Say a hero has taken 5 damage. Can I use close call to cancel part of that damage (say 3) and assign the remaining 2 to a hero ?

interesting - reading the card i dont see anything in the wording that prevents this...

I agree...

It doesn't specifies that you have to remove all damage, so i'd say you can do that.

Yes I totally agree you can choose to cancel some of the damage. The wording could be different making you cancel all damage.. look at Frodo's ability- it makes you change all damage into threat gain, you cannot choose.

Being able to choose makes this card so much better also, imagine this scenario: Beregond is at full health with his 4 defense and defends against an enemy with 7 attack but the shadow gives him plus 2 attack and would now kill Beregond so you use this card to cancel 2 damage keeping him alive and only raising threat by 2 for everyone which isn't bad. If you had to cancel all damage and raise everyones threat by 5 that would suck (although he would still be at full health).

I'll definitely use this card to only cancel as little damage as needed since my Tactics decks usually struggle with threat already.

I've already used the card to great effect, I find it especially good for undefended attacks cancelling most of the damage and raising each players threat by between 3-5. Best of all is when an attack just goes over the defense of a hero who only has one life left and you are able to cancel that 1 or 2 damage and save the hero. Incredibly good and versatile card!

but if you were going to do that, why wouldn't you just play the Wizard's Voice instead and then the enemy would not even attack at all, *and* you could have an enemy engaged with each other player not attack as well. That just seems a *lot* better, IMO.

Because you never know when the shadow effect would catch you from behind and tear your little dwarf fortress into pieces.

Sudden Pitfall, we are looking at you, also you Despair.

but if you were going to do that, why wouldn't you just play the Wizard's Voice instead and then the enemy would not even attack at all, *and* you could have an enemy engaged with each other player not attack as well. That just seems a *lot* better, IMO.

True so that's why you may want both in your deck because at times one will be better than the other. Wizards' voice is a card for using before attacks while Close Call is a nice backup if things go wrong.

I dunno, if Shadow effects are the issue I'd rather just run things to mitigate shadow effects, like Hasty Stroke, A Burning Brand, Dark Knowledge, etc. Incidentally, Close Call won't even save you from Sudden Pitfall, although it might save you from Despair. Maybe if you're running pure tactics with no teammate this card could make it into your deck. Maybe.

I dunno, if Shadow effects are the issue I'd rather just run things to mitigate shadow effects, like Hasty Stroke, A Burning Brand, Dark Knowledge, etc. Incidentally, Close Call won't even save you from Sudden Pitfall, although it might save you from Despair. Maybe if you're running pure tactics with no teammate this card could make it into your deck. Maybe.

I think you're really underestimating this card and not only how good but how flexible it is..... any damage just placed on a hero including archery, direct damage effects from the encounter deck etc, add to this that you can cancel x of the damage even just 1 if that's all that is necessary. As much as cancelling the attack altogether is better what if you cancel an attack that wouldn't have actually done any damage? You've just put your threat up by 3, wasted the wizards voice and had nothing come out of it. In many situations you will take no damage but if randomly some horrible shadow card comes up and you don't have shadow cancellation close call will save you big time, wizards voice you may have already used against the bigger enemy who got a shadow card with no effect anyway and would have just done 1 or 2 damage but not killed the hero.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, the main benefits of Close Call are as follows:

1. Versatility: you can use it to cancel direct damage, to soak undefended attacks, or to indirectly cancel most of the bad shadow effect cards. Effectively you get a lot of different possible options out of one card.

2. You could stack it with Wizard's Voice or Feint (or both) putting them all in the deck, no need to pick just one.

3. Compared to Wizards Voice specifically, you can choose to play or not play the card later, after you see the Shadow Card. This lets you know exactly if you "need" to use it or not.

I guess I get that, but I'm still skeptical. Versatility is nice but I think there are card combos out there that do everything Close Call does only better. Close Call may allow you to slot in 3 cards into your deck rather than 6, so if you're looking to tone down your deck size, or don't have a lot of card draw maybe. It's worth pointing out that you only really ever want to cancel "kill" damage with this card. Any other instance of damage it's better to just take and then heal up later. I'm not saying that Doomed 1 to save a hero's life isn't totally worth it, I'm just saying ideally you don't get to that point at all. If you're going to stack it with Wizard's Voice or Feint to do an Uber-tank deck off of 1 tactics hero, that's a deck I can see working. It's 9 cards to run 3x Wizards voice, Feint, and Close Call. It's not a bad plan, but it's a fair chunk of your deck, not a splash, it's a commitment. I'd run Wizards Voice and Feint before choosing close call if I was only going to pick a few.

Wizard's Voice is still way better even if you have to play it earlier. Close Call is DoomedX (for all players) for an effect that only benefits you. Wizard's Voice is Doomed3 but at least it benefits everybody. What's more, if you'd just played Wizard's Voice in the first place, you wouldn't need to play Close Call. I guess you're thinking of maybe an enemy with 2 attack that you want to take undefended gets maybe a nasty +3 damage shadow card or something. Can it happen? Sure. Does it suck? Yes. Even so, Hasty Stroke or Dark Knowledge or Silver Lamp are better tools to use for this purpose so you can just find out if you need to Feint/Voice the monster. Again, Close Call allows you to do with one card what otherwise you would need 2 cards to pull off, so I see your point. Still, if the tanking thing is something I'm going to do, I'd rather do it well, rather than scraping by with Close Call, which is what it feels like to me.

As much as we disagree somewhat I do really enjoy and respect your thought process and very valid points. I run 3x feint already and actually only run close call in my sideboard so only use it for certain quests or plays. When VOI came out for so long I questioned whether wizards voice should go in my decks but have never put it in and got myself a third copy of feint instead, as amazing as I'm sure it is it was just not for me with the high threat gain for both decks. I often try to make sure my combat deck engage most enemies, especially the nastier and stronger ones, this means in many situations I may be more than capable of defending the other couple of enemies (especially those engaged with the other non combat deck) and really only need to stop one attacking, in this situation the wizards voice would be useless (or at least raise my threat by an additional two and would stop an attack that didn't need stopping) where feint or close call would not. Then again, due to the random nature of shadow cards (plus the action advantage) stopping a second attack even if its weak is pretty useful I suppose...
As well as this my two decks run quite high starting threat (and do not used any other doomed cards except power of orthanc which is also a sideboard card!) so doomed 1 or 2 is much preferable to doomed 3 even if the doomed 3 ability is stronger. I honestly think they are both quite powerful cards (maybe wizards voice gives a bit more bang for its buck) and really it's a matter of both situation and personal preference as to which takes the cake. You have however convinced me to at least finally try out Wizards Voice and see how well it performs.

As someone pointed out in another topic, comparing cards is bound to sunk into opinions and not facts. However, to add to the discussion, I must point out that, in this particularly crual world of middle earth, there are many ways to get damages other than combat (archery, trichery, engagement forced effect, etc). Therefore, I would not totally opposed wizards voice and close call as they do not re-act to the same situations.

I run a pretty solid solo deck featuring Grima, Glorfindel (sp) and Beorn. In this deck, I have 3 close calls and 3 feints but only one wizards voice. The point is that with wizards voice you will get the 3 threats any way, whereas, with close call, you could decide to let go some damages if no hero would be destroyed by the attack.

Can you deal some archeries damage points (for example, 4) and cancel all these tokens by Close Call raising up 4 your threat?

All archeries damage are dealt at the same time, so it's possible.