There are now three Magic: The Gathering cards for Sting, the magic sword Bilbo claims from the troll hoard. To be fair, they’re all mechanically distinct. In The Lord of the Rings set there was an artifact card called Sting, the Glinting Dagger, and an instant called Hobbit’s Sting that did more damage the more food you had. Several the hobbit-themed cards are empowered the more food tokens you have piled up, which is a flavorsome idea.
The upcoming Hobbit set adds a card called Sting, Bilbo’s Sword, which uses the new mechanic hone, which lets you add +1/+0 to a creature with equipment—a mechanic that mostly shows up on dwarf cards. As you may remember, there are a lot of dwarves in The Hobbit.
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
There are also now three cards for the One Ring. The Hobbit set adds My Precious, representing the Ring as Gollum’s, whereas The Lord of the Rings set had it as both Bilbo’s Ring and in its final form as The One Ring. (There was also an instant called Slip on the Ring to represent the act of using it.) Again, the cards are all mechanically distinct and depict a different aspect of Tolkien’s story. But at the same time, it’s tough to see the slight differences between the 2023 Middle-earth set and the 2026 one as demanding a whole separate release.
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There are a couple of other brand new mechanics alongside hone. The dwarves get storied, a condition that activates when they have “three or more artifacts, legendaries, and/or Sagas” and has different consequences based on the dwarf. Dáin, Lord of the Iron Hills, for instance, makes your opponent pay a point of mana for each creature they want to attack you with if you’re storied enough to deserve it.
The humans of Laketown get recruit, which lets them draw a card and discard one, giving them a 1/1 human soldier if that discard was a nonland card. Meanwhile, amass, which was used to build armies of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, can here be used for armies of goblins—only fair since The Hobbit doesn’t use the word orc for its equivalent monsters.
Each of these additions is fine, and I’m pleased to see several new adventure cards in this set, and the return of saga cards based on Tolkien’s songs, because The Hobbit includes such bangers as Roll-Roll-Roll-Roll and the goblin singalong classic Burn, Burn, Tree and Fern. There’s definitely a more whimsical edge to this set, with dancing bears and trolls turning to stone, making it feel more like the charming talking-animal set Bloomburrow, which is no bad thing.
But I’m glad it’s a smaller release than the deluxe-sized Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth was. Nobody in their right mind would try to stretch something based on The Hobbit to be the same size as The Lord of the Rings, would they? Surely not.
Magic: The Gathering The Hobbit will be in prerelease from August 7–13, with a digital release in Arena on August 11, and its full tabletop release on August 14.
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