Morgul Banner-bearer (10C62)
 Houses of Lamentation (10C61)
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Morgul Vanguard (10R63) 
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Morgul Banner-bearer (10C62) is a 
Ringwraith Minion from the Mount Doom set.
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Strategy[edit]
Morgul Banner-bearer is a mediocre card that rewards very carefully calculating what you can play in a given turn. Unlike most other Morgul Orcs it doesn't care about spotting Nazgul or possessions and doesn't work especially well as part of a swarm. It's meant to be a sidekick for high-priced minions (like Nazgul!), but it can serve just as well as a splash into a deck focused on any culture. Unfortunately, it's just not consistent enough to justify inclusion in almost any deck, however.
If you can manage your twilight perfectly, you get an 11 strength archer minion for a bargain price. Three twilight usually gets you a 6 strength archer like Southron Archer (4R245)
, or a 9 strength minion with useful gametext like Uruk Warrior (1C156)
or Mordor Pillager (10U92)
. If you can consistently keep Morgul Banner-bearer's gametext active, you're getting quite a discount.
Where the card falls down is consistency. You need to use up all of your excess twilight before the end of the archery phase to get an archery wound out of the Banner-bearer, which can be randomly impossible based on what you draw. And that's assuming your opponent cooperates: cards like Shoulder to Shoulder (1C59)
can guarantee you'll never have the right amount of twilight at the right time, as can almost any Free Peoples event with a twilight cost greater than zero. Cards that can soak up twilight later in the turn, like Úlairë Attëa, Keeper of Dol Guldur (1R229)
or Easterling Captain (4R225)
can turn on the Banner-bearer's gametext again later, but with most of these cards you miss out on the archery wound due to the timing. The only card of note that soaks up arbitrary amounts of twilight with the right timing is Rapid Reload (15U89)
, but 
Men decks don't need mediocre, unreliable archer minions with no synergy with other Men cards like this one.
Another problem is that archery is generally better when you have lots of archer minions to simply overwhelm your opponent's ability to soak and heal wounds, and Morgul Banner-bearer doesn't work well with other archers. Ringwraith-culture archery decks want to play more than four minions at a time on key turns, and other cultures with archery minions either want to play similarly wide (
Moria) or have fairly harsh cultural enforcement ( Men). It could arguably fit in with Southrons, but an inconsistent minion that only does one archery wound at best isn't worth splashing into a different culture.
Morgul Banner-bearer does force your opponent to be careful about how they assign and resolve skirmishes, since killing minions can bring the total back below three, but this minion isn't so intimidating that it's posing any real challenge to your opponent. This is a middling-strength minion that relies on efficiency, not raw power, so the upside from a misplay that turns on its gametext mid-skirmish phase is relatively small. In the end, Morgul Banner-bearer's lack of consistency scuttles its on-paper efficiency, and as a result it rarely sees any play.
Morgul Banner-bearer is very similar to the even-more-rarely-played Southron Savage (10C50)
. It's not clear if this was an aborted cycle, or simply a concept Decipher felt fit into two different cultures.
Strengths and Weaknesses[edit]
Synergizes With...[edit]
- Expensive minions with a variety of different twilight costs, to soak up all of the twilight in the pool
- Shadow effects with variable costs can turn on its gametext, although the most common type of these (e.g. Úlairë Attëa, Keeper of Dol Guldur (1R229)
, Easterling Captain (4R225)
) of these won't make it an archer in time to matter.
Strong Versus...[edit]
- There isn't a particular strategy this minion excels against.
Weak Versus...[edit]
- Free Peoples decks that flood, like Ent Swarm
- Free Peoples cards that generate twilight later in the turn, especially Shoulder to Shoulder (1C59)
