The Tale of Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™ Vision Design

I had the privilege of leading the Vision Design team for Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™. I had previously been a member of the design team for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth™ (LTR) and led the design of the Commander decks for that release. When we designed LTR, we avoided making cards that represented things from The Hobbit. We figured that, if LTR was a success, we might want to make another Magic expansion set in Middle-earth, and The Hobbit was the best candidate for that second journey. We didn't want to scoop ourselves if that ended up being the case. Well, it's no secret that LTR was indeed a huge success. Now, the release of Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit is imminent!

I love The Hobbit novel. I've read it to each of my three children when they reached the right age and several times myself. While The Lord of the Rings is a sprawling fantasy epic, The Hobbit is a much more concise and playful tale, feeling more like a fairy tale than a legendary saga.

And when I say "concise," I mean it. The Hobbit has one fifth of the word count of The Lord of the Rings novels. This was a fact that I was acutely aware of when I accepted the assignment of leading the Vision Design team for Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit. We had some difficulty identifying enough unique card concepts for LTR. Authentically adapting a shorter novel into a draftable Magic set presented even more challenges. Fortunately, we had the tools and experience to meet those challenges.

Research!

I re-read The Hobbit and took notes, taking particular interest in people and animals that could potentially be creature cards. As over half of the cards in a Magic set are creatures, I knew that finding enough appealing, distinct concepts for those cards was important. I discovered a whole series of potential card names written by Tolkien himself. We could simply lift short phrases from the text and use them as particularly charming and distinctive card names for creatures.

This was the origin of cards like Little Bear, Ordinary Bear, Large Bear, and Gigantic Big Bear!

Designing a Medium-Sized Set

At the time of Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit vision design, we had pioneered draftable "medium-sized" sets for other Universes Beyond releases. The Hobbit, being a small book starring a rather small (in physical stature only!) hero, seemed like a good fit for the same treatment. Before I even started designing this set, I circled up with Corey Bowen, who led another medium-sized Magic set, to get his opinions about what worked and what didn't in that set. I also wanted to learn about the structural implications of designing a medium-sized set intended for four-player drafts.

Corey provided me with the wealth of wisdom he learned from his past work, much of which was useful when balancing the Limited gameplay of Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit, but much of his guidance didn't have big creative implications for the set. There was one exception, however, and it was a very important one. Unlike our larger sets, which typically have ten supported two-color draft archetypes for eight-player draft, medium-sized sets have only five draft archetypes. Hmm … five. That's a number with particular resonance for The Hobbit!

Factions

The climactic battle in The Hobbit is presented in a chapter titled "The Battle of Five Armies." This chapter has played a large role in several adaptations of the original novel, so it has a high degree of recognizability. Five armies, five color pairs, five draft archetypes. Should our set have five factions, each themed around a creature type to represent one of the armies?

During the creation of a Magic set, the set's Worldbuilding team creates concept art and writes a world guide to facilitate the creation of unique concepts for all the cards that will be in the set. They create an equal number of concepts for each of Magic's five colors. When we're making a Magic Multiverse set, it's easy to make sure that every setting has all the ingredients a Magic set would need. When we adapt properties in Universes Beyond sets, they rarely fit the shape of a Magic set perfectly, as those worlds were built for a different purpose than concepting Magic cards.

Factions are super useful when making a Universes Beyond set. They give game designers and card conceptors some flexibility to create new card concepts that still feel organic for the world that they will inhabit. There may not have been an apothecary from Lakeshore mentioned in The Hobbit, but it makes sense that an apothecary would exist as part of the Human faction, so the concept feels correct as an extension of Middle-earth's worldbuilding.

I did the exercise of trying to define five factions for The Hobbit, each based on one of the armies from the Battle of Five Armies. I had a few criteria to keep in mind:

1. Each Magic color should be represented exactly twice among the factions so that each faction had a roughly equal number of cards.
2. Each faction's color combination should make sense for the faction from a creative perspective.
3. The factions' color combinations should be appealing to players who already have decks themed to the factions' respective types. They should also align with corresponding factions from LTR, if applicable.

Mechanically, the draft archetypes do not encourage you to focus on a specific creature type (though there are some cards that care about creature types at high rarities). Rather, their mechanical themes are broader and more flexible, enabling players to blend cards from different factions together during a draft or when building a sealed deck. This is generally a good practice when designing a Magic set but was particularly important for four-player drafts, where we expect roughly half of the decks to be three colors. We gave each faction its own mechanic.

Goblins (Black-Red)

The Goblin archetype being black and red was the most obvious. Goblins had been primary in red and secondary in black since 2007's Lorwyn. LTR's Orcs and Goblins were also in black and red. This seemed like a slam dunk and the obvious starting point for my exploration. Goblins are selfish, polluting, and destructive, which makes them an excellent fit for black-red.

As an aside, you'll notice that the Orc creature type doesn't appear on cards in The Hobbit. In Middle-earth, the word "Orc" and the word "Goblin" refer to the same types of creatures. The words are merely from different languages. The division of these words into two different species originated in Dungeons & Dragons and has since been replicated in many fantasy settings. However, the word "Goblin" is used almost exclusively in The Hobbit. We thought it would be more authentic to the original source to use the Goblin creature type on all such creatures in this set. Additionally, it would help to ensure that a critical mass of Goblin cards would appear in Standard together, which could help to enable typal (or creature type-focused) decks in that format. The Goblin mechanic is amass, which we used in LTR as well. This will allow players to combine their cards from both of our visits to Middle-earth in a pleasing way.

Elves (Green-Blue)

In LTR, the Elves, with their connection to the forest and to the sea, were a great fit for green and blue. I thought it would be best to keep those colors for Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit, even though the most popular Elf decks are black-green. Black felt like a poor creative fit for Middle-earth's Wood-Elves, who are often associated with light but never darkness.

The Elf mechanic is landfall. I considered using the scry mechanic that was used in LTR for the Elves, but I didn't like how decision-intensive the green-blue Elf decks from LTR were.

Dwarves (Red-White)

The Dwarves felt like they had to be red. They live in a mountain, they seek treasure, and they often go off half-cocked—all red traits. The Dwarves' second color was a little less obvious. Black could have worked, as they're very influenced by the sickness of greed, but the Goblins were already black-red. White seemed like the best choice, as the Dwarves in Bilbo's party are comically numerous and most of them are more or less interchangeable. They are as follows: Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Thorin. White cards are often concepted to represent large groups of similar folk. Also, we've supported Dwarf typal themes in red-white since we printed Depala, Pilot Exemplar, and Dwarves appear in red and white on Avishkar and Kaldheim.

The Dwarf mechanic is storied, which cares about controlling three or more artifacts, legendary permanents, and/or Sagas. The storied mechanic was created by the Set Design team after I handed the set off to them and replaced a mechanic that cared about tokens.

Humans (White-Blue)

In LTR, we had positioned the major Human nations of Gondor and Rohan in white-blue and red-white, respectively. White was the common color between Gondor and Rohan, so it made sense to run that back in this new set. In The Hobbit, the city of Lake-town is situated on pilings in the middle of a lake. All that water, and its attendant fishing, boating, and more, made it clear that blue should be the Humans' second color.

The Human mechanic is recruit, which is a keyword action that makes a player draw a card, then discard a card. If they discarded a nonland card this way, they make a 1/1 white Human Soldier creature token.

Wolves (Black-Green)

While adaptations of The Hobbit have varied on exactly what the fifth army was (some adaptations have it as the Eagles, some as a second Goblin army), Professor Tolkien's original text is unambiguous: the fifth army is the Wolves. As forest-dwelling creatures, Wolves made sense in green. As a faction aligned with darkness (like the Goblins), black was a good second color for the Wolves.

As a designer who has worked on several Innistrad sets, I knew that Wolves would present a challenge for the Creative team. There are only so many distinct concepts you can create for different Wolf cards before they all start looking alike. Fortunately, there were plenty of other animal concepts that, while not aligned with the evil Wolves, fell into the category of formidable animals.

The Wolf mechanic is ferocious, which makes cards stronger if you control a creature with power 4 or greater.

More Returning Mechanics

Aside from each faction's mechanic, this set has three returning mechanics.

Sagas

The Saga cards from LTR were quite creatively satisfying, representing songs people sing in The Lord of the Rings. We made more Sagas along similar lines for Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit.

Adventure

We experimented with various mechanics that represented the concept of "There and Back Again." In the end, the Set Design team decided to bring back the Adventure subtype, as it captured that concept quite well, and the word adventure is very resonant for The Hobbit, which is, after all, "a story of how a Baggins had an adventure."

Treasure

The Hobbit is the archetypical fantasy story of an adventuring party traveling to a monster's lair to take its treasure, so it was vitally important that Treasure tokens be a major component of the set. While there are a few cards that create Treasure tokens at lower rarities, most of them are exciting rare and mythic rare cards, such as Gleaming Splendor.

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There you have it: a glimpse into what we did during the early stages of the design of Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit. May you go on an adventure, slay a Dragon, and claim a fabulous treasure at the Prerelease!

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.