Magic: The Gathering’s The Hobbit is almost certainly an instant best-seller, but I’d wager this has little to do with its quality and more to do with the hype behind Lord of the Rings as a franchise. That, or the speculators who have the current market price of a Tales of Middle Earth booster box printed out in front of them and dollar signs in their eyes.
Although we only have a couple of weeks of data to work with, it’s already becoming clear that The Hobbit is a pretty poor set, at least as a Limited format. We’ve had three of these smaller UB MTG sets now – first Spider-Man, then Ninja Turtles, now The Hobbit – and the main takeaway after a trio of attempts is that they don’t really work.
The problems with The Hobbit are immediately clear if you take a look at 17Lands, a tool players use to track their draft performance. The results for the Hobbit show that black is the strongest color by far, with Golgari and Rakdos decks achieving high win% (56 and 57) despite being the most popular archetypes.
The Hobbit came with five ‘pre-built’ archetypes, but anything with black is obviously the best, Azorius and Boros are B-tier at most, and one strategy – the elf landfall deck – has whiffed entirely.
There’s also a problem with the speed of this format, with being on the play giving you an unusually high (4-5%) extra chance to win.
Outside of the stats, the real problem I’m seeing here is how little interplay there is between the Hobbits mechanics. Draw-2, landfall, amass, 4 power: they’re all very separate and disconnected, which means there’s little advantage to playing a three-color or off-color deck. In other words, this is drafting on rails. Stay in your lane. Turn off your brain.
While we can’t blame every issue with The Hobbit on the fact that it’s smol, with about 100 fewer cards than a regular premier set, there are some ways in which this clearly hasn’t helped.
For starters, with a reduced cardpool, there is less room to include strong glue cards that could tie different mechanics together and make it easier to go off-piste. There’s also less space to seed extra archetypes.
While you might argue that this year’s ‘big’ sets, Lorwyn and Strixhaven, both had five archetypes just like The Hobbit, this isn’t really true. Lorwyn had five very well-supported decks, but five minor tribes too, several of which could work out if you were the only one in that color pair. And both these sets had decent five-color decks, supported by their Vivid and Converge cards.
The other problem with The Hobbit being a smaller set is that the problem of dud color combos feels even worse. Because so few archetypes are actually viable and these each have fewer cards in general, you end up getting the same cards cropping up again and again. It feels like you’re running into the exact same decks over and over.
Wizards has now tried three small UB sets in the last 12 months, and two of them have been stinkers, suggesting this approach is not quite working. Of the three, Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles is, surprisingly, the clear winner. All five of its archetypes are strong, and the mechanics fit together cohesively, which means you don’t just have to stick to the five color pairs, you can brew a Black/Green/Blue deck or go with Red/White/Blue.
I think WotC should aim higher than 33%, though.
As a player who’s main interest in new releases is their drafts, it’s a damn good thing that Mark Rosewater has confirmed we’ll be getting no small sets in 2027. May they also be missing from 2028 and 2029. (Spits on ground).
I have to wonder what made WotC want to try out so many smaller releases like this. Surely it can’t be yet another remnant of the disastrous Aftermath experiment?
Source: Wargamer
