Hobgoblins as such do not have a particularly big history. A real Wildcard from Kamigawa, though? The powers from the UA would work really well for a Kitsune, who are usually Clerics or White mana Samurai in the old Sets.
That’s actually my point. They could stand to give goblinoids a bigger and more heroic role in a setting than they’ve had before.
For D&D, hobgoblin really only got some substantial focus in Dragonlance, in which, since it didn't have orcs, they got more of a chance to shine as the big mammalian humanoid antagonists (draconians of course took some of that spotlight, but were, obviously, reptilian). But without other Dragonlance races like kender or irda (and hopefully playable draconians), this seems somewhat unlikely...
May be they don’t think they need to test kender, or have it dialed in already more than hobgoblins and so figure they can rest it further down the road, once DL is announced. But yeah I won’t hold my breath for DL.
Ah, yes, slight lack of clarity there, I was thinking in terms of Magic Settings Hobgoblins really haven't been a distinct thing, more just Goblins as a vague group (there were Hobgoblin and Bugbear cards in the recent AFR Set, but they were just "Goblins" by creature type).
They may be experimenting with a replacement hobgoblin. However, if the Feywild hobgoblin is in the Multiverse book, I'd be shocked if it was in there as anything other than a new variant. It would be odd to make the only hobgoblins in the book incompatible with the ones in the core rules.
