Crack The Plates and Treasures of Smaug: The Hobbit Scene Box Spoilers from MagicCon Amsterdam

There were plenty of exciting updates during the panels at MagicCon Amsterdam this weekend, and the release closest on the horizon is Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit. Magic: The Gathering | Lord of the Rings was an enormous success, carrying the Universes Beyond concept single-handedly until Magic: The Gathering | Final Fantasy came along. It was also responsible for some of the most powerful card designs — even problematically so — seen in the past several years.

Will The Hobbit introduce more The One Ring- and Orcish Bowmasters-tier cards? Almost definitely not, given that this is a Standard-legal set, not straight-to-Modern like LOTR was, but that doesn't mean there's no room for exciting and strong cards. We can start with the soft-Commander-product Scene Box exclusives!

An Unexpected Party

Starting from the top left, the boisterous brothers and youngest of the thirteen Dwarves: Fili and Kili, Joyous taps for two red mana, to be spent on a few different card types. First, naturally, are Dwarf spells. Next, aligned with a theme that has appeared almost in lockstep with strong Dwarf cards, the mana can pay for Equipment. Lastly, it can pay for Sagas — a hint of a returning mechanic with some new aspects that we'll see later. It's a three-mana creature that taps for two mana for specific things — not a very exciting effect in the command zone, but a great support piece in a color that's desperate for more ramp.

Gandalf, Party Guest, on the other hand, is the instant slam-dunk for commander candidate from these cards. Wizard Kindred decks are a mainstay of the Commander format for several years now, but there are surprisingly few options for commanders that really care about actually using the creature type. It may be a bit restrictive for Gandalf to care only about legendary Wizards, but I rattled off several that would be great for this commander before I even finished reading the text box: Azami, Lady of Scrolls, Naban, Dean of Iteration, Venat, Heart of Hydaelyn, Gogo, Master of Mimicry, Cadric, Soul Kindler, and Alisaie Leveilleur are all legendary Wizards that have applications in a deck like this.

Next is Thorin, King of Durin's Folk, and without considering what may come out in the next several days, this may be the single most exciting card to see in this entire article. True Dwarf Kindred — one not muddied by leaning on Equipment or Vehicle synergies — has only appeared on a precious few other cards in Magic, and yes, I know that Dwarves being tied to those two artifact subtypes is good flavor. But Thorin is one of the very few Dwarf Kindred commanders that really, unequivocally rewards you for playing Dwarves. It still boils down to be an artifact-themed deck considering the anthem effect; but, as it allows me to play Dwarves with a theme other than Equipment/Vehicle typal with a Dwarf hat on, I'll take that over Depala, Pilot Exemplar or Giott, King of the Dwarves any day.

The top half of this scene box easily wins the arbitrary contest of which cards would make better commanders; Bilbo, Fellow Conspirator is less interesting for the command zone, but as a role-player in Food decks, he's fantastic. Another Academy Manufactor, even at 66% effectiveness, is still an Academy Manufactor. Combine him with Peregrin Took for some truly nasty synergy.

Cards like Bag End Banquet may be unoriginal, but damn if it isn't kind of funny. Night of the Sweets' Revenge does this effect and much better at a rate of four mana, and it even comes preloaded with its own anthem/finisher effect for decks that love to cook. That being said, not all Food decks include green (though it's often foolish not to), and more sources of big mana are always welcomed.

Rounding out this art scene is Ori, Plate Stacker, carrying an anxiety-inducing stack of plates, as the name suggests. He must end up dropping them, seeing as his enters trigger destroys all artifacts and enchantments and restores one life to his controller for each of them. There isn't much to say here — at seven mana, you're almost never hardcasting this spell, and wrathing for artifacts and enchantments is usually achieved alongside a more devastating effect, like all creatures or all nonland permanents being destroyed as well. Still, there's a place in some blink-and-flicker or reanimator decks for this card.

My Wings A Hurricane

The first entry from this Scene Box is an interesting one. Long-Lost Lances is an Equipment that supports Equipment decks in a somewhat unique fashion: instead of giving keywords only to the creature that wields the card, these lances provide all of your equipped creatures with first strike and vigilance, though only during your turn. It doesn't even need to be equipped itself, which is the really interesting tidbit, as it means you don't even need to attach it to anything to get the value. This card will be effective in plenty of Equipment decks that choose to go wide with equipped creatures, rather than stack them all on a single creature.

Colorless lands dealing with Treasure synergies are plenty good — see Treasure Vault — but Dragon-Cursed Halls is a different kind of piece of the puzzle with some neat flavor. Some iterations of Bilbo Baggins have already seen in other spoilers, and the chief flavor winner is Bilbo, Luckwearer, a sneaky little hobbit that can't be blocked with a looting trigger on combat damage. Mechanically, though, this card is a nice-to-have. I wouldn't really expect to have my games made or broken by functionally spending two mana to maybe get one Treasure, depending on my deck's creature situation.

The infamous and terrible dragon Smaug didn't make much of an appearance in the first Lord of the Rings set, but now Smaug the Impenetrable is here in all his terrible magnificence. At seven mana, he's a chonker, but his text box more than makes up for the cost: three relevant combat keywords in flying, indestructible, and haste, and an interesting triggered ability: when the true King under the Mountain is dealt noncombat damage, the foolish player who thinks they "control" Smaug the Unassessably Wealthy receives an equal amount of Treasure tokens. This ability is a nice compliment to the use of damage-based boardwipes in red-inclusive decks.

Bilbo's Burglary bears brief semblance to Blatant Thievery, an exorbitantly brazen burglary of unbridled bracketing. In non-word-nerd language, this spell is just a more-restricted-by-type version of other theft spells. The main qualitative difference is that actual, factual, unconditional, permanent theft as in Blatant Thievery is actually somewhat rare, given that most blue theft effects require maintenance of an Aura.

If you like to game your friends, Dragon's Desire is what some people refer to as "a meta call;" others might call it hosing, and I just call it conditional. In the situations where you're playing against multiple artifact decks, then this card will absolutely do work. But in plenty of other cases, the card won't do very much, and the alternative of giving away artifacts or generating artifacts for other players just to get a ritual spell is overcomplicating and worsening an actually good spell like Mana Geyser.

Some of the other cards in this box have been a little disappointing to be sure, but Necklace of Girion is the card that convinces me to run a mana rock in a green deck. Whenever you cast a green spell or a Forest enters your board, you get a +1/+1 counter on a creature, and it taps for one. Three-mana rocks have suffered greatly from power creep in a post-Arcane Signet landscape, so it's nice to see an especially powerful one here. Granted, though, outside of mono-green and green-dominant two-color decks, the only way to force this to work is with a Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth, and while you may run that in a five-color deck anyway, the main strength of this card is tagging multiple creatures you control with counters by playing a Forest, getting multiple from land-ramp spells, or double- and triple-spelling in a turn with green spells.

The Road Goes Ever, Ever On

That wraps up all twelve new cards revealed this weekend for the Scene Boxes for The Hobbit. EDHLAB's full main-set spoiler on these cards will come once everything in the main set is available online, so keep your eyes peeled for our full deep-dive on the best cards from Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit!

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