Designing All the Dwarves of Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™
"He pulled open the door with a jerk, and they all fell in, one on top of the other. More dwarves, four more! And there was Gandalf behind, leaning on his staff and laughing."
—"An Unexpected Party"
Dwarves have been a staple of Magic: The Gathering since Limited Edition (Alpha). They're a beloved, yet relatively niche, creature type to build decks around. They've mechanically cared about all sorts of Dwarven things, from mining (i.e., destroying lands) to Vehicles, Equipment, and regular old "Dwarves matter" effects. Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™ gave us a unique opportunity—or rather, challenge—to create a bunch of new Dwarves! Luckily, we had a lot of promising mechanical hooks from the past to develop on.
The reason why I call this more of a challenge is a similar reason to how Bilbo felt: there are just so many Dwarves in Thorin's company. Thirteen to be exact, all begging to be named (and therefore legendary) creatures, as well as Dáin and a few of his folk. Ethan Fleisher, the vision design lead for the set, decided we should do two-color pairs for each of the popular creature types from the Battle of Five Armies. I initially was shaken! How do you put over thirteen legendary creatures into a single color pair? Shouldn't we toss some of the Dwarves into other colors to make it a bit more balanced? I'm sure one of them read a book once and could be blue … or likes hanging out with ponies and could be green … but no. Ethan was dedicated to putting the Dwarves in the colors players would expect them to be in, and therefore none should feel stranded or left out. I'll admit I was sold the first time I assembled three Dwarves with rhyming names in my opening hand. It was just too entertaining. As the set design lead, I had to be super tactical and make sure having this many legends felt satisfying. This, in part, led to the storied mechanic (check out the mechanics article for more on that) and tactical design choices for mitigating the negative feelings of drawing multiple legends with the same name. Let's jump into some of those designs!
During vision design, Ethan took care to put the Dwarves with rhyming names at similar rarities. We mostly were able to maintain this throughout set design. Ori is our storied representative here, while Dori helps enable storied by coming with a Treasure token. Nori being our common red-white hybrid card was a pretty crucial structural piece to get right. We wanted to make sure other color pairs with white or red might want to draft a copy of him, as having multiples of this two-drop legend could get you into trouble. Worst-case scenario, you can still turn on an enduring story using your second copy of a legend on the battlefield before one is forced to be sacrificed, or you could find a way to rummage it away.
Óin and Glóin were split up on rarity, but it was because Óin's design was so critical to navigating multiple copies of legends. Óin allows you to discard and draw repeatedly, which can help you ditch that second copy from your hand. Storied grants him haste so that later in the game you can go searching for tools to end the game even quicker. Personally, I draft this guy every time! Glóin gets to use his Adventure, Easy Pickings, to showcase his skill at demolishing Goblins. We also had to find ways to ramp in red without creating Treasure tokens, as we had to be mindful of how easy it was to turn on storied with tokens in Limited.
Now that we are in uncommon territory, we get to have a lot more fun with the designs to try to evoke different things about the characters. Bofur is known for taking care of the ponies, so he got a protective Adventure spell. Again, since this is a low-cost legend, I hope having this Adventure gives him some additional flexibility. That way, you don't mind giving multiple copies of him a try in Constructed. Bombur is notable for being large, and he won't wake up unless you already have an enduring story. And Bifur is our first explicit Dwarf type callout, where we get to have a fun doubling effect you wouldn't normally see at low rarity because of the hoop you have to jump through, and historically Dwarves aren't the most powerful creature type.
Time for rare Dwarves! We pulled whatever characteristics we could find from The Hobbit to inform the mechanics of the higher-rarity Dwarves. In this case, Balin's interest in stories:
"There they lay for some time, puffing and panting. But very soon they began to ask questions. They had to have the whole vanishing business carefully explained, and the finding of the ring interested them so much that for a while they forgot their own troubles. Balin in particular insisted on having the Gollum story, riddles and all, told all over again, with the ring in its proper place."
—"Flies and Spiders"
I always found cards like
Dwalin was a bit of a self-indulgent design to showcase hone counters. This mechanic was invented by the red representative of the council of colors at the time, Ben Weitz. As a big fan of red, I immediately wanted to put it in set and tried it on loads of cards. However, it proved to be not super fun to see a bunch in Limited without a ton of ways to blow up artifacts (and some artifacts were innocent!), but I still wanted a card that could put hone counters on things turn after turn. It's also just so evocative to have Dwarves improving your weapons with smithing and such. I hope you have fun with it!
Kíli and Fíli were some of the first rare cards we developed with storied in mind, and each has a powerful ability locked behind just enough of a hoop that (I hope) they are inspiring to play with! Each tackles one of those Dwarf-related themes I mentioned at the top. Both Fíli and Kíli specifically call out Dwarves to encourage you to throw them in a deck with a high density of that creature type. Kíli amplifies an Equipment strategy, while Fíli can build a Dwarf army all on his own through token generation.
I can't forget the Thorin(s)! Each of our gold signposts (cards that tell you what your two-color draft archetype is about) is a notable legend from one of the five factions. It went without saying that Thorin would be in this slot for red-white. He plays both an aggressive and protective role for your team, as he has trample (here's a hint: he's real good with Equipment) and grants ward
We can't deign to notice Dáin! His rare card and Iron Hills Blacksmith share an Equipment token because I wanted to make sure that we weren't just enabling storied with Treasure (which is obviously still flavorful for Dwarves) but also with Equipment. With a smaller set, we had to be tactical about where Equipment could fit and what it could do. Here, it often comes with a creature token or an enters effect. Creating this token just gave us extra flexibility by putting it on the right designs.
Three more! These are all additional versions of Thorin, Kíli, Fíli, and Ori. I had a few more things I wanted to give Dwarf decks, and the Scene Boxes were the most flexible place to put these cards. The first is
That's all the named Dwarves in the main set of Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit and Scene Boxes. I've given my own personal shot at a red-white Dwarf Commander deck here, with
Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit releases on August 14, 2026, and is available for preorder now from your local game store, TCGplayer, Amazon, and elsewhere Magic is sold.
YOUR LOCAL STORE
TCGPLAYER ↗
AMAZON ↗