Radagast of Rhosgobel is looking like one of the MTG Hobbit set’s finest commanders. The brown wizard is actually green, and a great leader of a creature-based green deck. He not only lets you play one green creature each turn as though they had flash, he also gives them a significant two mana discount.
That’s a fun take on a Yeva, Nature’s Herald ability, powerful, without just being a straightforward replacement for the older commander. Radagast is limited to one creature per turn, so you can’t really combo off with him, plus he doesn’t have haste himself. But that discount makes him a really nice value piece. If you can get multiple mid-sized creatures onto the board each turn, you’re going to easily pull ahead and get to do lots of fun green things.
While Radagast seems like a good mono-green commander by himself, I also imagine he’ll be a great inclusion in pretty much any creature-based deck that uses green, from dragons to elementals. Giving everything flash is a powerful effect, forcing everyone around the table to be as wary of you and your open mana as if you were playing blue, and the mana cost reduction effectively makes him great at ramping too.
Speaking of elves, another interesting card revealed in the last few days is Thranduil the Strategist. This guy’s strategy is pretty uncomplicated: he makes a bunch of elves and makes them all tap for mana. Blue-green in the MTG Hobbit set has a landfall theme, and this is about as pure an interpretation of that idea as I could imagine.
However, in a move that I find frankly bizarre, Wizards has chosen to make Thranduil a non-Standard legal, collector-booster exclusive card. That’s going to make this card bloody hard to find, and therefore (I suspect) bloody expensive.
This is pretty annoying, but luckily there’s some far off hope, in a product coming out in 2027. Next year there’s a Battle of the Five Armies Co-op kit dropping for The Hobbit, similar to the one WotC released for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and bordered versions of Thranduil will be a part of it.
There are apparently 8 more of these collector booster/co-op kit cards, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for them.
Source: Wargamer
