[LTR] Maro's Teaser for Lord of the Rings

[Mookie]

Link

Before previews for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth ™ officially begin, I thought it would be fun to do another of my Duelist-style teasers where I give tiny hints of things to come. Note that I'm only giving you partial information.

First up, here are some things you can expect:

SPOILER

Show

Hide

• five different card types get the legendary supertype
• a decently sized "legendary matters" theme
• new nonmana ward costs
• a mechanic returns but now references a different creature type
• a card that makes a Smaug creature token
• two three-color and one four-color legendary creature to go along with the five-color one already previewed
• a lot of one-of "creature type matters" cards
• a mechanic returns that I had to fight tooth and nail to get into the set it premiered in
• a new creature type gets its own equip cost
• some counters in the set: burden, deathtouch, first strike, hope, indestructible, influence, lifelink, lore, stun, verse, vigilance, and +1/+1

Next, here are some rules text that will be showing up on cards:

SPOILER

Show

Hide

• "Whenever you attack with Merry and another legendary creature,"
• "Then create a Food token for each creature you control."
• "Remove an indestructible counter from Arwen:"
• "Copy any number of target instant and/or sorcery spells."
• "Whenever you draw a card during an opponent's turn, create a 1/1 blue Tentacle creature token."
• "Whenever a creature an opponent control dies, put a +1/+1 counter on Legolas."
• "Target opponent gains control of target Horse you control."
• "When this ability resolves for the third time this turn, Gimli fights up to one target creature you don't control."
• "You may pay 0 rather than pay the equip cost of the first equip ability you activate during each of your turns."
• "Whenever you put one or more counters on Aragorn, put one of each of those kinds of counters on up to one other target creature."

Here are some legendary creature type lines in the set:

SPOILER

Show

Hide

• Legendary Creature – Avatar Demon
• Legendary Creature – Bird Noble
• Legendary Creature – Halfling Knight
• Legendary Creature – Halfling Soldier
• Legendary Creature – Horse
• Legendary Creature – Kraken
• Legendary Creature – Nymph
• Legendary Creature – Spirit Noble
• Legendary Creature – Spider Demon
• Legendary Creature – Wraith Noble

Finally, here are some card names from the set:

SPOILER

Show

Hide

• Birthday Escape
• Breaking of the Fellowship
• Fear, Fire, Foes!
• Grond, the Gatebreaker
• Horses of the Bruinen
• Lembas
• One Ring to Rule Them All
• Oliphaunt
• Second Breakfast
• There and Back Again

Find out about some of these cards and more in The Lord of The Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ debut 9:00 am PT on Tuesday, May 30th at twitch.tv/Magic or on our official YouTube channel.'

[Sporegorger_Dragon]

one four-color legendary creature

Saruman of Many Colors, perhaps?

[Ink-Treader]

a mechanic returns but now references a different creature type

Amass probably.

[Mookie]

Second Breakfast

I'm going to hope it's a Second Sunrise variant, but cloning all your food tokens seems more likely. Hmmm...

a new creature type gets its own equip cost

'Equip ringbearer'? I'm not sure if there are any other new creature types other than halfling.

[void_nothing]

I can tell you right away who these characters are:

Legendary Creature – Avatar Demon
Durin's Bane

Legendary Creature – Bird Noble
Gwaihir₁

Legendary Creature – Halfling Knight
Pippin

Legendary Creature – Halfling Soldier
Merry

Legendary Creature – Horse
Shadowfax

Legendary Creature – Kraken
The Watcher in the Water₂

Legendary Creature – Nymph
Goldberry

Legendary Creature – Spirit Noble
The Oathbreaker King of Dunharrow

Legendary Creature – Spider Demon
Shelob₃

Legendary Creature – Wraith Noble
The Witch-King

Note 1: The Great Eagles are sometimes theorized to be Maiar in bird form but no Avatar type here.
Note 2: The Watcher is a Nameless Thing rather than a "kraken" per se, I'm surprised at no Horror or Elder or Nightmare typing or whatnot.
Note 3: Shelob gets the Demon typing because her mother was Ungoliant, who is a mumble mumble something that Tolkien left unclear, but is definitely not "just" a giant spider. Again, other adaptations say she's a Maia, but I guess not really here?

N.B. Maybe Merry and Pippin are reversed here? I believe they were both technically knighted.

[void_nothing]

Also: That returning mechanic with a different creature type in it? Maybe soulshift for Avatars as fana shift. Prowl, the other contender, doesn't actually reference the Rogue type - it just cares about dealing combat damage to a player with a creature that shares a type with the card.

Also also: GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND!

[Guardman]

a mechanic returns but now references a different creature type

Amass probably.

My first thought was Prowl. It fits in as a good Hobbit mechanic and all of the previous Prowl cards referenced Rogues (and I guess Goblins, a rogue faerie, and one random Sphinx who thinks that covering his face would hide his identity if you want to be pedantic).

[void_nothing]

and one random Sphinx who thinks that covering his face would hide his identity if you want to be pedantic

To be fair, there are TONS of sphinxes on Zendikar. It's an effective disguise there, less so on, idk, Kaldheim for example.

[Ink-Treader]

a mechanic returns but now references a different creature type

Amass probably.

Assuming the Galadriel and Sauron precons are real, looks like I might well be correct. Amass <creature type>, Orcs in Sauron's case.

[NZB2323]

With Aragorn and Arwen, Wed showing that we can get multiple characters in a card, I hope we get a Naya card that has Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn. It looks like there's already synergy between their 3 separate cards. If you put a +1/+1 counter on Aragorn, you can put one on Gimli, and then when you have Gimli fight another creature and kill it, you can put a +1/+1 counter on Legolas.

I still don't understand how the Riders of Rohan are blue. They're landlocked, aren't known for being scholars, are emotional, are violent, and you don't have to be blue to have horsemanship. There are Red, White, Black, and even Green cards with horsemanship.

[Venedrex]

With Aragorn and Arwen, Wed showing that we can get multiple characters in a card, I hope we get a Naya card that has Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn. It looks like there's already synergy between their 3 separate cards. If you put a +1/+1 counter on Aragorn, you can put one on Gimli, and then when you have Gimli fight another creature and kill it, you can put a +1/+1 counter on Legolas.

I still don't understand how the Riders of Rohan are blue. They're landlocked, aren't known for being scholars, are emotional, are violent, and you don't have to be blue to have horsemanship. There are Red, White, Black, and even Green cards with horsemanship.

I think it's because, lore aside, the set needs blue cards, and while I'm sure we will see blue elves, and some blue wizards, the set probably has a lack of normal blue creatures. So make some humans blue and give the blue cards that would normally be flying elementals or sphinxes or djinns into riders of Rohan with horsemanship. As horsemanship is just flying for all intents and purposes in a contained environment.

For green you have elves and hobbits and possibly humans and ents (treefolk, same thing) and beasts and etc etc.
White has hobbits and elves and humans.
Black has orcs and humans and specters and spiders and such. Also maybe goblins too.
Red has dwarves and maybe humans and definitely goblins.
What does blue have? A couple wizards, maybe some elves... the eagles? If you don't make some humans blue you are going to be coming up short in density. Although, I would have made Gondor the blue-white humans myself.

[NZB2323]

With Aragorn and Arwen, Wed showing that we can get multiple characters in a card, I hope we get a Naya card that has Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn. It looks like there's already synergy between their 3 separate cards. If you put a +1/+1 counter on Aragorn, you can put one on Gimli, and then when you have Gimli fight another creature and kill it, you can put a +1/+1 counter on Legolas.

I still don't understand how the Riders of Rohan are blue. They're landlocked, aren't known for being scholars, are emotional, are violent, and you don't have to be blue to have horsemanship. There are Red, White, Black, and even Green cards with horsemanship.

I think it's because, lore aside, the set needs blue cards, and while I'm sure we will see blue elves, and some blue wizards, the set probably has a lack of normal blue creatures. So make some humans blue and give the blue cards that would normally be flying elementals or sphinxes or djinns into riders of Rohan with horsemanship. As horsemanship is just flying for all intents and purposes in a contained environment.

For green you have elves and hobbits and possibly humans and ents (treefolk, same thing) and beasts and etc etc.
White has hobbits and elves and humans.
Black has orcs and humans and specters and spiders and such. Also maybe goblins too.
Red has dwarves and maybe humans and definitely goblins.
What does blue have? A couple wizards, maybe some elves... the eagles? If you don't make some humans blue you are going to be coming up short in density. Although, I would have made Gondor the blue-white humans myself.

Yeah, Gondor is on the shore, has a port, and is near a river. They established a navy in the third age. Rohan is landlocked.

As for other blue creatures they have the Kraken, Wizards, and Corsairs of Umbar(pirates). We've also seen that the elf deck is Simic(makes sense with the Fords of Bruien and Rivendell), and the Sauron deck is Grixis, so I'm not sure they needed to have 3 out of the 4 premade decks have blue.

I was also hoping we'd get a Naya fellowship deck with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, but I guess they wanted to go Abzan for the fellowship deck.