The Hobbit's Best Commander Cards, 10 Days In

Ten days after The Hobbit hit shelves on August 14, the early Commander verdict is in: Thranduil, the Elvenking is the runaway breakout commander, Smaug the Magnificent is the card everyone wanted from packs, and the set's biggest sleeper might be a trio of trolls. Spoiler-season hype is one thing — here's what players are actually building now that the cards are real.

For you get a 5/6 Elf Noble with two lines of text that Elf players have been reading over and over: Thranduil has all activated abilities of all Elf cards in your graveyard, and whenever another legendary Elf you control enters, you draw two cards and discard one.

As of this week he sits at roughly 5,900 decks on EDHREC — nearly double the next-closest commander from the set. The reason isn't just typal loyalty. That first ability lets Thranduil impersonate any Elf in your graveyard, which means he can slot directly into combo lines that were built around completely different creatures. Discard the right Elf and your commander becomes the missing piece.

That's exactly the kind of deck worth auditing before you shuffle up. Paste your Thranduil list into our Combo Finder and you may be surprised how many complete combos — and one-card-short combos — a "fair Elf deck" is quietly carrying.

Behind Thranduil, the early build numbers cluster around a few names. Beorn the Fierce (about 3,600 decks) has Bear typal players genuinely excited — a cheap commander in a creature type that has waited years for a new leader. The Great Goblin sits right beside him in build count, and Smaug the Magnificent (about 3,000 decks) is the set's face card in every sense: he stockpiles Treasure on your upkeep and converts the hoard into attack damage, which makes him scary with a board and blank when he eats a removal spell before combat. In a four-player pod, assume he eats that removal spell.

Then there's Bard, King of Dale, quietly one of the strongest designs in the set. Reach and vigilance are the boring part. The text that matters: your non-first draws each turn become two cards, and your token creation is doubled. That's two of Commander's most-loved effects stapled together, and it's why Bard is showing up in the 99 of existing decks at least as often as he's in the command zone.

Not everyone is building a new deck. If you're upgrading what you already own, three cards stand out ten days in.

The Arkenstone does three jobs at once — it pumps your board, feeds you a card each end step, and its Adventure half digs a legendary creature out of your library. None of those effects is individually efficient, which is precisely why it's a healthy design: it's a value engine your pod won't rage about.

Tom, Bert, and William is the sleeper. A five-mana sacrifice-and-draw engine that refuses to stay dead, returning as a noncreature permanent that keeps working. If your deck already wants a Greater Good effect, the trolls do the impression while dodging most creature removal on the rebound.

And My Precious is the flavor win that's also just good: two mana to equip (plus two life) for hexproof and unblockable, with an Adventure that trades a creature for two cards. Voltron decks in black should be testing it this week.

The market's verdict is blunter than the build data. Gleaming Splendor — the Book Cover card of Smaug on his hoard, and a nasty payoff against opponents drawing cards — is the most expensive card in the set at around $50. Smaug the Magnificent holds near $30, with The Queen of Dale and Bilbo, Thief in the Night in the mid-teens to mid-$20s. Worth remembering when you crack packs: The Hobbit shipped with no traditional Commander precons, so singles are the only road to most of these.

You can browse every card and printing from the set on our Hobbit spoiler page, including the alternate treatments driving those price gaps.

Here's the catch with every "ten days in" article, including this one: adoption numbers measure excitement, not results. Six thousand Thranduil decks tells you what people built after spoiler season — it tells you nothing about whether those decks are winning their pods. The only data that answers that question is your own table. Sleeve up the new cards, then record the games and let a month of real results tell you which Hobbit cards actually earned their slots. Our prediction: Thranduil's numbers hold, and the trolls climb.