The first Welcome Deck I ever cracked open was the green-white one from Khans of Tarkir, handed to me at my LGS in late 2014. I was 22, broke, and the store owner gave it to me because I’d been hovering near the booster wall too obviously. I lost six games in a row with that deck before I gave up and went back to the kitchen-table Standard pile I’d built out of bulk rares. That was the model, more or less, for the next decade of MTG Welcome Decks: 30 cards, one color, free or close to it, given out at LGS events to people who looked confused.
So when I went to read the product lineup for Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit this week (out August 14, in case you missed it), I was a little surprised to find the Welcome Decks weren’t in any of the official materials. Not at the MagicCon Las Vegas preview panel. Not on the WPN product page. Not in the official Wizards announcement post. Nothing.
Then Star City Games went digging through the downloadable marketing folder on WPN’s site and found a “Product Family Shot” image with five Welcome Decks lined up next to the rest of the products. So there are Welcome Decks. They got buried in a PDF folder that store owners use to make Instagram posts.
What we actually know
Five decks, 40 cards each, single color, themed around a face card. They release on the same day as the main set, August 14. They’ll be sold (or given away — pricing isn’t announced) through WPN stores in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. The decklists haven’t been revealed.
The face cards aren’t confirmed either. If I had to guess from the IP and the five-color split, you’re looking at something like Bilbo in white, Gandalf in blue, the Trolls or Smaug in red or black, and… whatever wood elf they decided to feature in green. Tom Bombadil already showed up in the LOTR Commander decks so it probably isn’t him. I genuinely don’t know. I’m guessing.
Forty cards is the part that surprised me. The 2024 Welcome Decks were 30 cards each and built around mixing two of them together into a janky 60-card deck — basically Jumpstart with training wheels. These 40-card decks won’t do that math: 40 plus 40 is 80, not 60, so they’re built to be played as-is. Which is fine, except it makes them a different product than the Welcome Decks people remember.
What collectors should actually watch
Look, Welcome Decks aren’t where the value is. They never have been. They’re loss-leader product designed to put cards in beginner hands so those beginners come back and buy actual booster packs. The contents are usually reprints with no premium treatments. If you’ve got a binder full of mythics, you’re not going to care that there’s a free 40-card mono-white deck with a Bilbo face card.
Or are you? The thing about Universes Beyond Welcome Decks is they’re the cheapest way to get the IP-themed face card. Bilbo Luckwearer’s Hobbit preorder is sitting around $2.99 on Scryfall right now. The Welcome Deck version probably won’t dent that, but the art might be different. We don’t actually know yet. Welcome Decks usually use the same printings as the main set, just on slightly downgraded card stock. Sometimes the face card gets a unique treatment for the deck only, and that copy ends up worth more than the regular printing for a few weeks until reprints catch up.
So yeah. Welcome Decks. I keep thinking about how they were almost not a thing for this set. Wizards is making seven Magic sets this year, and one of those sets had its entire beginner product line basically forgotten by the marketing team until somebody opened the wrong folder. That’s not nothing. It either means they’re a last-minute addition, or it means somebody at WotC is sitting in a meeting next week getting yelled at for missing a slide.
The 40-card thing is worth a second look
Going from 30 cards to 40 is a real format change. Thirty cards was the magic Jumpstart number — small enough to be functional with two combined, tight curve, easy to teach. Forty cards is what you get with Starter Decks (those have lands), Planeswalker Decks (defunct), and now this. It’s awkwardly between “intro thing” and “actual deck.”
Maybe the idea is “buy two, hand the second one to a friend, play singleton 40-card Magic at the kitchen table.” Or maybe Wizards is testing a Starter Deck rebrand and didn’t want to call it that yet. I don’t actually know what they’re going for. The decklists will tell us. If they include lands, they’re starter decks in everything but name. If they don’t, they’re going to look more like Jumpstart half-decks.
A purely functional note: the decks will be available in the six languages mentioned above, sold through WPN stores, and pricing is TBD. The decklists haven’t been revealed. We’re probably looking at mid-July for a full reveal based on past timing for set announcements.
How I’d handle this if I scan my collection
If you’re tracking your collection in an app like Eldwyn, the Welcome Decks are easy to plan for. Three things.
First, when the decklists drop, pull the list and pre-tag those cards in your collection so you can spot when you’ve already got copies. Most of what’s in Welcome Decks will be reprints from the main set or older commons and uncommons you probably already own.
Second, if you go to a Hobbit release event and grab a Welcome Deck, scan it before you sleeve it. Welcome Deck face cards sometimes get unique art treatments that don’t appear in the main set, and you want those flagged separately in your collection. Even if the face card is the same printing as the main set’s version, scanning the deck en masse is faster than scanning the cards later one at a time. I scanned a 2024 Welcome Deck for my nephew last December (the white one) and it came out to about $4.50 in total singles. He didn’t care about the value; he just wanted to know which card was the most powerful. (It was the Pacifism. He played it on every creature I cast for an entire afternoon and we had to talk about win conditions afterward.)
Third, don’t pay singles money for the Welcome Deck contents. The reprints almost never beat whatever the deck costs in retail unless one of the cards spikes hard, and the rares in Welcome Decks are usually intentionally mid. If the deck is given out free at a release event, sure, take it. If your LGS is charging $15 for one, the math probably doesn’t work unless you really want the face card.
Why I think this matters for the August release
If you don’t run an LGS but you scan your collection, the Welcome Decks matter in a smaller way than they used to. Hobbit will attract a lot of people who haven’t played in years, or ever — people who watched the movies as kids and saw “Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit” on a Target shelf and decided to give it a try. Some of them will walk into your shop with Welcome Decks and want to know if anything is “worth money.” That’s a fine entry point. The honest answer is “probably not but let me scan it.”
The bigger thing is the IP creep. Seven sets this year, four of them Universes Beyond, and now the Welcome Decks themselves are Tolkien-branded. I’m not sure how I feel about that. There’s a version of this where new players walk into an LGS, get handed a Hobbit-themed Welcome Deck, and become Magic players for life because of Bilbo. There’s also a version where they buy the Welcome Deck, take it home, and never come back because they wanted to play a Hobbit board game and didn’t know they were getting a TCG. Both have probably already happened in playtesting.
If you want a fuller read on what to watch in the Hobbit set, the Hobbit collector first look covers the bigger product lineup. The 2026 theme decks post is the same kind of question applied to the 60-card decks. And if you’re trying to plan ahead for the August release weekend, prerelease prep for 100+ new cards is probably more useful than this post is. I’ll come back with the actual decklists in July when (if) they drop. Until then, keep an eye on your LGS — the family shot showed the boxes look pretty distinct, so they’ll be hard to miss on the shelf.