My store finally paid out the IOU. Three Hobbit Play Boosters, handed over the counter last Thursday by the same guy who wrote the receipt-paper slip in August, and he’d kept a little stack of those slips rubber-banded next to the register the whole time. I opened them in the car. Two rares I already own and a foil Wood Elves. Six weeks of waiting and that was the payoff.

That slip was the whole reason I said The Hobbit prices would move again in September. Back on August 16 I wrote that Smaug had fallen from $72 to $27, that a big chunk of the Play Booster print run was stuck with US distributors, and that once those boxes landed there’d be a second wave of supply. I also made a few specific calls, which is the part I’ve been dreading, because now I have to check them.

Reality Fracture comes out Friday and nobody’s going to think about Middle-earth for a while after that, so this is the last good moment to look.

The Queen of Dale from The Hobbit, one of the few Hobbit mythics that held its price

The Hobbit prices, then and now

Same cards as August, release-week number first, today’s Scryfall price second:

Bilbo lost 59% in six weeks. That’s on top of what he’d already dropped from his $42 preorder, so if you bought one before release you’re holding about eighteen cents on the dollar. Smaug lost another 30%. The Arkenstone slid a quarter. Tom, Bert, and William continue their journey toward the bottom of a bulk box, which is where I suspect they’ll live for the rest of their lives.

And Thorin went up. Sixty-six cents, from two fifty-nine to three twenty-five, which is nothing, but I specifically told people in August to let Thorin go, so I’m noting it here before anyone else does.

Grading my own homework

I made four calls in August. Smaug’s $27 wasn’t his floor. Right, he’s at nineteen. Bilbo would keep sliding with the rest of the mid-board mythics. Also right, and by more than I guessed. Gleaming Splendor could go either way. It went neither way, which I guess makes that call technically correct in the least satisfying sense possible, forty-two cents of movement in six weeks.

Then there’s The Queen of Dale. I named her by name as one of the mythics carrying “leftover preview enthusiasm and no format holding them up” and said she’d slide alongside Bilbo. She’s $16.91 today. Still sitting right in the band where she was in August, while Bilbo, the literal title character, fell off a cliff next to her.

So that’s two out of four, if you’re generous about Gleaming Splendor, and one straight miss. The miss is the interesting one.

The Commander numbers explain the miss

EDHREC published its top 10 most-played Hobbit cards yesterday, and I read it with the price list open in another tab. Here’s the top three:

  1. Gleaming Splendor, in 61,248 decks
  2. The Queen of Dale, in 37,208 decks
  3. Smaug the Magnificent, in 35,236 decks

There’s my answer, and it’s also a correction to the August post. I said Gleaming Splendor was expensive because it’s Standard legal and white needed card advantage after the August bans. That might be part of it. But sixty-one thousand Commander decks in six weeks is more than 60% ahead of anything else in the set, and it’s the kind of number that holds a price up on its own no matter what Standard does. The card makes a Treasure every time an opponent draws their second card in a turn. In a four-player game that’s a lot of Treasure. EDHREC’s writer compared it to Smothering Tithe, and that’s the right comparison, down to the part where everyone at the table immediately wants to kill it.

The Queen was the one I didn’t see coming. A two-drop that punishes other people for casting noncreature spells is a very Commander card, and apparently thirty-seven thousand people agreed within a month and a half. The August me was looking at Standard results and preview hype, and neither of those was where her demand was coming from.

Bilbo isn’t in the top ten at all.

Smaug the Magnificent from The Hobbit, down another 30 percent since release week

I want to stop here, though, because I can feel myself building a neat rule out of this and it doesn’t quite hold. Smaug is number three on that list, 35,236 decks, basically tied with the Queen. And he still dropped 30%. If Commander play were the whole story, Smaug should look like the Queen, and he doesn’t. My best guess is that Smaug had further to fall because he started at $72 on pure dragon-on-the-box energy and some of that is still being burned off, while the Queen was never hyped enough to have a bubble in the first place. That’s a guess. I don’t have sales-volume data that would actually prove it, and I’m suspicious of how conveniently it fits.

Still, I think the direction is right. The cards that held were the ones with somebody at a kitchen table actually wanting them, and a mythic’s price six weeks in mostly comes down to two things, how inflated it started and how many decks want it.

The ones that are played and still cheap

The bottom of the EDHREC list is kind of funny if you look at it next to prices:

Wizard’s Staff is in almost exactly as many decks as Smaug and costs about a seventh of what he does. Some of that’s rarity, since Wizard’s Staff, Belladonna, and Radagast are rares and the rest of the top of the list is mostly mythic. Some of it’s just print run. A Universes Beyond set with a crossover audience this big opens a staggering number of packs, and a rare that everybody wants can still end up cheap if everybody also opened three.

My Precious being in twenty-three thousand decks makes me feel a little better about the August post, where I picked it as the set’s sleeper. People are playing it. It’s worth a dollar thirteen. Both of those things are true, and I’m keeping my copies in the box anyway.

This is the category I’d actually pay attention to if you’re sorting a Hobbit pile right now. Cards in 20,000-plus Commander decks at one or two dollars are where the slow risers usually come from, a year or two out, once the packs stop getting opened and new players keep building decks. I sold four Modern Horizons 2 Esper Sentinels in the summer of 2021 for about three bucks apiece, to a guy at Game Kastle who was very polite about it, because I needed cash for a Forgotten Realms box I barely even opened. They’re $61.13 each now. I think about that box every time I see Esper Sentinel reprinted, which, given the Secret Lair from yesterday, is often.

Not that I’m saying Belladonna Took is the next Esper Sentinel. She’s probably just a three-dollar card. Most of them are.

Gleaming Splendor from The Hobbit, the most-played Hobbit card in Commander

So what do you do with a Hobbit pile

Honestly? Not much, which is kind of the point of checking at six weeks instead of two days.

If you logged your pulls in August like I nagged everybody to, pull that list up now. The gap between release week and today is way more useful than any single price. In my case it told me Bilbo went from my third-most-valuable Hobbit card to a card I’d happily trade for a nice sleeve, and I only know that because Eldwyn kept the August number next to today’s instead of silently overwriting it. If you also wrote down what you paid, even better, because a $7 Bilbo means something very different to someone who opened him than to someone who bought him at $42.

Sealed is getting cheaper too, for what it’s worth. IGN flagged a 30-pack Hobbit box on Amazon at $169.99 last week, down from the $209.70 it usually lists at, ahead of Prime Big Deal Day. That tracks with everything else here. The delayed boxes landed, and there’s plenty of product around now.

So yeah. If you’ve got Queens and Gleaming Splendors, those are holding because they get played, and I’d just keep them unless you need the money. If you’ve got Smaugs, I think there’s still a little more to go but I’ve been wrong about this set once already. And Bilbo. I don’t know what to tell you about Bilbo. The guy’s the hero of the whole book and he’s not in the top ten.

I’m going to check again at the three-month mark, the way I did for TMNT, which puts it right in the middle of Star Trek spoilers. Nobody’s going to be thinking about hobbits then either, so it should be a pretty clean read.