There’s a page in my Tolkien binder that I’ve rebuilt three times. It started as “expensive LTR stuff,” then became “expensive LTR stuff plus the Commander cards I pulled apart,” and now it’s just a mess of nine cards that don’t belong together except that they all cost more than twenty bucks and they all have hobbits or wizards on them. Delighted Halfling is in the top-left slot. Has been since 2023.

Delighted Halfling from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth

Scryfall has the whole Hobbit Commander list up now, which means the guessing is over. Forty-nine unique cards in the set. Thirty-seven of them are reprints. Twelve are new. That ratio is the story, and it’s a worse ratio than I expected when I wrote about the first three confirmed reprints back in June and told everyone to go log their LTR singles before August 14.

I still think you should log them. I’m less sure the reason I gave was the right one.

Thirty-seven reprints, one very narrow door

The Hobbit Commander set, HOC if you’re searching Scryfall, doesn’t come in a Commander deck. There are no Commander precons for The Hobbit at all, which makes it the first Tolkien crossover to skip them entirely. The 2023 release shipped four of them at around $44.99 each and that was how most people I know got their first Middle-earth cards into a deck.

HOC cards come out of Collector Boosters. That’s it. That’s the whole distribution channel, at $37.99 a pack.

So when you look at a list with The One Ring, Orcish Bowmasters, Mox Amber, Delighted Halfling, and Mithril Coat all sitting on it, the instinct is to assume every one of those cards is about to eat a reprint and drop. That’s the normal reflex and it’s usually right. Print more copies, price goes down, the Commander spec crash happens on schedule.

Except a Collector-Booster-only reprint doesn’t add copies the way a precon does. A precon puts a fixed, guaranteed copy of a card in every box that ships, and stores buy those by the case because they’re the cheap entry point. A Collector Booster puts a card behind a pull rate, in a product that costs almost forty dollars, that a lot of stores order thin because it doesn’t move at that price. We’ve been here before. The Strixhaven Special Guests reprints of Library of Alexandria and Sylvan Library were supposed to flatten those cards and mostly didn’t.

The One Ring is where I keep going back and forth

The original LTR copy, the plain black-bordered one at collector number 246, is at $103.11 as I write this. The borderless HOC version is preordering at $142.

Which is higher. The reprint is more expensive than the card it’s reprinting.

Now, preorder numbers on an unreleased set are close to fiction, and I’ve said so about this exact set already, so I’m not treating $142 as a real price. But it’s a signal about what the market expects, and the market apparently expects the new borderless treatment to be scarce enough to carry a premium over a card that’s been in circulation for three years. If that holds even halfway, your LTR copy isn’t the one getting hurt.

Then again. The One Ring is played in Modern and Legacy, so its price is propped up by four-of demand from constructed players, not by collectors wanting one pretty copy. Those are different buyers with different tolerance for a reprint, and if the HOC version turns out to be reasonably obtainable, some of that constructed demand just migrates to whichever printing is cheapest that week. I said in June I’d hold mine. I’m still holding mine. Ask me again in September when the actual pull rates are known and I might have a different answer, because right now I’m reasoning from a preorder number and a set symbol.

The cards I’d actually watch are the LTC ones

Everyone’s staring at the headliners. The reprints that made me sit up are the ones pulled out of the 2023 Commander decks, because those cards have exactly one printing history and it’s a precon.

Call Forth the Tempest from Tales of Middle-earth Commander

Those numbers are all from the original Tales of Middle-earth Commander printings, and every one of those cards climbed to where it is because there was one run of it and then nothing for three years. That’s a scarcity price, not a demand price. Scarcity prices are the ones reprints actually kill, even mediocre reprints, because the whole thing holding the number up is “you can’t get another one.”

Call Forth the Tempest at thirty-seven dollars is a seven-mana sorcery in a Commander precon. I like the card. I’m not going to pretend anyone is buying it for gameplay reasons at that price.

The LTR main-set stuff is more mixed. Orcish Bowmasters is at $44.37 and it’s a genuine constructed card, so I’d expect it to be sticky. Mithril Coat at $30.98 and Last March of the Ents at $29.62 are more vulnerable, they’re Commander-only cards holding Commander-only prices. Delighted Halfling sits at $29.32 and I genuinely don’t know which bucket it belongs in, it does real work in Legacy but most copies live in Commander decks.

The one nobody’s talking about

Mox Amber is in this set. Not a Tolkien card. Not a Middle-earth anything. Just quietly sitting at collector number 96 in a set about a hobbit going on a walk.

It’s at $76.24 in Dominaria, which is its cheapest printing. If you’ve been holding one because it’s a Mox and Moxen go up, this is the second reprint it’s picked up in four years and it’s the kind of card that shows up in a Collector Booster slot precisely because Wizards knows it moves packs.

Okay so, look. I bought a Riders of Rohan precon on release weekend in 2023, took it apart the same night, sleeved the good cards into a binder page and put the rest in a shoebox that is still in my closet. Never played a single game with it. Never even shuffled it. And I remember thinking at the time, forty-five bucks for a deck with a Sol Ring and some Rohan legends, fine, whatever, it’s Tolkien. Three years later half the cards from those four decks are on this reprint list and I couldn’t tell you where most of mine are. That shoebox is going to be a project.

Which is the practical thing, I suppose. If your Tolkien cards from 2023 are scattered across a binder, a couple of decks, and some containers you haven’t opened, you don’t have a baseline, you have a vibe. Pulling them into one place and getting a number attached to each one takes an afternoon at most. I scanned my LTR pages into Eldwyn in maybe fifteen minutes when I wrote the June post, and the only annoying part was the borderless ones, which never scan cleanly.

August 14. Two and a half weeks. The list isn’t going to get shorter between now and then.