Page values for "Data:Gimli, Dwarf of the Mountain-race (2P121)/Data"

Gimli is an odd duck. Rather uniquely among the rest of the cards on this list, he isn’t a problem in FOTR in the slightest. We can of course argue whether the same is true for these other cards, but you can’t deny that most of them have at least been complained about quite loudly and often; the same is not true for Gimli.

Since he is a problem primarily in the post-Shadows world of site manipulation, we are left with reducing his choke impact and granting him an additional bonus to compensate.

(It's probably a moot point anyway, since if you're playing Dwarves that means Bearer of Grudges, but let no one say we didn't at least take Decipher at their word.)

Decipher Notes:

Dwarves as a culture have never excelled at keeping site Shadow numbers low and “choking” off the twilight pool. Gimli was a fun anomaly for the Fellowship block, where the number and placement of underground sites was known and limited. Those same boundaries held true on the Tower and King site paths. But with Shadows, all that is changing.

Shadows has a big focus on what design and development call "terrain" – that is, whether a site is a battleground, forest, mountain, river, or any of the other similar types of keywords. Terrain is so important with the new adventure path that in playtesting, players were frequently bidding to go second, and "pathfinding" (selection of the next site by the Free Peoples player) was valued as it has never been before. If a player wants to run an adventure path of nothing but one type of terrain, that may well be possible – if not with Shadows, then likely once Black Rider and Bloodlines are added to the mix.

In short, having a single, easy-to-start card (one with out-of-culture gameplay, at that) which could potentially deny 2 twilight tokens at every single site simply proved too strong.