Predicting The Hobbit Draft

We just had a generic five-archetype Limited environment. While I was hoping for something deeper with Hobbit, it looks to be a format that's going to be largely similar.

By the time I usually write these, I've typically played Early Access, which didn't exist for this format, so I'm going on pure vibes and experience with new sets.

There are five supported color combinations. I've spent some time doing mock drafts to get a feel for what the decks will look like and how they'll play against each other.

Let's look at the archetypes, explain what they're trying to do, and how I think we can best leverage their strengths.

Boros Storied

Boros aims for a new version of Metalcraft - Storied, which is when you have three or more Sagas, Legendary permanents, or Artifacts.

This archetype will quickly create a Storied token, a permanent buff to any card with the ability. If you play with Storied, Bifur will trigger its ability twice, once when it enters and once when it attacks. It's not a strict double-up, as you can spread the counters out and make it easier to push favorable attacks.

Boros Storied wants to play from ahead, so our focus will be cheap creatures and efficient equipment. You can shave on removal to be the aggressor. Equipment can help you win combat, but it's also expensive to move equipment around, so you can lose a tempo battle using your mana inefficiently.

This will be the format's best purely aggressive archetype. You will need to focus on picking up good two-drops, pushing your archetype's early-game advantage, and not worrying about value.

Aggressive decks have more pressure to mulligan because they take advantage of early-game tempo and can generally operate off fewer lands. Keep this in mind if your deck has a low curve and an inability to win long games.

Rakdos Amass

Rakdos focuses more on value and either using the Goblin tokens from Amass as fodder for sacrifice effects or growing them large enough to dominate the board. Usually, you'll start the game using the Amass tokens to trade for real cardboard. As the game develops and players start to unload their hands, you'll try to Amass a large threat to close the game.

This color pair tends to have access to the best removal in the format. This time is no different since we get a re-skin of both Murder and Lightning Strike at common.

You'll have access to card advantage with the Amass cards, as they will create a creature on board which you can use to draw cards, recur your other creatures, or just kill your opponent's creatures.

Rakdos is one of the decks I'm most interested in. It could be the best archetype given its access to all the fundamental tools in Limited: good removal, card advantage, and solid creatures.

Azorious Recruit

Azorious Recruit is a straightforward archetype that will be defined by value. Much like connive, recruit is an ability that draws and then discards a card, but you get a 1/1 critter when you discard a non-land instead of a +1+1 counter.

There are a few ways to approach this archetype. Plenty of creatures and cards have "draw your second card" triggers, like Bard the Bowman. There's also an argument to draft this archetype in a more controlling shell to acquire removal and grind out the opponent with value using cards like Bilbo Baggins, Burglar, and Plow the Trollshaws, another important card for the archetype.

While the removal seems lackluster, you can pick up enough to stifle the opponent's aggression and grind them out with raw card advantage. That style of controlling Azorious deck will be rarer, especially at first. Instead, we'll see more decks built around Bard the Bowman and Lakeshore Apothecary.

This is another archetype that stands out as potentially one of the stronger archetypes on paper. It's hard to tell until I play a few games.

Simic Elves/Landfall

This is the archetype I'm most interested in exploring as a "soup" variant. It will have extra access to splashing with green cards that find lands. Wood Elves will only find basic forests, which will help for Landfall and ramp up to large creatures. It won't fix the mana, so we'll have to go about that in other ways.

This archetype wants to hit the ground running and develop creatures early to trade off with or establish an offensive posture. It will try to play a longer game than the other archetypes, and its core weakness will be removal. If I'm splashing, it will likely be for bombs, but splashing for removal also has potential. We only get access to some fight spells and aura-based removal in blue-green, which isn't a great combination in a format full of equipment and tokens.

This is probably the archetype I'm the least enamored with on paper. It looks clunky and has situational removal spells that are unusable in early turns without board presence, specifically Quarrel.

My early Simic decks will likely end up just being value cards and splashed removal rather than focusing on the synergies.

Currently, this is my frontrunner for worst archetype. Green looks fairly weak because it doesn't have a common that's a quality first-pick card, which drags the archetype down.

Golgari Ferocious

One of the major disappointments of these small sets is the lack of creativity. Ferocious has been in and out of Magic sets for years. This time we've just color-shifted it into an odd place, Golgari.

This archetype keeps adding high-power creatures to the battlefield and plays a more race-style game that hits early, often, and hard. It won't necessarily play that well from behind if you're focusing purely on Ferocious. A more midrange-style deck with soft synergies will be better.

Ferocious takes advantage of green cards better than UG because it has black removal that makes double blocking difficult for the opponent. This is a nuts-and-bolts archetype that we should follow linearly. We will deviate at times with splashes since the archetype can take advantage of some cross-synergies with Landfall and use the format's Evolving Wilds for fixing while contributing to ancillary Landfall triggers.

This archetype can dominate on board with creature sizing, draw extra cards with some black-based card advantage, and play long games well.

This deck's biggest weakness will be the removal suite. Only red has access to efficient removal spells that cost under 3 mana for early turns. Quarrel will play well in this deck, but you don't want to focus on this card because it would be better to play the available black unconditional removal.

This is the toughest archetype for me to evaluate properly because it has access to everything it wants, but green is just weaker than other colors at common, which makes me scared.

It's hard to determine what the best colors or archetype will be without playing a few games. These days, the commons aren't as important as the uncommons and their availability. For accountability's sake, I'm going to predict the best-performing archetypes and compare later to what pans out in the future:

1) Azorious

2) Rakdos

3) Boros

4) Golagari

5) Simic

The set looks bland and would be a good one to skip if you're sick of these small UB sets, except that the Arena Direct for this appears to be a great value. It may be worth learning just for that.

I'm going in with low expectations and hoping to be pleasantly surprised. This is possible, as the set has some cool things going on, but it's not deep enough to keep me excited to draft it after seeing it all.

I'll be missing the online release of Hobbit since I'm going to Disney World with my family for the week. I'll be back the following week to play Hobbit and find out how close my evaluations were.

See you then.