Welcome to the first week of Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™ card previews! I want to take a different approach for today's article. Rather than talk about creating Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit specifically, I'm going to use my article to talk about what we need to do when we return to a world in a Universes Beyond set. I will use cards and concepts from Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit for my examples. Before I'm through, I'll show you a new card from the set. Let's get to it.

Coming Back

Returning to worlds is nothing new for Magic Multiverse sets. In just the past two years we've returned to Arcavios (the home of Strixhaven University), Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, Tarkir, Amonkhet, and Avishkar (although we only saw a smidge of the last two). Much of what we do with a return to a Universes Beyond world is the same as any return, but there are a few differences. I'll begin with the similarities between Magic Multiverse returns and Universes Beyond returns.

Revisit the Things That Worked Well Last Time

The first thing we do for any return is spend time thinking about what we did for the past visit or visits to the setting. Usually, we write down every major mechanic and theme on a whiteboard. We then put all the items into one of three buckets:

Must Reuse (The "Yes" Bucket)

Each world in Magic has a mechanical identity, so it's important to understand what players think the iconic elements of a world are. Ravnica, for example, is tied to two-color factions that represent the ten guilds. Innistrad has double-faced cards to represent dark transformations. Zendikar has landfall to represent the close connection between the people and the land.

The key to a return is making sure that you're revisiting the things players love about the world. When we identify one of those elements, we put them into this bucket. These are things so closely associated with the world mechanically that there would be a disconnect for players if we failed to include them.

For Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit, the two things in this category were Sagas and amass. Middle-earth has a deep history, and Sagas are a great way to represent the stories from that history on cards. Today's preview card happens to be a Saga, so this would be a good place to show it off.

▲ Click Here to See The Misty Mountains Cold


0104_MTGHOB_Main: The Misty Mountains Cold 0321_MTGHOB_BdlPromo: The Misty Mountains Cold

The Sagas in Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit are all songs sung by the people of Middle-earth. The design team really wanted a place to reference the songs in the set, and Sagas proved to be the perfect vehicle. The Misty Mountains from the book is a mountain range that acts as one of the obstacles for Bilbo and the Dwarves on their journey. They must cross them to reach Erebor. Sagas have proven to be particularly useful in Universe Beyond sets as the worlds we work with tend to have a lot of stories built into their worlds.

We chose amass because we try to use existing design technology in Universes Beyond sets whenever we can. Most of the draw of a Universes Beyond set comes from players' familiarity with the world. That means we can save the majority of our mechanical novelty for Magic Multiverse sets. That's not to say Universes Beyond design teams can never make new things. The bar is just higher. As I like to say, before we look outside the box, we should first look inside.

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ design team was working on how to represent Sauron's army of Goblins and Orcs. We realized that we were trying to solve the exact same problem a previous design team had solved years earlier in War of the Spark. In that set, Bolas had a giant zombie army. Representing the army with lots of creature tokens was gumming up the board. What if the army could grow in size but not in number?

The result of this was the amass mechanic, which premiered in War of the Spark and returned for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. It played well, the audience enjoyed it, and it was a perfect fit for capturing the flavor of the Goblin and Orc army. (Okay, it did require us to tweak the mechanic slightly. Previously, the Army being a Zombie Army was baked into the mechanic.) Well, The Hobbit also had an army of creatures that we wanted to depict. Why not to just bring back what worked so well last time? There was one slight change, though. The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth used amass Orcs. Amass Goblins appears in Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit and is a bit more backwards compatible with Magic. Magic has a lot more Goblins than Orcs, so the Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit design team made this one tiny tweak.

Might Reuse (The "Maybe" Bucket)

This bucket consists of things that players generally liked but aren't essential to the setting or world. As I'll talk about soon, part of a return is about doing new things, so not everything can come back, even some things players generally enjoyed the first time. This category is filled with things that could easily return or not return. The example I'll use here is historic. Historic first appeared in Dominaria. We were revisiting Magic's original plane over a decade since our last visit. In that time, we had changed how we create Magic worlds. They now had a core theme. Because Dominaria had been the setting for almost 40 sets (it was the setting of most Magic expansions in the game's first decade), it was a hodge-podge of various themes.

As we looked at the numerous expansions set on Dominaria, we realized that Dominaria, both in our world and in the Magic Multiverse, had a deep history. What if we built a world around that? The line we used was "It's a world whose present is defined by its past." To capture that sense of history, we made a mechanic called historic that batched together three items we felt captured a sense of history: artifacts (objects of history), legends (characters of history) and Sagas (stories of history). While designing The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, we realized that history was important to the story, so we made use of the historic mechanic. It was used lightly, but it added a lot of flavor.

Is the sense of history important to the story of The Hobbit? Yes. Middle-earth is a place where history is very important. Does that have to be represented specifically by historic? No, it didn't. Our approach was that the design team could use historic if they found a good spot for it but ignore it if they didn't.

In the end, the Set Design team used historic as a jumping-off point to make a new mechanic, storied. Storied is a threshold mechanic that uses the same three things historic cares about. Storied's reminder text says, "If you control three or more artifacts, legendaries, and/or Sagas, you have enduring story for the rest of the game."

This category is important because it helps you identify the items that you might want to bring back but aren't compelled to. That's a useful list to have as you're starting to build a set's vision.

Don't Reuse (The "No" Bucket)

Most sets, even successful sets, have some elements that didn't succeed as much as we hoped. An important part of this process is not just identifying what you might want to bring back but also what you don't want to return. The best example is the Ring tempts you. The One Ring plays a role in The Hobbit, but it's not the driving source of the story like it is in The Lord of the Rings.

In addition, there were a number of things that mechanically we didn't like about the Ring tempts you. It was more complex than it needed to be. (It should have only had three abilities—that's an important line in how human memory works.) We are also being a bit pickier about when to use outside game pieces these days. Also, some players felt the lack of a negative effect when using the Ring was a big flavor mismatch.

Things in this category are a great help in crafting the vision for the set. As I'll get to in a second, revisits require new things, so we have to make space for them. Also, even successful sets, like The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, have room for improvement. Our goal with every return is to apply the lessons we learned from previous visits and make the return even better.

The exercise of breaking down the previous visit into the three buckets is a valuable tool in helping the design team have a sense of what mechanical tools they can or can't access.

Find the New Thing

Every Magic set wants something new. Magic keeps putting out additional sets that allow the game to keep evolving. One of the things that most excites players is seeing things they've never seen before. That means every revisit must expand the world to show new things, and that includes new mechanics and themes.

Usually this involves tapping into a new subtheme for the world. The main theme of the world usually wants to stay constant to help it feel like we're returning to a known world, but there should always be something extra. Theros Beyond Death visited the Underworld. Wilds of Eldraine ventured away from the courts and focused on the fae. Lorwyn Eclipsed saw the two aspects of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor merge into a singular world. There are a couple ways to find new space.

Explore Themes That Were Merely Hinted at in the Original Visit

Most worlds have a theme or two that were extensively explored in a previous visit and/or themes that show up on a card or two but were not fully explored. Part of looking back involves picking up crumbs left behind by designers during the previous visit. For example, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth had a couple of cards with landfall and ferocious (the latter being unnamed). Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit was able to take those smaller themes and turn them into larger themes. The Elves, as an example, in green-blue make use of landfall, while the Wolves in black-green make use of ferocious.

Find Mechanics from Other Sets That Are a Great Fit for This World but Didn't Get Used on a Previous Visit

Magic has an extensive catalog of mechanics. One of the things a return can do is explore existing mechanics to find other flavorful inclusions. Adventure is a good example from Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit. Adventures first showed up in Throne of Eldraine to capture the fairy-tale genre. The mechanic played well and quickly became a fan favorite. Well, The Hobbit is a book all about adventures, so the mechanic was a perfect fit, both mechanically and flavorfully.

Explore New Mechanics That Tap into Themes of the World

One of the ways to get something new in the set is to design a mechanic that doesn't exist yet. While we try for Universes Beyond sets to have less new mechanics than Magic Multiverse sets, they do get to do some new stuff. Usually, the new designs come about when you're trying to meet a specific need of the set's structure. Once you deplete existing mechanics, that leaves you with two options. You can tweak something that exists or make something new out of whole cloth.

Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit's two new mechanics are both examples of the former. As I explained above, storied is a tweaked version of historic. Recruit is a tweaked version of connive. Connive was originally a faction mechanic from Streets of New Capenna. Connive allows you to loot with the possible bonus of a +1/+1 counter. Recruit, in contrast, can give you a 1/1 white Human Soldier token.

Recruit came about because the structure of the set was built around the five armies from the story. The Goblins returned with amass (although amass Goblins rather than amass Orcs). The Elves got landfall. The Wolves got ferocious. The Dwarves ended up with storied. That left the Humans. Humans' great strength came from having a lot of Humans, and we liked a more go-wide strategy. Instead of building up creatures with +1/+1 counters as connive does, recruit gives you a mass of 1/1 creatures.

How Is Universes Beyond Different?

So far, I've mostly explained how we do returns for any set, Universes Beyond or in the Magic Multiverse. But Universes Beyond does have some qualities that are different, so let's talk about those.

We Don't Control the Flavor

When we make a Magic Multiverse set, we have total control over the worldbuilding. For example, when I was designing the original Innistrad, I realized there was an opportunity to spread the five creature types the set cared about (the four monsters— Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies—and their victims, Humans) across the five ally-color pairs. Everything worked perfectly except Werewolves. They obviously were green, but I also needed them in red. I went to the Creative team, explained what we were up to, and they helped me figure out how to make red Werewolves.

The flavor was able to adapt to the needs of the mechanics. That's important because mechanics are a lot less flexible than flavor. That was an important lesson we learned with the Champions of Kamigawa block, where we created the flavor first and had to figure out how to adapt the mechanics to it. The result was a very ham-fisted and parasitic set.

The challenge with a Universes Beyond set is that the flavor is already locked. We don't have the luxury of changing the flavor to make mechanics work better. That doesn't mean we have no wiggle room, but it's restricted. For most sets, there's more material than we can use in the set, so part of what we can do is choose which parts to focus on. For example, in The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, there were some challenges with evasion, especially flying. We had to lean in on flying things, like birds, no matter how small a role they played in the books.

For a return, one of the most important things the design team can do is try to find more material than needs to be used to give them additional flexibility. With this set, this proved to be difficult as the source material was a single book. We were able to work with our partner, Middle-earth Enterprises, to flesh out things that were referenced or hinted at without completely spelling them out. This helped the design team to fill in the needs of the set.

The Biggest Twist: We Often Explore a Different Aspect of the World

Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit is a good example of this point. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place in the same world, Middle-earth, but they're very different stories. Yes, there's a little overlap, but mostly it's a different type of story with different characters and different settings. For example, why is Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit a smaller set when The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth is a larger one? For starters, The Hobbit is a single book that's around 300 pages long. The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy that's about 1,000 pages long. That dictates the nature of the two sets.

For example, Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit's core structure was built around the concept of the five armies. Because it was a smaller set built for Pick-Two Draft, it needed five draft archetypes. Five armies, five draft archetypes. A lot of time was spent figuring out how to align those two. In the end, the solution was to have five two-color archetypes; not five ally-color or enemy-color pairs, but a mix of the two. Each archetype was then given a mechanic to build around. Here's what the set ended up with:

  • White-blue: Humans with recruit
  • Black-red: Goblins with amass
  • Black-green: Wolves with ferocious
  • Red-white: Dwarves with storied
  • Green-blue: Elves with landfall

Another Useful Tool: Focusing on a Different Subset of the World

This one's less applicable to Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit but is another strategy with larger Universes Beyond worlds: pick a focal point and build the set around it. Many of the worlds we work with have a swath of material, often created over many decades. With those types of worlds, we can use returns to zoom in on a completely different aspect of the world. This allows us to create sets that will feel very distinct from one another.

The success of Universe Beyond has shown how much the fans adore these worlds. For example, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth proved to be an amazing set that brought in new players, ones who are huge fans of Middle-earth. So, of course, when we were given the opportunity to return, we were excited by the prospect. The challenge was finding ways to make something new while remaining true to the world as a whole. Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit is very much its own set, but it's important to us that the players who adored The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth also love Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit. I'm pretty confident they will.

Once More with Feeling

That's all for today's topic. I will be back next week to talk about a more personal aspect of Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit and share another preview card. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, on Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit, or any of the things I talked about today. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week for more stories from Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit.

Until then, may you enjoy double-dipping in your favorite flavors.