Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1367: The Hobbit Design with Annie Sardelis

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™ Set Design Lead Annie Sardelis to talk about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work at Home Edition. So I like to use these times a lot of times to do interviews. So today I have Amity Sir Dellis to talk all about The Hobbit. So Annie was the lead set designer. So hello, Annie.

Hello. Okay, so let's start from the very beginning. What experience do you have with The Hobbit? What is your background with The Hobbit? So my actual first experience reading through it was just before this set. Surprise, surprise. But I was a big fan of Lord of the Rings. I did read all of the Lord of the Rings books when I was in school.

But I just was like, eh, The Hobbit. It doesn't really seem that exciting. There's not enough darkness and evil. But no, I really enjoyed it. I think I kind of might like it a bit more at this point. Just because it is such just like an easy-to-read story. Like, it just makes you feel really good. And the writing is so fun in it.

So, honestly, yeah, I became quite a big Hobbit fan, but honestly, because of this project in large part. Yeah, so my story is, the Hobbit was my introduction into the Lord of the Rings. Because I was in, like, sixth grade or something. And the librarian said, oh, I think you'd like this book. And at the time, I really didn't like fantasy. So I'm like, ah. And she goes, no, no, no, it's really good.

So I, because she'd recommended books I really liked. I read it. And like, oh, this is really good. So the Hobbit was kind of my interesting. road of fantasy. Yeah, I think it's because Lord of the Rings, like the trilogy was really blown up when I was growing up and I'm just like, why do I need to read that one? But I really should have because it's fantastic.

Okay, so let's start at the very beginning. So you led set design. Who led vision design? Ethan Fleischer. So Ethan Fleischer read vision. So when the set gets handed off to you, what state was it in? I was one sort of walk through the mechanics. Oh, okay.

Oh, like the vision mechanics. yeah, because I guess everyone's going to know about those. Yeah, in Vision, we had the structure basically figured out. Like, being another smaller draft set, we have our five archetypes again. But we didn't do like allied or enemy colors. Ethan was just sort of like, let's just give the armies their respective correct colors and just make sure that they're color balanced. And so being able to do that, I think gave us a lot of leeway to just be

really flavorful for the different armies and just do what's right for them. So real quickly, for the people that might not be, might not know the Hobbit Super well. There's a battle of five armies that happens. That's a big battle in the book. Who are the five armies? You want to talk about who the five armies are? And then what two-color combination we gave you to?

Oh, and what colors there. And yeah, of course. So, yeah, very early in vision. We had figured out white blue was the humans. They're from Lake Town. They live on a lake. It's a white blue, easy enough, right? then there's black red for the goblins again easy enough the original lTR set also had them in those colors

there's green black that's the wolf army that's like the one no one knows about but they're technically like the fifth army was wolves it's not eagles i know popular misconception but it's wolves they're in black green then we have the dwarves which are of course in white white red. Again, I think that's the expected colors that everyone puts their fantasy dwarves in. So our dwarves are in white, red. And then last up is elves. So yes, we pulled again from LTR to put our elves in green and blue. So there they are. And as you point out, they're not all ally or all enemy. They're a mix of ally and enemy. We've done that like in Ravnikas sets, I guess. But this is the first non-ravnikasset that we've ever sort of mixed the pairs for five.

Yeah, and it was just to make sure we can be a follow-through on both LTR and be true to what the different, you know, creature types are expected to be in, honestly. Okay, so let's, I'm almost talking a few things that came from Vision, then to some stuff that obviously you added and sat. So let's start. I'm going to talk a little bit about the goblins. So you are correct that the goblins and the orcs were in black, red in Lord of the Rings. but, and you carried over a mechanic almost. So I want to talk a little bit of going from a mass orcs to a mass goblin. Yeah. So the thing is, orc and goblin, Tolkien treats them a little bit synonymously,

but I will say the word orc does not appear a single time in the book The Hobbit. So it's like, if we want to be true to the Hobbit, we got to use Goblin. But luckily, there was like that amass rules up. like after war to make it so you could amass basically any kind of creature type and it would just be additive to the army. So your army will be an orc and then you'll play a card from the Hobbit and then it'll be an orc goblin. And then you can play that one weird gremlin card that amasses gremlins. You know, you just like keep adding types to it. And I'm like, wait, that's sort of like the best of both worlds because your typo cards can call out your arcs and goblins get whatever

and it's going to work with that army no matter what. So it was actually just kind of the perfect solution like hiding in plain sight already because of that rules update. Okay, so I want to talk through, let's walk through different mechanics, and we can explain where they came from. Let's start with adventures.

Because obviously, the whole story is kind of a bunch of adventures. So how did adventures come about? Okay, so adventure was added after vision. I think we didn't really fool with it much in vision because it's like, we know how adventure works. It's great. It's really easy to make cards with. They're also very resonant cards. So we don't need to like sort of go all in on adventure in the Vision Summit. But afterwards, I was like, hey, working with the set and trying to make the best possible draft environment, it's really useful to have access to, you know, the diversity of effects you can throw on adventure cards. Because sometimes you just want to squeeze in a squeaky little spell that'll get rid of the artifact or something. It's really hard to do when you're working with a smaller size set. So adventure came about not only because it's, yes, obviously, we're going on an adventure. And it's just so obvious to do something that evokes that really core theme of The Hobbit,

but it was also a very, very, very useful tool for draft as well. So it reappears here. Yeah, one of the things that'll be a theme today just to make sure is that you knew from the very beginning the size of the set, that it was, I don't know, we'll call it a medium-sized set maybe, but it's not as big as a normal set. And that has a lot of restrictions and a lot of, you know, when you're putting a set together, you're used to having a normal size set. So not having quite as many cards makes it a little harder to find all the pieces you need.

No, it was definitely a lot of learnings from the previous two. Okay, next up, this is in the order I have written down. So, storied. Let's talk a little bit about what storied is, how you used it, how it came about. Yeah, so storied was another one added after vision. Oh, let me explain what story is for the people that find adventures. I assume people know because we've done it many times. Story says if you control three or more artifacts,

legendaries, and or sagas, you have an enduring story for the rest of the game? Yes, you have an enduring story. Yeah, I was scrolling down to a couple cards with it. All right, so, yeah, how'd this come about? Okay, so in red-white, this again is sort of a medium-sized set learning. It is you have a lot of legends sometimes, and sometimes there's nothing you can do about it because that's just how that color is going to go.

So in red, white being dwarves, we have all of Thorin's company to show as well as a couple Dane cards, right? And so there's just like so many dwarves that people expect to see. Like we got to see biffer, bomber, bofer, you name it. They all got to have their own card. So that really like loaded up red white with a lot of legends. And the other expectations of dwarves is to have artifacts and equipment. And the other one, which is very Hobbit-related, is that they're always singing songs and telling stories. So the last one being sagas also felt like a natural fit.

And so it's like, oh, wait, this is trending towards the batch of historic, which players are just really easy. They like remember it. And so as a batch of sorts, it was something that we noticed players were just sort of like, oh, yeah, I know what historic is. historic, storied, you know, you get it. And so if you get to collect three of those, you then turn on your enduring story

for the rest of the game, kind of like the city's blessing. So at any point, was it historic? Like, how did, obviously historic was in the original Lord of the Rings on like four cards. No, I think we are mostly just like artifacts, caring about artifacts in large

or carrying about tokens in large because each army is pretty, has like its own associated token. Like we have like two dwarves and 1-1 humans. And so it was, oh, and also the amassed army. So, like, there's a lot of blendable things we could do with just having a token or having an artifact.

So it started out there. And then I'm like, I want to give them a little bit more, you know, Hobbit-related identity. So just decide to make up something new. Okay. Speaking of something new, another mechanic, recruit, draw a card, then discard a card. If you discard it a 9-land card, create a 1-1 white human-sum. soldier creature token. So this is an evolution of a previous mechanic.

Yes. It is an evolution of connive in a sense, or, you know, like a sideways thing to connive. So yeah, in this case, you're getting a 1-1 token rather than the counter on the creature. Again, this was sort of to like suit the needs of blue-white being the human archetype. like blue definitely wants to do some you know kind of like card draw shenanagan white definitely wants to be building an army and so it just kind of felt like doing a sort of draw your second card strategy might be promising here it was a little bit novel to do in this color pair for sure but recruit had pretty strong flavor for like all right all the folks in lake town getting together

to face smog yet again and not doing so hot, but doing their best. So, yeah, that's how recruit came about. Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting is to take something we have knowledge of and then just tweak something. In this case, you tweak the output. And just changing the output really changes the dynamic of how the mechanic works. Oh, definitely. Okay, next up, we have some flashback.

How do flashback come about it? Oh, flashback? Okay, I hardly remember that being here. But okay, so flashback is on a handful of cards. I think even at low rarity, we have a couple fancy commons. This was mostly added to give a bit of texture to the graveyard, again, with recruit. Like, we wanted some moments without having a whole archetype built around, like, reanimating stuff from the dead, because like, that's not really what the Hobbit is about. We wanted some moments where you felt clever for the discard side of recruit.

with, you know, positive ways that are put on a handful of our, of our flashback spells. That's about it, though. There's not too much flavor to it. Yeah, there's not a lot of thought. I'm just, this is everything in the stat. We're going through everything. Okay, perfect. Next up, ferocious. Okay, yeah, ferocious is have a guy with power for greater.

I know it's not that new. But when you get to put the word ferocious back on it, all of a sudden, it sounds awesome. So we gave that to the wolves and a couple of the creatures. of Merkwood. And so, I don't know. It was just sort of like, in black, green, it's a bit of a novel color. But with black having a mass,

you are able to build up, like, a four-power creature in black decently often. It's pretty trivial in green. Green can do it all day long. But it was tough to do in black, but it just felt right for the ferocious wolves to have that mechanic.

Yeah, it's another thing that's fun. I like when we work on sets is when you can take something from the past but recontextualize it, that's always super fun. And moving colors is a really fun way to re contextualize. Oh, yeah, but it's definitely tough. You get in some fights with color pie sometimes,

but hopefully it's just enough novelty that we're not blowing stuff up. Yeah, luckily the color pie, I mean, you can care about having creatures and all the colors get to care somewhat about having creatures. Yeah. Okay, the other one we brought back, a landfill.

How do you use land? infall in the set? How do we use landfall? Well, um, so the elves in LTR were in blue green. So likewise, we brought them back in blue green. Um, didn't want to do the scry angle again here, but wanted to do something that had more broad support in magic just because we're a bit of a, like I said, again, a little, a bit fewer cards here than an LTR. So it's like, hey, let's just make sure people have an easy place to slot these in their deck, whether they're playing LTF, or whether they're playing cards from wherever in magic. And so bread and butter elf stuff is landfall.

And so we got to make a couple fun cards to support landfall here. And it's not even novel in blue. It's like landfall has been everywhere at this point. But I just wanted to make sure that the set was very approachable for folks who might be playing for their first time. So landfall just felt like a really good choice. Okay. So let's talk a little bit of,

this is the first set where we made a set and then later we come back and we're making another set in the same world. I'm going to talk a little bit about like you had to stay true to Lord of the Rings. Talk a little bit about what were the challenges of that. Yeah.

I think the biggest challenges were when we had overlapping concepts because Sting the sword exists in both. And of course we're going to make a cool sting in LTR. And I think like the biggest challenge was definitely working on another ring because it's like, oh, Lord, we've done some crazy rings in the other set in like both Bilbo's ring. Like don't count out Bilbo's ring. Bilbo's ring is an insane card too.

And of course the one ring. But so like having to make another installation of a very iconic, like expected to be rare concept was definitely the biggest challenge. But I think we also got a lot of, we got just as much support as we did challenge, as I'd say. It was, it was, it was a great opportunity to get to build on something that set out

just like really like fan favorite creature types in colors, people would love to have them in. So what's the name of Vilbo's Ring? Oh, well, that one's in, I think, the commander set or something. Oh, that's not in the main set. called My Precious. Okay, but that's not in the main set. My Precious is in Hobbit Monset, yes.

Oh, my precious. Okay, so hold on. Let me look at my precious. Okay, so my precious. Oops, I got to spell precious. Okay, my precious, cost three, legendary artifact equipment. It has an adventure on it, a lure of power, one in a black, instant adventure, as an additional cost to cast a spell, sacrifice the creature, draw two cards,

and then it says, equipped creature has hex-proof and can't be blocked, equipped to pay two life. Yeah. So there's a cool thing. So obviously the ring in the Hobbit

and the ring in the Lord of the Rings is the same ring, but Hobbit treats it really differently than the Lord of the Ring. It's nowhere near the scale of what it is in Lord of the Ring because the Hobbit, we know, Bilbo doesn't really know that yet.

Yeah, it just makes them invisible. He gets to do a little sneaking around. So that's largely what ours does with like that sinister backstory adventure of like, what is this really about, you know? So like with a smegel story and such. So it's just sort of like a everyone knows. So we got to allude to it. Yeah.

And having an adventure on it's cool. I mean, we've done adventures on artifacts before, but it is nice. We don't do it a lot. So it's true. It's pretty novel. Okay, so what else? What are challenges did you have to, like, doing a sequel, if you will? Let's see.

Well, yeah, finding, yeah, again, running back high rarity things that people already expect to see. But I will say, I will say it's more of a prequel. I mean, it is a prequel. You are 100% great. Like, I think, I think, no, honestly, I think there are more benefits than challenges because the tone of the two are also so different. So, like, I can make a spider and Lord of the Rings can have made a spider and LTR, like really creepy, ugly stuff. And I can make one and we can be, like, poking fun at that spider and Bilbo's, like, insulting the spider in the forest and having a good time.

And it's just like, even though there's similar concepts and we are running into the same kind of cards, the tone we get to use is entirely different. Like you might see like, she lob on like a sinister strike and LTR being like, oh man, that's morbid. And over here you get to see like Bilbo singing like Old Fat Spider can't see me. And it's just even though, you know, the things we run into are pretty much very similar in both properties. just the tone really helps us set it apart a bit. So there's one thing that we purposely did keep, if we knew if we were going to the Hobbit one day, we didn't do. We alluded to it.

I think there was a token in Lord of the Rings, but smog, we, obviously he's the, you know, the giant dragon from the Hobbit. Do I talk a little bit? So there's multiple smogs. There's two smogs. So let's let's talk to the two smogs. So the first smog is the common.

Smog, the Great Calamity, Five Red, Red, Legend, Creature, Dragon. He's got an adventure, spew, Flame, four in a red, sorcery adventure. Spue, Flame deals five damages to target a creature. And then he's just a five, five, flying creature. So how did that smog come about? Yeah, we wanted to have a couple characters that you would see at Common. I think it's just like Bilbo, Bjorn, Smog, maybe Gandalf. just like to make sure that you're having these moments in draft where smog can show up and wreck your guys,

but also you have a moment to smite smog with the black arrow more often, you know? So it's like we just really wanted to make sure that you had the moments of fighting someone because smog is just such a big part of the story. It's like I would be remiss to play a game without at least thinking about the threat of smog. And once smog is on that adventure, like after you've done the spell side, you're just like, oh man all right time to get ready for him like he's swooping overhead you know and so like even adventure kind of added some flavor there as well um and also i think there's two there's actually three smogs i think i smog the magnificent he's the mythic is there another smog yeah there's

the two color rare one oh the two color one hold on oh smog wicked worm that's okay this is the the rare so smog wicked worm is three black red legend creature dragon fly When smog enters, create X-tap treasure tokens, where X is the number of artifacts your opponent controls. Whenever you cast a spell, if manner from a treasure was spent to cast it, you draw a card and lose a life. That's how that one come about. Yeah, well, we wanted to make at least one two-color smog, you know, for the commander-enjoyers, I'd say. Because we kind of pushed the mythic one into like sort of like standard territory, the common ones for draft territories. So this one's for people that want to goof around and make a billion treasure and get back at their opponents for having a billion treasure also.

Because, like, hey, if you have that, I deserve it. And that's what Smog's all about is taking everyone's stuff. So I just really wanted to make a little treasure build around card. Maybe people can hang out with Magda from Caldheim. I don't know. So I just really wanted to make a card that seemed pretty fun to play in a little bit. Okay, so let's talk about the mythic rare one, the one that was a little more for standard. Smog the Magnificent, two red red, legend and creature dragon, four three, flying haste.

Whenever smog attacks, he deals damage equal to the number of treasure you control to any target. At beginning of your upkeep, create a treasure token. Yeah, okay. Sorry, I was just digging through the dev comments because I think this was made up by a combination of everyone's favorite dragons on like our play design team essentially. there's like feelings of gold Span Dragon, there's feelings of like Glorybringer, just like all smushed together and then just smog the magnificent just to make sure he was a real threat in the format. So again, I'm just like, I don't want to make a smog that doesn't mention treasure, so let's go. And that's how he came about. And someone noticed, I think it was

at MagicCon Vegas. They're like, oh, he actually has one less toughness to show. know, like the missing part in his armor. And I'm like, oh, I love that. So you can believe whatever you like. It might have been a balanced decision, or maybe it was flavor, and you'll never know. Maybe it was both. Maybe it's both. Okay, let's talk a little bit about Bilbo, our hero of the story.

Okay, so there's a bunch of different Bilboes. We'll start with the common Bilbo. Bilbo Baggins Burglar. Two in a blue, Legend and Creature, Halfling Rogue. he's an adventure, take a glance with one blue, scry two, and then he's a two-one when Bilbo Baggins enters draw a card. Yeah, easy enough. You can sort of see how over the rarities,

like each one of them is sort of saying the same thing, but in a more powerful way. But yeah, this Bilbo, just being a simple common is going to help you draw that extra card for, you know, our white, blue draw two strategy. or draw your second card strategy. And, of course, being able to scri to, it's just a very convenient to do. And as well, we are very mindful of our common legends.

You can see, like, this is somewhat of a cheaper card, so you can run into, like, the redundancy issue of the legend rule. But I'm hoping that being able to use the adventure side helps you make the card feel like less dead sometimes, like because that way you can just chuck one on an adventure and then you know save the other for later and then chuck that one on an adventure and just let them kind of chill there for a while also you have recruit in white blue so uh recruit us also if you can discard and a film extra definitely definitely yep okay okay okay so let's now get to the is the uncommon one gold i'm guessing uh no it's also just blue it's also just blue okay The Luckware. There is Bilbo.

Oh, Bilbo Luckware. One in a blue. Legend and creature, Halfling, Rogue. His adventure is burglars plot, four in a blue, exchange control of two target non-land permits that share a card type. Ooh, one of my favorite type of cards is a switcher-roos.

Bilbo can't be blocked. He's a one-one. Whenever Bilbo deals combat damage to a player, draw a card, then discard a card. So what's the uncommon up to? Yeah, so the uncommon gets to be that invisible Bilbo. from the scene where he actually like goes in and does the treasure stealing. Whereas the first one's more like,

ooh, I'm just going to take a peek at these trolls. Oh no, everything went wrong. So the second one is him in doing his smog shenanigans essentially. I really, really wanted to have a switcheroo in the set so bad. And I'm just like, where can it go? Where can it go? It doesn't fit anywhere because like it's very conditional, right? Like you really have to make sure there's enough support to have it

mean something, but I'm like, wait a second, I'll just throw it on as an adventure on Bilbo. And again, like, adventure just helps us add a lot of flavor. So I hope you get to trade some junk with Smog's treasure hoard of cool stuff. One of my favorite decks before I even worked at Wizards was I had a deck with both juxtapose and Gaunts of Chaos because they were the only two ways to swap with the opponent. And I love making decks where I would give them things that they didn't want to have. That was one of my favorite goofy decks to make. Here's things of horrible upkeeps that you can't deal with.

Okay, so now let's get to Bilbo Thief in the Night. This is his mythic card. One in a blue, legendary creature, halfling rogue. He's a two-two. Spells you cast from anywhere other than your hand costs one less to cast. Whenever Bilbo attacked, you may cast an artifact, instant or sorcery spell from your graveyard. If an instant or sorcery spell cast this way, we put in your graveyard, exile it instead. Yeah.

So spells you cast from anywhere other. than your hand means a lot of things in this case. It can mean, in this case, the flavor of it is supposed to mean like stolen cards, which are often like in exile as you steal them. It can also mean cards on an adventure in our set in the command zone. It's okay. So the second ability is basically just a way to have access to more, quote unquote, stolen cards. whatever you had in your sack. And, yeah, we'd be remiss to not put artifact on there is that is what he is most known for stealing.

But it's very snapcestry with the whole instant and sorcery bit. Okay, so we're almost out of time here, but I'm remissed and not talking a little bit. One of the things I get asked all the time is people who are fans of dwarves, and they want dwarves. And I always said, well, at least the Hobbit. You know, the Hobbit's going to pay off with some dwarves. So what were you trying to capture?

Because obviously there's a lot of jobs. dwarves in the Hobbit? Oh my gosh. Tons of stuff. Well, first, we had to give everyone in the party a card, and we did that. I think we ended up with like 21 dwarves. I don't know how many legendary ones, but way too many. I'm just kidding. Just enough. And then making sure that they had identity that was both unique to the Hobbit, but also backwards facing. So we have storied, which is largely to support our draft format. But it's also very trivial to turn on if you're just playing a normal artifact deck in whatever format you like, because it doesn't take too much to turn it on.

And I wanted to make sure they called out treasure a good bunch to be specific about the kind of artifacts and equipment a decent amount to be specific about the kind of expected play styles of red-white. I have like this little mini package of my own little agenda. of like the Dane related cards, a lot of them come with a token equipment, just like an axe. And once you were able to just equip that to anything,

there's like loads of payoffs for just having equipment. And there's also like hone counters on a couple of these things, which are also new. Talk about home counters. What are hone counters? Oh, okay. So you put hone counters directly on equipment, and each hone counter on an equipment grants plus one plus oh

to the equipped. creature. So it's sort of just like a permanent upgrade for your for your equipment that you can proliferate and do whatever nonsense you want with. But so I got like Dwalin and Dane doing a bunch of equipment nonsense. And I just think the set is mostly going to help with density of actual factual dwarves. Get those change things out of here. Their time has come. It's time for some real dwarves. So that was my agenda. A fun story real quickly, behind the scenes on home counters. So, Ben is our, well, what used to be our red counselor, he's now moved to a different color.

But for a long time, he was red, and he had a mini team he put to try to find more things for red to do. And one of the things that he and his team made that we really liked was home counters. And we've been looking for a place to do them. So a whole bunch of dwarves making weapons turned out to be a wonderful place to do them. Definitely. So we do have plans. We're introducing Hone here, but we hope to be able to use it in other places. So, okay, Annie, we're almost out of time here.

So any final thoughts on the making of The Hobbit? Number one, read The Hobbit. Don't be like me and never read it until you're an adult. It's so fun. I don't know. Find a child and read to them or something. It's a great time. And also, what else is there to say?

I just think it was a really, really fun and charming set to get to work on. I got to make a lot of weird woodland animals, which was kind of like my favorite part of working on Bloomboro Commander, is just making up weird little animals. And just, I don't know, Tolkien's world is just so charming. And I'm just really happy to get to bring that to some magic cards. Well, Annie, I want to thank you so much for being with us here today. It was super fun to talk about The Hobbit.

But as I can see my desk, we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work or end of my time in my office. So that means instead of talking magic and the Hobbit, it's time to be making magic. So thanks everyone for joining us, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.