New Magic: The Gathering cards for classic Dungeons & Dragons characters Drizzt Do'Urden, Bruenor Battlehammer, and Lolth, the Spider Queen were unveiled by publisher Wizards of the Coast in a Drizzt-themed livestream on Thursday. The new cards, all three of which have both standard and rarer, alternate art versions, will release as part of the upcoming D&D / MTG crossover set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, due out later in 2021.
The cards were revealed at the end of the stream, after a four-minute animated short film featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, and an item on next month's D&D Dark Alliance videogame, which features Drizzt's iconic party as its heroes.
Introduced on-stream by Magic's world building and narrative design manager Meris Mullaley, we first saw standard and borderless variant cards for Lolth, the Spider Queen – who is a Planeswalker in her MTG incarnation – then both standard and “rulebook showcase” frame versions of Drizzt Do'Urden and Bruenor Battlehammer. Mullaley said these alternate art cards were based on original line drawings from the characters’ “very earliest appearances” in D&D books.
Mullaley also confirmed that only characters who have travelled between the various planes of existence in the D&D universe would qualify to become Planeswalker cards in the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms MTG set.
The Planeswalker Lolth, Spider Queen gains a loyalty counter every time one of your creatures dies, with loyalty abilities that spend one life to draw a card (+0), spawn buffed-up Spider creature tokens (-3), and create an Emblem (appropriately at a loyalty cost of -8) that, if you did an opponent anywhere between one and seven combat damage in a turn, bumps that damage up to eight.
Drizzt Do’Urden himself enters the battlefield with a 4/1 Legendary Cat creature token to represent his loyal panther Guenhwyvar, and gets +1/+1 counters equal to the difference in power every time a creature dies that was bigger than he was at the time. Giant slayer indeed.
Bruenor Battlehammer, appropriately enough, is a fighty boy, at 5/3 for a mana cost of four, gives creatures you control +2/+0 for each equipment they have on them, and allows you to equip one Equipment card for free each turn. Very handy in a red/white aggro deck, to tool your creatures up nice and quick.
If you’re looking to broaden your MTG horizons, why not try your hand at making a MTG Commander deck? Or, if you haven’t yet tried the game’s digital form, you can go play MTG Arena for free. We’ve even got a guide to the best MTG Arena decks to help you along, and a list of MTG Arena codes to net you a bunch of free cards to get started with.