Magic: The Gathering's Hone Mechanic Will Appear In Sets After The Hobbit

Magic: The Gathering's upcoming crossover with The Hobbit introduces several new mechanics, one of which is Hone.

This mechanic can be seen on the card Sting, Bilbo's Sword, a colourless 2-drop Equipment with Flash, with the card text: "When Sting enters, put a hone counter on Sting for each creature target opponent controls. Attach Sting to up to one target creature you control." Additional text explaining the hone mechanic reads, "Each hone counter on an Equipment grants +1/+0 to equipped creature."

Though Hone is being introduced in The Hobbit, the mechanic won't be exclusive to that set. According to Magic's principal game designer Gavin Verhey, Hone is planned for inclusion in future sets. This was revealed in a panel attended by TheGamer at MagicCon, an event that took place over the weekend in Amsterdam.

Hone Could Be Here To Stay

"We have a lot of internal hackathons where we try to come up with new ideas and products," Verhey began. He explained that the design team has begun holding mechanical hackathons where the aim is to "try and solve a problem a colour has, or come up with new mechanics."

They identified a common problem faced by red decks, where they don't scale very well into a game, and instead need to win quickly before control decks come online and make life very difficult. The team was searching for ways to address this weakness in red, and came up with the Hone mechanic.

"One of the possible outcomes was this Hone counter mechanic, because red loves equipment, and you could hone up its equipment and make them better over time in a very red way," Verhey explained. "We'll see how it plays and how people receive it to determine how much more we want to do in the future."

There's always a visual clarity problem to consider when introducing more counters into the game, but, unless the Hone mechanic becomes very common, this shouldn't necessarily pose a problem.

The Hobbit is Magic: The Gathering's next scheduled release, with the set arriving on August 14. MagicCon also saw the reveal of the three in-universe sets releasing next year, all of which have been well received by players.

Magic: The Gathering