Adventures in the Forgotten Realm Spoilers: Daily Roundup for May 20, 2021

Wizards of the Coast gave us a sneak peak today at a few brand new cards in the upcoming set Adventures in the Forgotten Realm, the much anticipated crossover with the Dungeons and Dragons universe. Check out the details below, and make sure to visit our complete spoilers page which will be updated daily.

Lolth, Spider Queen:

Lolth is the first planeswalker that we’ve gotten a look at from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, and it has a unique design to be sure. Static planeswalker abilities return, with Lolth’s ability being reminiscent of Garruk, Cursed Huntsman from Eldraine- it has no activated abilities that allow it to gain loyalty, instead relying only on its static ability. Five mana for a four loyalty planeswalker may be a big ask, but the static ability means that Lolth’s loyalty can increase by as much as the deck around it will allow. It’s possible that you could even activate its ultimate on the turn it’s played in the right shell. Decks built around Pest Summoning and Plumb the Forbidden come to mind as a potential home for Lolth in Standard, especially since Lolth can create two tokens itself to fuel the sacrifice engine.

Bruenor Battlehammer

Wizards has been experimenting with many different ways to make equipment cards more playable by addressing the classic problem with equipment: they usually require significant mana investment due to the equip cost. If your creature eats a removal spell after you have paid the both the casting and the equip cost, it results in a major tempo swing in favor of your opponent. Cards like Embercleave and Maul of the Skyclaves have approached this problem by essentially giving one free equip when they enter the battlefield, but now we see Bruenor Battlehammer taking a slightly different approach- allowing the player to have one free equip activation each turn. It will be interesting to see what effect this card might have in Standard where several powerful equipment cards already see play, and Bruenor is sure to see play in equipment decks in the Commander format as well.

Drizzt Do’Urden

Last but not least, we have Drizzt Do’Urden, a five mana legendary creature that comes with a cat companion in the form of a 4/1 trampling token. This card is difficult to evaluate on multiple levels, but seven power on a five mana spell split between two bodies is a very good rate. The last ability on Drizzt is no joke either, especially given that he has double strike. There might not be an existing archetype in Standard that Drizzt can slot right into, but it’s possible that this card is efficient enough that mono green decks will want to splash white or there may be new archetypes that form around it. After all, we have seen that the ruthless efficiency of Lovestruck Beast – which very similarly creates two efficient bodies on one card – is powerful enough to be a staple across multiple archetypes.