Dragons love their treasure hoards, however no dragon cherishes their trove greater than Smaug from The Hobbit. At MagicCon: Las Vegas 2026, Wizards of the Coast lastly revealed the primary few playing cards from the upcoming set, due out Aug. 14, and the headliner is Smaug the Magnificent.
Fittingly, the cardboard is super-powerful, however if you play it alongside one explicit dragon that’s 5 years outdated, issues can in a short time spiral uncontrolled.
Smaug the Magnificent is available in three variants: a mythic uncommon in the primary set, a borderless model with a dragon hoard body, and a gleaming gold headliner card. Smaug boasts a strong means: each time he assaults, Smaug offers harm equal to the variety of treasures you management to any goal — and he generates a treasure token at the start of your maintenance.
In observe, it’s essential to construct your total technique round producing treasure tokens to make a card like this pop off. You could possibly lean into dwarves, dragons, and treasure. The actual lethal combo for Smaug, nevertheless, is Outdated Gnawbone from 2021’s Adventures within the Forgotten Realms set. With this inexperienced dragon on the board, each time a creature you management offers fight harm to a participant, you create that many treasure tokens.
Let’s simply say you have got each of those dragons on the board with 5 treasure tokens, however your opponent has a 6/6 flying blocker. In the beginning of your flip, Smaug creates one other treasure token. Smaug and Outdated Gnawbone declare the assault. Smaug’s triggered means means that you can eradicate that 6/6 blocker. Gnawbone offers seven harm to the opponent, and Smaug offers 4. So that you create one other 11 treasure tokens which on prime of these earlier six, and Smaug creates one other one the next flip. You then’re 18 harm from Smaug’s means the following flip.
Since Outdated Gnawbone is inexperienced and Smaug is crimson, that opens you as much as a collection of coloration choices that generate treasure tokens and likewise a number of the variety of tokens you generate. Doubling Season doubles the variety of tokens you generate, however there’s additionally Parallel Evolution, Parallel Lives, Primal Vigor, and Second Harvest.
Different avenues you may pursue: Goldspan Dragon doubles the efficacy of your treasure tokens when you really use them relatively than hoard them, producing two mana relatively than one if you sacrifice them. There’s additionally Dockside Extortionist, a card so good it’s one of many only a few banned in Commander, producing X treasure tokens the place X is the variety of artifacts and enchantments your opponents management (so you may see why that’s OP when you have got three opponents relatively than one). And that’s simply in red-green! Treasure tokens even have some attention-grabbing choices in white and black.
The one main disadvantage right here is that Outdated Gnawbone prices not less than about $50. However that’s what all the treasure tokens are for, proper?
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