Right, so full disclosure before we get into this: I am not a hardcore Magic player. I never have been. I play casually, I build Commander decks that are fun rather than optimised, and I buy sets when the theme grabs me rather than on any kind of regular basis. The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set in 2023 completely destroyed my wallet and my free time, and I regret nothing about it. So when Wizards of the Coast announced they were coming back to Middle-earth with a full Hobbit set, I put the date in my calendar immediately and started quietly dreading how much money I was about to spend.
So there we were… release day. I bought a Collector Booster because apparently I have no self-control. I only pulled a foil Arkenstone, but honestly, I am happy with that. It is a gorgeous card and exactly the sort of shiny nonsense this set has made me want to collect.
The thing that got me straight away was the Scene Cards. There is a series of cards that, when assembled together, form a complete illustration of a specific moment from the book. The unexpected gathering at Bag End, the famous crack-the-plates sequence where Gandalf turns up with thirteen dwarves and immediately starts raiding Bilbo’s pantry, is spread across multiple cards that slot together into one enormous piece of art. Assembled, it is genuinely one of the most beautiful things Magic has ever produced, and I say that as someone who has been looking at Magic card art on and off for over twenty years. The craftsmanship in that illustration is extraordinary, and the idea of hunting down every piece to complete it is exactly the kind of collector bait that I am completely powerless to resist.
Thorin is obviously the big one, card-wise, and he absolutely earns it. He appears in multiple colour combinations, which means you can build completely different Commander decks around him depending on the strategy you want. That is a brilliant design decision for a character with that much personality and history. The card art across his different versions is stunning. If you are a Commander player and you have even a passing interest in Tolkien, you are going to want to build around Thorin, and the dwarf tribe support in this set is generous enough that the deck basically builds itself.
Smaug is everything you would want Smaug to be. A massive flying dragon who is absolutely catastrophic to deal with, has his own special mechanic, and even gets a ludicrous gleaming-gold headliner treatment in Collector Boosters. The five Dwarvish-language cards are separate Collector Booster finds rather than versions of Smaug himself, but they are still one of the most gloriously extra things Wizards have ever done. Five cards in total are printed in Dwarvish. Five. I need all of them. They serve absolutely no practical purpose in terms of actually playing the game, and I need all of them immediately.
The Adventure mechanic runs through the whole set, and it fits the Hobbit theme perfectly: characters going on journeys and returning changed. The One Ring is back as My Precious this time around, a slightly less powerful version than the 2023 card but still genuinely interesting and with a brilliant new piece of art. Bard gets book-cover art variants. Thranduil gets book-cover art variants. The Eagles introduce a mechanic that lets creatures around them fly, which is both thematically perfect and actually useful in Limited. Every design decision in this set feels like it was made by people who actually love The Hobbit rather than just people working from a brief.
The one shadow over the whole thing is the One Ring art controversy that came out in May, where the Dan Frazier illustration was found to have been lifted from earlier work by Marta Nael. Wizards confirmed it, both artists commented on it, and it left a slightly uncomfortable feeling around that specific card. Not enough to derail the whole set, but worth knowing about.
Everything else, though. Honestly, one of the best Universes Beyond sets they have made, which is saying something given how good Tales of Middle-earth was. The fact that it is Standard legal this time around means these cards are going to actually shape competitive play rather than just sitting in Commander decks, which gives the whole set a relevance the 2023 one never had.
I have already spent more than I am comfortable admitting. I regret nothing.