. Cost: 2. 1   1   0   2  

Dúnedain.

Response: After Weather Hills Watchman enters play, search the top 5 cards of your deck for a Signal card and add it to your hand. Shuffle the other cards back into your deck.

"Rangers use runes, and they come here sometimes." Aragorn, The Fellowship of the Ring
Kim Sokol

The Lost Realm #3. Leadership.

Weather Hills Watchman
Reviews

Thematically and mechanically it makes sense to have a card that fetches the various signals from your deck, so I see why this card was created. However I always seem to cut it long before it makes it into any Dúnedain deck. The bottom line is that I think it’s overpriced for what it is. It has no use other than retrieving a single card then chump blocking, but it costs 2. Compare this to Master of the Forge who costs the same but will fetch you an attachment — any attachment so less likely to whiff — every round. Galadhrim Minstrel is 2 cost for a one time use but as a Silvan can be expected to get a stat boost on entry and be bounced back and reused — and is much harder to justify outside a Silvan deck. This guy is just one and done with no useful stats. Yes, leadership generally has more resources than other spheres, but that can’t justify making everything overpriced.

Thies 62
Agreed on all counts. Another unfavorable comparison would be to Westfold Horse-breeder, who has a similar action but digs 10 cards deep and for one less resource. — SchadenfreudeNE 244

The biggest design problem with the Watchman is that Signals do not form their own archetype. The most popular Signals -- Dúnedain Warning, Dúnedain Mark, and Dúnedain Remedy -- are mostly used as splashable support attachments to flexibly patch needed weaknesses of any deck running leadership. There is little purpose in building a deck with the sole purpose of putting out a ton of Signals, as there is no overall synergy to these cards. At the same time, for most decks that use Signals, they are helpful to have, but not critical in the way that linchpin attachments like, for example, Vilya, Steward of Gondor, O Lórien!, or King of Dale. Those attachments merit including many ways to specifically get them on turn 1. The same is just generally not true of Signals, so the Watchman's fetch ability is helpful but not terribly valuable on its own.

Given that his ability alone cannot justify his inclusion, the Watchman needs to have strong utility in stats or traits. Unfortunately, neither is really the case. On stats, he's got a moderately useful 1 and can soak a point of archery. He can also chump, but likely won't be available to do that because he's questing. His traits, however, are where he really falls flat. He simply just doesn't fit in with the Dunedain archetype at all. His best utility would actually be in a Gondor swarm deck... if he had the Gondor trait. You could see playing the Watchman with Herald of Anórien, for example, to get an early Dúnedain Warning out on Denethor and set up A Very Good Tale search for Faramir. The Watchman would be decent with the Visionary Leadership boost, especially. But he's not Gondor, he's Dunedain. Unlike Signals, therefore, the Watchman is just not splashable and so doesn't really find his way into that many decks. As others have pointed out, he simply does too little for too much cost to justify inclusion in today's very competitive card pool.

kjeld 611