With The Hobbit, Magic: The Gathering Hopes Lightning Can Strike Middle-Earth Twice

The Lord of the Rings will always hold a place of honor in Magic: The Gathering. At a time when Universes Beyond crossover cards were confined to limited Secret Lair drops like The Walking Dead, or preconstructed Commander decks like Warhammer 40K, The Lord of the Rings introduced the first-ever tentpole Universed Beyond expansion with Tales of Middle-Earth in 2023.

Now, Tolkien's high fantasy world is returning to Wizards of The Coast's tenured trading card game in August with The Hobbit, the prequel story to the LOTR trilogy. After seeing a handful of cards at a pre-MagicCon Las Vegas press preview earlier this week, we suspect Magic's return to Middle-Earth will be as impactful as the first one.

(NOTE: There may be some cards revealed during the Preview Panel that were not shown to press during the press preview.)

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Full of flavor

One of the key achievements of that original LOTR set was its ability to capture the characters and events of Tolkien's universe on playable game pieces. Perhaps the most notorious card from the set, The One Ring, gave the player a few major advantages while slowly damaging them more with every use. Samwise The Stouthearted, meanwhile, saved a creature from the graveyard, just as Sam did for Frodo during their journey.

The Hobbit, in turn, also features many flavorful references to Bilbo's adventure. An Unexpected Party // At The Door, for example, can fill the board with surprise dwarf tokens thanks to its At the Door side, and then power each of those dwarves up once the enchantment side hits the board. Meanwhile, Tom, Bert, and William, massive trolls who toy with Bilbo, come back to the battlefield as artifacts after they're killed--mirroring when a blast of sunlight from Gandalf turns them into statues in the book.

Universes Beyond is at its best when it can directly incorporate or reference the outside intellectual property's source material, and based on the cards shown so far, The Hobbit is succeeding.

A magnificent Headliner

Last time, despite the concept of a Headliner card not being established yet, there was a super-rare serialized card in the one-of-one The One Ring, which Post Malone famously purchased for over $2 million after it was pulled.

Now, though, there is a Headliner, and it's magnificent--Smaug, The Magnificent, to be specific, a powerful version of the treasure-hoarding dragon from the Lonely Mountain of Erebor. While it's unknown if the Gold Foil Headliner version of Smaug--featuring art by longtime fantasy artist Ten Nasmith--will be serialized or just very rare, there's no denying how pretty the special version of the card looks--cue the chants of "my precious."

The card itself is a powerhouse too, dealing damage to opposing creatures based on how many Treasures you have, while also creating Treasures every turn. There's that magnificent flavor again!

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An unexpected party

One of the major questions regarding The Hobbit when it was first announced was the possibility of reprints from the previous LOTR set. That set wasn't eligible for MTG's Standard competitive format, so any cards reprinted from that set here in The Hobbit would be making their Standard debut.

So far, while there are some LOTR reprints, they will not be Standard legal. That's because the reprints are coming through Box Toppers, special one-card packs included in every box of packs. So far, of the cards included in the Box Topper bonus sheet, The One Ring, Tom Bombadil, and Sauron, The Dark Lord were the first revealed, and more are still to come.

Also, as Tales of Middle-Earth included cards written in the Elven languages, collector boosters of The Hobbit will sometimes features reprinted cards written in the Dwarven language. So far we've only seen one, Arcane Signet, but more are said to be on the way.

That's not to say there won't be any impactful reprints in the main set, though; Wood Elves, a cheap and efficient green creature, will hit the Standard scene through The Hobbit. Wood Elves were first printed in 1997, but as of recently, the card was only legal in Modern or eternal formats like Legacy and Vintage. This means Standard green players will have a new tool they may already be familiar with come August.

While the preview of Marvel Super Heroes left me with questions, our first look at The Hobbit has me super excited for when the set drops in August. Considering how well The Lord of the Rings fit into Magic: The Gathering the first time, Universes Beyond's first-ever "sequel" set is shaping up to be a hit of its own.