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Dragons love their treasure hoards, but no dragon cherishes their trove more than Smaug from The Hobbit. At MagicCon: Las Vegas 2026, Wizards of the Coast finally revealed the first few cards from the upcoming set, due out Aug. 14, and the headliner is Smaug the Magnificent.
Fittingly, the card is super-powerful, but when you play it alongside one particular dragon that’s five years old, things can very quickly spiral out of control.
Smaug the Magnificent comes in three variants: a mythic rare in the main set, a borderless version with a dragon hoard frame, and a gleaming gold headliner card. Smaug boasts a powerful ability: whenever he attacks, Smaug deals damage equal to the number of treasures you control to any target — and he generates a treasure token at the beginning of your upkeep.
In practice, you need to build your entire strategy around generating treasure tokens to make a card like this pop off. You could lean into dwarves, dragons, and treasure. The real deadly combo for Smaug, however, is Old Gnawbone from 2021’s Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set. With this green dragon on the board, whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a player, you create that many treasure tokens.
Let’s just say you have both of these dragons on the board with five treasure tokens, but your opponent has a 6/6 flying blocker. At the start of your turn, Smaug creates another treasure token. Smaug and Old Gnawbone declare the attack. Smaug’s triggered ability allows you to eliminate that 6/6 blocker. Gnawbone deals seven damage to the opponent, and Smaug deals four. So you create another 11 treasure tokens which on top of those previous six, and Smaug creates another one the following turn. Then you’re looking at 18 damage from Smaug’s ability the next turn.
Since Old Gnawbone is green and Smaug is red, that opens you up to a suite of color options that generate treasure tokens and also multiple the number of tokens you generate. Doubling Season doubles the number of tokens you generate, but there’s also Parallel Evolution, Parallel Lives, Primal Vigor, and Second Harvest.
Other avenues you can pursue: Goldspan Dragon doubles the efficacy of your treasure tokens if you actually use them rather than hoard them, generating two mana rather than one when you sacrifice them. There’s also Dockside Extortionist, a card so good it’s one of the very few banned in Commander, generating X treasure tokens where X is the number of artifacts and enchantments your opponents control (so you can see why that’s OP when you have three opponents rather than one). And that’s just in red-green! Treasure tokens also have some interesting options in white and black.
The one major drawback here is that Old Gnawbone costs at least about $50. But that’s what all of the treasure tokens are for, right?
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