If you look at online chatter surrounding Magic: The Gatherings Universes Beyond IP collaborations, it’s easy to believe that they’re universally hated. Yet as people queue up to take photographs with Marvel standees at Magic Con and fans enthusiastically pay top dollar for Final Fantasy MTG sets, the on-the-ground reality seems to tell a different story.
"We've learned a lot from the fan reaction," principal game designer Gavin Verhey notes when reflecting on the evolution of Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond. "We're always learning, listening to people, and taking in feedback. Universes Beyond is still in its relative infancy... so we're putting out all kinds of things and learning from them."
No matter where you stand on sci-fi and superheroes entering the best card games, however, one MTG Universes Beyond set was enthusiastically embraced by all corners of the Magic community – 2023’s Lord Of The Rings: Tale of Middle Earth. It was somewhat inevitable then that Wizards of the Coast would be returning to Middle-earth with The Hobbit. Now as Wizards gear up to release their anticipated The Hobbit collaboration on August 16th, I sat down with three of the game’s creative leads to see how they transformed Tolkien's literary classic into a rich and compelling TCG set.
MTG The Hobbit is now up for pre-order at Amazon, though it's worth noting that certain items have sold out already or are battling inflated prices.
When Tales of Middle-earth launched, the design team told me that they deliberately held back material from Tolkien's prequel novel, hoping that there’d be enough demand to make a Hobbit-specific-set.
“Magic in many ways pays direct lineage to Tolkien and the work that he did. That's why Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are such natural fits for Magic: The Gathering,” explains Verhey. "When [LOTR] launched as a huge hit, almost immediately it was like, 'We've got to start working on The Hobbit!'"
After fans' enthusiastic reaction to the Lord Of The Rings set, it would have been easy to dig deeper into the Lord Of The Rings, yet for set lead Annie Sardelis, it was important that they treated The Hobbit as its own self-contained entity. “I saw a lot of people theorizing, 'Oh, they'll have this from Lord of the Rings.' But no, we stuck to The Hobbit,” says Sardelis.
"Really, The Hobbit is its own thing—it stands on its own," agrees Verhye. "It comes much more like a sequel years later, like a sequel to Strixhaven."
Finding Magic in narrative constraints
While on paper The Hobbit may seem a less rich narrative pool to draw from than LOTR, the story’s shorter scope instead enabled the team to focus on the specificity of each beloved story moment, dialling into nich characters and moments from the beloved novel.
"Anytime we made up a creature, we would search through the book for a characteristic we could evoke because we can get so specific with it." Explains Sardelis. "We don't need to broadly say, 'This is a Mirkwood elf.' We can say, 'No, this is the one that served drinks specifically,' or 'that guarded the gates of the cells.'"
"The Hobbit is not that long of a book—but on the flip side, I think it's actually an advantage," agrees Verhey. "Basically, if it's in The Hobbit, it's in the set somewhere. There's very little that happens in that book that does not show up in the set in some capacity."
Avoiding the films entirely, the team drew only from the original novel. Retaining the core team from the LOTR set also dramatically streamlined The Hobbits’ production. Executive producer Zakeel Gordon noted that typical Universes Beyond cycles typically take five years, but because this time they could retain the same art directors and narrative leads, they managed to shave off a year and a half of development time.
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While the two sets will be narratively separate, Sardelis says she thought carefully about how fans might combine their LOTR and Hobbit sets into killer Tolkien-inspired decks, and the magic that she could help create there.
"That was a tough balancing act, honestly, because we know people like to put cards from different sets together," reflects Sardelis. "Making sure we kept the color alignment the same between the factions was tricky, because I didn't want to use the exact same mechanics; I wanted to make sure I was reinterpreting them."
"We don't really have this giant army of orcs pouring out of Mordor in this case, and the word 'orc' isn't even dropped in the book once," she adds. "But people still love that Amass deck—they're still playing that Grixis Sauron. So I decided to deliver Amass, but just make it goblins. The technology was already there to append [creature] types to Army."
A new form of storytelling
As the popularity of MTG-inspired novels and narrative podcasts grows, each set's designers are taking more care to ensure that their set tells an equally rich story.
"One thing that got me into Magic was being able to follow a story with the set," reflects Sardelis. "The Hobbit hands us an extremely popular story that someone might be familiar with, serving as a good jumping-in point. We made sure in the card set to really acknowledge that story every step of the way, in case someone just wants to absorb the set through the story."
Many fans feel that Dwarves have been underrepresented in the world of Magic: The Gathering. Thankfully, the little guys play a huge role in The Hobbit, and have been recreated lovingly in the new set.
"If you look at Magic dwarves historically, there's a lot of stuff that interplays perfectly with the dwarves in this set," reflects Verhey. "A lot of the dwarves in Magic history have done things that Tolkien dwarves like. Being aggressive, liking Treasure, liking artifacts—those are all things Magic has done, and they are also true in Tolkien's world. So that melding made a lot of sense. Putting a lot of dwarves in this set lets us do stuff we were never able to do before and lets you build out more of a dwarf deck."
Balance was a real focus for this set, too, with publisher Wizards of The Coast attempting to avoid unwanted power-creep in Commander-only releases.
"One thing that we've been very careful to try and do—especially recently—is not make cards in Commander-only products way better than the cards in the main set," Verhey adds. "That doesn't serve anyone well; you want to make sure they're about equal."
While Magic has long cultivated a devoted following, there’s no denying that Universes Beyond brings in vast audiences of new players. For The Hobbit, Verhey explains that designers prioritised keeping the rules accessible without ever diluting the tactical depth that experienced players expect.
"Making sure that your set is approachable for a newer player is an important priority, but at the same time, we don't want it to be a beginner set. This has to have all the complexity and richness that fans of Magic love and fans of the IP want, too. You want to feel like you're playing real Magic: The Gathering."
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- See all MTG Hobbit packs at Amazon
