'Aragorn, but in card form': Magic: The Gathering and Lord of the Rings are a fated crossover

pcgamer.com:

The next Magic: The Gathering set—The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth—is billed as a crossover, but it’s more like crossing the street than hopping to universes beyond. Magic has been getting pretty weird when choosing dance partners the last few years, with Transformers and Fortnite being some of the oddest choices. But there have also been well received and enjoyable picks, like the Magic The Gathering Warhammer crossover, and a pair of Dungeons & Dragons sets that felt a bit like flipping through Richard Garfield’s dusty high school yearbooks.

So it’s only natural that Wizards of the Coast would take a whack at the grandfather of modern fantasy, and we’ve gotten a look at the art and cards, from the Shire to Mordor.

So far we’ve seen the Amass keyword returning, which creates creature tokens with the Army type to swarm your enemies. When Amass featured in War of the Spark, it was creating piles of Zombie Army tokens, but so far Tales of Middle-earth has swapped that out for Orcs, which are Sauron’s usual henchmen. 

There’s also the extremely fitting return of the food tokens, which will let you ensure that half your hobbits are half as well fed as you should like. More than just giving you some spare life, food tokens are being used to fuel abilities, like Eastfarthing Farmer, who gives you a food token when he enters the battlefield and then pumps up a creature based on how many food you have. You’ll also be able to use cards like Frodo, Adventurous Hobbit to trigger effects by gaining the three life a sacrificed food gives you—all part of a balanced second breakfast. Which is also, of course, a new card that interacts with food.

The major new mechanic that Tales of Middle-earth has introduced is ‘the Ring