24 New MTG Lord of the Rings Cards Officially Revealed!

Anyone who’s been keeping with Magic over the past year knows about the Lord of the Rings crossover. Not only have cards like The One Ring and Orcish Bowmasters completely changed various MTG metagames, but The one of one Serialized Ring turned Magic into a sensation, producing the most expensive MTG card ever, selling for over two million dollars to Post Malone.

For excited MTG Lord of the Rings fans out there, the fun isn’t over just yet. A holiday release is on its way later this year, and 24 new mechanically unique cards have just been officially revealed! On top of that, some new Lord of the Rings artwork is also on its way to Magic players everywhere! Let’s take a look!

Lord of the Rings Scene Boxes

Officially revealed in ign.com today was the new Lord of the Rings Scene Boxes. Each box contains some LOTR packs alongside six new mechanically unique cards that form a scene – similar to the contents of the LOTR Bundle except the remaining contents are quite a bit different.

Each of these bundles will contain one scene of six cards, six art cards, three LOTR Set Boosters. Four different Scene Boxes will be available – each of which containing six mechanically unique cards to make up the scene associated with the product.

Interestingly, three of the scenes have already been leaked, and this official reveal marks those cards as the real deal. If you want to read more about those, take a look here. Legolas’s Quick Reflexes looks particularly powerful, threatening to even appear in competitive formats like Legacy.

For now, though, let’s take a look at the remaining scene that wasn’t leaked early. That scene is pictured above.

Gandalf of the Secret Fire

Gandalf of Secret Fire won’t be doing anything in competitive formats, but it may be a surprisingly popular card in Commander. This is thanks to the card slotting beautifully into the upcoming Timey Wimey Doctor Who Commander deck that cares about Time Counters and mechanics like Suspend. Interestingly, that deck’s color identity also happens to be Jeskai, making it the perfect home for Gandalf.

Olorin’s Searing Light

Olorin’s Sealing Light definitely seems like a card primed for Commander. Being able to take out the biggest thing each of your opponents have is a strong effect for four mana, and the Spell Mastery effect, which is rather easy to turn on, can severely punish stompy players at your table. This seems like a great inclusion for casual Boros Commander decks, but is unlikely to see play elsewhere.

Sorcerous Squall

Sorcerous Squall has one of the scariest keywords in all of MTG: Delve. This keyword has caused Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time to be banned in Modern and Legacy while being Restricted in Vintage thanks to the presence of Fetch Lands absolutely breaking them.

Unfortunately for competitive hopefuls, Sorcerous Squall cares about what your opponent is running, making it somewhat unreliable unless you’re trying to counter an expected metagame. That said, in the right circumstance, this could easily see play in Legacy sideboards. This should generally hit something interesting in Commander as well, but it could also easily just end up being an overpriced Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile.

Rammas Echor, Ancient Shield

Wall fans, rejoice! Rammas Echor, Ancient Shield offers a very powerful Legendary artifact for Arcades, the Strategist fans everywhere.

While this is a bullseye for that archetype, Rammas Echor is better than it may appear at first glance. This is also pretty strong in any deck that cares about tokens. As long as you can consistently cast two spells per turn, you’ll get an 0/3 white Wall with Defender. This also counts your opponent’s turns, making four tokens per turn the ceiling of this card.

Exalted, once again, gives the Walls a different way to create value other than just slotting into a Defender Commander deck. This could be a unique protection spell for Superfriends decks, and will likely slot into casual Convoke Commander decks.

Courageous Resolve

Couragous Resolve is an interesting protection spell that can be deadly in the right hands. You really need to care about the Fateful Hour effect to run this efficiently since there are equally powerful protection effects for less mana.

At worst, however, this overcosted effect can draw you a card. That said, Protection is better than Hexproof, and can double as both a protection spell and a way to make your Voltron Commander unblockable in the right context.

Should someone break the Fateful hour text on Courageous Resolve, the sky’s the limit. Otherwise, this card should see play somewhere.

Fell Beast’s Shriek

This is a weird Magic card. Fell Beast’s Shriek’s Splice cost being twice as expensive as its normal casting cost may seem weird, but you can Splice this onto any instant or sorcery, which can play rather nicely alongside copy effects that copy the Spliced version of that card.

Otherwise, Splicing Fell Beast’s Shriek onto an instant can give this instant speed effects to potentially catch an opponent with their pants down. This probably won’t be seeing any competitive play, but it is an interesting tool that explores some unique design space. I wouldn’t count on this card breaking anything.

A quick reminder that since these are part of Lord of the Rings Commander, they are not legal in Modern.

New Collector Booster Chase Cards!

In addition to the official reveal of the new Lord of the Rings Scene Boxes, IGN also revealed five new chase cards that will appear in the new wave of Lord of the Rings Collector Boosters!

Notably, the previous serialized cards will not be available in these Collector Boosters. To reiterate, while these look like Secret Lair cards, they are not. These are instead available in Special Edition Collector Boosters releasing as part of the holiday release of Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. Notably, these are only being offered in English printings.

To replace the absence of serialized cards, a rarer variant of the above cards will have serialized treatments as well as normal ones. 100 of each will be available.

Unlike the previous cards, these new Secret Lair-esque Collector Booster exclusives are not mechanically unique. They are instead poster-ish mockups of the following cards:

Aragorn, the Uniter

Mount Doom

Arwen, Galadriel Queen

Gandalf, the White

Saruman of Many Colors

The serialized versions of these cards are going to be incredibly difficult to open and, as such, I would expect a massive price tag attached to those cards. As long as the artwork doesn’t end up being a huge deterrent to MTG and LOTR fans alike, we may have a new masterpiece on our hands.