At MagicCon Las Vegas 2026, Wizards of the Coast debuted new art and some cards from the upcoming set. Fans of the Tolkien novel will be excited to see Bilbo, dwarves, the menacing Smaug, and the sickly looking Gollum. Pretty much everything shown (see below) is fantasy and not really leaning into horror, but more on that in a minute.
The Smaug card that was debuted was Smaug the Magnificent. For two and two red, you get a 4/3 dragon with flying and haste. Whenever Smaug attacks, he deals damage equal to the number of treasures you control to any target, and at the beginning of your upkeep, create a treasure token. I can easily see this being a fun commander format card for decks that are creating treasure tokens and then swinging out with Smaug to destroy your opponents. Who doesn’t love to play with dragons?
They also showed off the art for Smaug, the Great Calamity, which is metal as hell, so we will have to wait until the full card is revealed to know what that will do. But for now we get to enjoy the rad art as well as the art for where Smaug lives, The Lonely Mountain.
One horror-adjacent card is the trio of trolls: Tom, Bert, and William. They all live on one card, and you can pay 1 colorless to sacrifice another one of your creatures and draw cards equal to its power, then discard a card. You will be feeding your trolls for your card advantage, and being a black and green creature, you should have no problem generating creatures to sacrifice.
The Lord of the Rings set had The One Ring. For The Hobbit, they are introducing “My Precious.” A legendary artifact costing three colorless, which you can equip to one of your creatures for two, and paying two life. Your creature then has hexproof and can’t be blocked. In addition to that, it also has an Instant Adventure paying one colorless and one black, plus an additional cost of sacrificing a creature to draw two cards. More sacrificing for card advantage!
They debuted a bunch of other cards, including cards in Dwarven language. For Hobbit fans, this set seems to be on par with the Lord of the Rings set and hopefully just as good.
Now onto that horror stuff I mentioned earlier. I wanted to know whether Wizards of the Coast were going to lean into any of the dark and horror elements, to which Nick Marcantel, Senior Narrative Designer for Universes Beyond replied:
“Oh yeah. That’s a yes. It is something that we certainly kept in mind early on. Of course, we knew going into this that this would be a children’s fantasy novel, it was going to be a little bit more whimsical than perhaps The Lord of the Rings, but it would be a disservice not to hit on some of those iconic, darker elements. We are not shying away from that. It is pieces of the set, pieces of the story that are iconic.”
Mark Rosewater added, “I had nightmares of the spider as a kid.”
Unfortunately, we will have to wait a bit longer to see the dark/horror cards, but hopefully, you are excited to jump back into Middle-earth with Magic: The Gathering. The set's prerelease is on August 7, with the full release on August 14. Jump below to check out more card debuts.
