With The Hobbit prerelease having come and gone, players can now finally get their hands on all the new cards they need. Naturally, this means that players will be upgrading their Commander decks with new Hobbit cards, as there’s some very exciting potential. From a combo point of view, in particular, The Hobbit has tons of great new enablers, especially for being a smaller set.
MTG Notary Hobbits
The Notary Hobbits is one of the craziest mana generators we’ve seen in some time, tapping for nine mana on its own without any support. Cards like Panharmonicon and Doubling Season can push these Hobbits further, allowing them to easily generate 25 mana!
Even without these support pieces, Notary Hobbits can easily go infinite with a wide variety of different cards. In mono-green, having Notary Hobbits and Pili-Pala allows Marvin, Murderous Mimic to repeatedly tap and untap himself, netting infinite colored mana. Alternatively, Umbral Mantle and Notary Hobbits can create infinite power and toughness instead.
If infinite tokens are what you’re after, The Notary Hobbits also has a series of different combos with Food Chain. Alongside Concordant Crossroads, you can both tap Notary Hobbits and sacrifice your Commander to Food Chain to recast it infinitely, eventually creating infinite tokens.
MTG Elven Raft-Steerer
As a Retreat to Coralhelm on a stick, Elven Raft-Steerer is bound to be one of the most popular uncommons in The Hobbit. The card can easily slot into any deck that wants to reuse a Commander’s tap ability, like Thranduil, the Elvenking or Zimone and Dina. Outside of that, of course, Elven Raft-Steerer can create a ridiculous number of infinite combos.
With Walking Atlas and Guildless Commons, for instance, you can exploit Raft-Steerer’s untap ability to repeatedly use Walking Atlas to bring Commons back into play. On its own, this will net you infinite landfall triggers, but something like Amulet of Vigor turns that into infinite mana, too.
Branching out into more colors, Elven Raft-Steerer can essentially get all the lands into play with Wight of the Reliquary and a Landfall token producer. With Field of the Dead, for example, you can use Wight to sacrifice a token to put another land into play. This will generate another token while Elven Raft-Steerer untaps Wight, establishing the loop.
MTG Bard, King of Dale
Between acting as both a draw and a token doubler, Bard, King of Dale is bound to see tons of play in Commander. After all, doubling up on Smothering Tithe treasures, or drawing two cards from cantrips like Ponder, can easily supercharge your game plan. If that weren’t enough, however, Bard, King of Dale even sets up infinite combos with other popular Commander staples.
In Azorius, Smothering Tithe and Gleaming Splendor threaten to deck your opponents out while making near-infinite mana. By targeting two opponents with Gleaming Splendor’s ability, Smothering Tithe will create four Treasure tokens thanks to Bard, which lets you use Gleaming Splendor again while netting one Treasure.
Bard can also create infinite tokens in Azorius using Urza, Lord High Artificer and Deadeye Navigator. Since Bard lets Urza create two Construct tokens on entry, you can tap them for two mana, flicker Urza with Navigator, and repeat the process. In Bant, Bard has a wide variety of similar combos using Earthcraft and a token producer like Sacred Mesa.
Heck, Bard can even provide infinite card draw in Azorius using Mind Over Matter and a Looter, like Merfolk Looter. Since Bard will cause Merfolk Looter to draw two cards, you can use your extra card to untap the Looter with Mind Over Matter, repeating the process. So long as you have at least one card in your hand before starting this, you can easily set up a Thassa’s Oracle win from here.
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