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We're just a month or so away from the release of MTG The Hobbit, but those tricksy halflings are up to mischief already – the community has cottoned on to there being pumpkins in Magic's version of the Shire, and it's reignited a debate that's sent me down one hell of a rabbit hole.

As often happens with new sets for the best card games , MTG The Hobbit features specially themed cards… including seasonal basic lands that follow a hobbit hole through the year from Spring to snowy Winter. One card has pumpkins in pride of place outside the door for Fall, and that's where our problem begins. You see, pumpkins aren't allowed in Middle-earth. As in, at all – and the Tolkien estate has a history with making damn sure these squashes are forcibly evicted from Lord of the Rings.

In a reddit thread discussing the cards, user PublicOutcome27 points out that "it's really weird to see giant orange pumpkins (Themselves a modern breed from the 60s/70s [...]) in the Shire" before giving a very insightful explanation as to why that blew my mind. Middle-earth is apparently supposed to be prehistoric Europe in a time history forgot (with the Shire being roughly where modern-day Oxford is in England today), so Tolkien was dedicated to making sure it highlighted local flora and fauna you'd find on that continent. Because pumpkins are found in North America, they shouldn't be available here. Sorry, Bilbo Baggins – no Jack-o-Lantern for you.

A hobbit hole of your own

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast) If you want the seasonal Hobbit basic land cards, you'll need Prerelease Packs, Bundles, and Gift Bundles. These are proving tricky to find, and I'm only seeing the Gift Bundle at Amazon for now.

While MTG seems to have gotten away with this, other developers haven't been so lucky. As originally discussed in a Polygon article , developers who'd worked on Lord of the Rings-related video game projects told stories about how the Tolkien estate came down hard on them for including pumpkins and even tomatoes in their work. Hidden Path Entertainment CEO Jeff Pobst says that his team at the time "had pumpkin patches in the Shire" for a Fellowship of the Ring game from the early 2000s, "and the Tolkien Enterprises people went nuts about it." They then had to pause production while these were removed.

Honestly, it feels like a bit of a weird hill to die on – and Tolkien himself had to backtrack after including New World produce in his work like potatoes, corn, and tobacco. (He suggested that Aragorn's ancestors, the Numenoreans, may have shipped it over.) And as pointed out by Fit-Government8676, "i could be wrong but i dont think there were elves and nazgul in europe either."

What do you think? Would you prefer that pumpkins stay away from Middle-earth, or are you happy for the halflings to invent pumpkin spice lattes a few millennia early?

For recommendations on what to play before MTG The Hobbit arrives, why not try the best board games or the best tabletop RPGs ? As for gaming on the go, we're also covering the best travel board games right now.

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Archie Comics have been all the rage since their start back in the 40s. 20 years later, they brought Sabrina the Teenage Witch into the fold and the rest was made in Riverdale history. Now, there is a new take on Sabrina the Teenage Witch coming for fans of the character with some pretty powerful people bringing her to life. Hugo Award-nominated writer Corinna Bechko , who has written iconic stories for characters like the Green Lanterns and the Na'vi of James Cameron 's Avatar franchise, is set to tell her Sabrina story with Eisner Award-Nominated Artist Kano . And we have exclusive pages from Bechko's comic to get fans excited for its October release.

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The full scale of Xbox's rash of layoffs is still to be properly tallied up—partially because CEO Asha Sharma is yet to announce a further 1,600 axed roles. One particularly harsh casualty is id Software, which has taken around 136 job losses on the chin. A move that one employee described this week as reducing it to the size of a "support studio" .

We're just now learning about the projects that the developer, which had just released a large DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, was cooking—courtesy of Gamesbeat . The report states that id Software was looking to pitch a Perfect Dark reboot:

"The team was also considering doing a game based on Perfect Dark, the franchise that hasn’t had a new addition since Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 on the Xbox 360 game console … Concept art was in the works."

And, listen—it's not confirmed this pitch hasn't been picked up, or even that it's been impacted the layoffs. But I think we can all take a deeply educated guess that it's unlikely id Software is going to have the resources to make it. It's a studio whose majority of staff has been shown the door, forced off its homegrown game engine and forced to work in Unreal. Chances of it happening are microscopically slim.

Which wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has killed a Perfect Dark reboot in the past five years. Back in 2025, a staggering 9,000 layoffs saw developer The Initiative closed , and their version of the game—which had an impressive gameplay demo in 2024—tossed into Microsoft's growing landfill of shuttered projects.

Another project from the hollowed-out studio that likely won't see the light of day is a John Wick-inspired game dubbed "Fury", says the Gamesbeat report:

"It had elements of sci-fi, noir, and Louisiana and Chicago gangsters. It had a modern, cyberpunk-like feel. It had a concept called Gun Fu, which combined gunplay with martial arts. The game was supposed to feel a lot like a John Wick movie, but it was not formally greenlit for production."

Sounds awesome, and I figure if anyone could've pulled it off, it would've been id Software, progenitors of Doom—shooter experts in their own right. Will it ever see the light of day? Well, Microsoft would have to restore an estimated 3/4ths of its staff, first. I legitimately can't think of a game that a studio who has lost that much talent could even make. When your co-founder's mourning their own former studio , you're probably in trouble.

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