Adventures in the Forgotten Realm Leak: Den of the Bugbear will be Standard’s Newest Creature Land

The beginning of the spoiler season for Adventures in the Forgotten Realm is just around the corner, but today, a Reddit post revealed a new card that was apparently accidentally leaked from the Pinfinity website. Official spoilers start on June 29, but in the meantime let’s have a look at the leaked card Den of the Bugbear.

• Card Name: Den of the Bugbear
• Card Type: Land
• Rarity: Rare
• Card Text:
  If you control two or more other lands, Den of the Bugbear enters the battlefield tapped.
  {T}: Add {R}.
  {3}{R}: Until end of turn, Den of the Bugbear becomes a 3/2 red Goblin creature with “Whenever this creature attacks, create a 1/1 red Goblin creature token that’s tapped and attacking.” It’s still a land.

The last few creature lands in Standard have proven themselves to be quite good- Crawling Barrens was everywhere after its release in Zendikar Rising, and still sees some play in control decks. Meanwhile, Faceless Haven is a strong enough threat to push some decks into running a Snow landbase even if the deck runs few other snow cards, if any. Den of the Bugbear is less efficient than Faceless Haven, but it creates tokens when attacking, something we haven’t seen much on a land. Lands that make tokens are nothing new, but they’re typically generated by an activated ability that’s primarily used as a mana sink, such as Castle Ardenvale. Assuming the leak is accurate, this is the first land we’ve seen in Magic that generates tokens as a triggered ability when it attacks.

We also get a first look at the visual design of the card, which is based on a Dungeons and Dragons adventure book. It’s interesting to note that we have seen direct references through other cards to “Dungeons” as a mechanic- Cloister Gargoyle (also a leak) includes the text “venture into the dungeon” and “completed a dungeon,” and we know that the prerelease kits will contain “3 foil double-sided Dungeon cards”. There is no indication from what we can see on this card that it might be one of the dungeons in question, but the styling does make one wonder. There could be a back side that the front makes no allusion to, or the dungeons could be something else entirely.

Either way, Den of the Bugbear is an interesting card and it seems like a decent creature land for decks that want to go wide. Creature lands are often good against control decks as they are essentially immune to sorcery-speed removal- like wraths- and Den of the Bugbear is unique in that it helps to rebuild your board after a wrath instead of just pushing through extra damage. We’ll have to wait for the official spoilers to give us more information about dungeon cards and what other cards might get this style treatment, but in the meantime, make sure to stay caught up with all the AFR spoilers we have seen so far over on our main spoilers page.