Last Friday, Wizards of the Coast hosted the latest MTG preview panel at MagicCon: Las Vegas. As always, this event unveiled a ton of spoilers for upcoming sets, including Marvel Super Heroes and Reality Fracture. Despite not being the next set on the 2026 release calendar, however, The Hobbit MTG set took center stage.
While our second visit to Middle-earth is still a few months out, we got to see some incredible cards from the set. Bizarrely, beside Bilbo himself, the first real foe he faces might be one of the scariest cards we’ve seen so far. While Tom, Bert, and William are difficult to take seriously in The Hobbit, making the same mistake in MTG will cost you.
MTG Tom, Bert, and William
Whether you’re repurposing creatures targeted by removal, or sacrificing leftover tokens, Tom, Bert, and William can turn any creature you control into a mitful of new cards. Because of this, Tom, Bert, and William are really interested in high-power creatures that have a low mana cost. Despite their downsides, cards like Lupine Prototype and Slumbering Trudge can refill your hand on the cheap with this Commander, ensuring you never run out of cards. On the other hand, because you need to discard a card, this Troll doesn’t work well with small creatures.
Despite this downside, however, Tom, Bert, and Harry’s discard clause can still be used to your advantage. Discarding massive creatures like Archon of Cruelty, for example, can set up Reanimate plays. Alternatively, discard-focused effects like Monument to Endurance and Bone Miser can get a lot of value out of repeated Tom, Bert, and William ability activations.
While Tom, Bert, and William are all about their first ability, it’s their second effect that makes them so playable. Thanks to coming back as an artifact when killed as a creature, it’s extremely difficult to truly remove this Troll from play. You can even go a step further here, using cards like Karn, Silver Golem that animate artifacts as creatures to keep reviving this card when it’s targeted by removal. If you want to abuse this, Tom, Bert, and William can become repeatable sacrifice fodder, even going as far as to create infinite combos.
Sacrificing Cards Infinitely
Thanks to Karn, Silver Golem’s activated ability being so cheap, it’s rather easy to create a sacrifice loop with Tom, Bert, and William. Combine these two cards with Ashnod’s Altar, for example, and you have infinite colorless mana, as well as infinite enters and dies triggers. By repeating this loop, winning the game with cards like Walking Ballista or Blood Artist from here is trivial.
If that weren’t enough, Cryptcaller Chariot can also go infinite with Tom, Bert, and William thanks to their discard clause. So long as you have something that creates mana on death, like Pitiless Plunderer, you’ll be able to sacrifice the tokens that Cryptcaller Chariot makes infinitely.
Between Tom Bert, and William’s infnites and the other cards we’ve seen MTG The Hobbit is off to a great start. Whether you want to try Bilbo, Thief of the Night in constructed, or add Smaug the Magnificent to your Treasure deck, there’s a ton of cards for players to pick up here. Sadly, for those who want to try these new cards, Tom, Bert, and William, included, you’ll need to wait until August 7th for their first opportunity to grab these cards.
Stick with us here at dev.mtgrocks.com: the best site for Magic: The Gathering coverage. Be sure to check out our deckbuilder for your next big brew, and our brand new MTG Rocks Podcast!