Magic: The Gathering: The Hobbit, a set review. By a subpar player.

Pretty sure I said it before, but if not, this was the set I was most excited for in Magic's 2026 lineup. And now that we've had a couple weeks with the set, I think I can safely say this set was my biggest disappointment in 2026. Now to be fair, I didn't have much hope for the TMNT set or the Marvel Superheroes set, so those two couldn't really disappoint me. And I also don't have any hope for the coming Star Trek set, so that's not likely to disappoint me. The only other set left to come out this year will be Reality Fracture and while I don't expect much from it, it would still have a lot of work to do to disappoint me the way The Hobbit has.

I know a lot of players say this set shouldn't be compared to the Lord of the Rings expansion as they were released during different eras of Magic and intended for play in different formats. But my disappointment is less from card design (though there is some of that) and more from the treatment of the source material. LotR felt like it was really paying homage to the books; The Hobbit feels more like it's just taking ideas from the book. The best way to explain the what I mean in that difference is looking at the movies from the respective titles. The LotR movies felt like true adaptions of the books trying to capture them in all their epic glory while The Hobbit movies felt like a pathetic cash grab. That's how these two sets feel different from each other to me and I'm just thankful WotC didn't try to make The Hobbit set into three separate sets. 

Don't get me wrong, there's some good cards in the set and I'm sure some of them will eventually see regular play in formats outside of commander. But overall the set is just meh. How the set continues to sell is beyond me. I mean, I get that the collector product is selling - that's just the world of collectable card games these days and the scalpers and speculators that dominate the higher end of the market. But even the cheaper product is being bought up, seemingly by people hoping to open one or two cards that're worth the cost of a pack. Or maybe it's just a lot of people that don't know better and they're buying it up thinking they can use play product to get into scalping cards themselves, but if they're buying play product after the set has officially released, they're behind the curve. Which is fortunate for retailers as there seem to be a lot of these fools about. But I digress.

Anyways, I'm bummed to be bummed about this set, but happy to not feel the need to buy up a whole bunch of it.  

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