Problems & Solutions for Small Set Draft
I had a good time with Hobbit for the first week or so. It's possible that the juicy Arena Direct biased me towards that direction. However, I enjoyed both Sealed, even though it was unbalanced, and my first drafts of the format.
After that, it dropped off a cliff. The set lacks replayability past a certain point, largely because of three issues I've diagnosed.
1. Color Balance
Hobbit is a small set like Turtles or Spider-Man, being especially similar to Spider-Man. Spider-Man was a fairly fast and punishing format. Because of that, you were locked into drawn-out strategies instead of exploring strategies that were off the beaten path. Hobbit is similar. There's not much fixing, and the two-drops are powerful. Despite many resource exchanges in some early games, the games that lack interaction can quickly snowball out of hand. This is why people noticed it had the largest play-draw discrepancy in Arena Limited history.
Balance issues will always exist. The easiest way to fix these issues is to identify them before releasing the set. A quick fix would be to ensure every supported color pair has at least one incredibly strong gold signpost uncommon. For instance, we see hybrid cards in this set. Every color pair has a signpost uncommon hybrid card, but those cards are often played in any deck. Look at Large Bear, which is a solid top-end threat for a Rakdos deck and probably as good or better in Rakdos than Golgari.
The Chief Warg is the other Golgari uncommon. It's playable but not great, though others say it's completely unplayable, even in Golgari. Regardless, it's important to stress-test uncommons and make sure they're strong enough to pull you into that color pair in these small sets. It shouldn't be a tough decision when you're in a color pair, see the signpost uncommon designed for Limited, and there's a generic common in the same pack. The card should be good enough to make that decision for you.
Hobbit is better than Spider-Man because it's reasonable to play an unsupported color pair, though that's mostly because the gold cards aren't super exciting. One way to tie that all together would be to throw an uncommon signpost card, rather than two of the supported, into each color pair for every small set, so there's payoff for going that direction. I'd want them to be more powerful and splash-worthy. Spider-Man did this to an extent by adding unsupported color-pair gold cards at mythic rare and other places, which added extra shelf-life to the set.
On top of providing more stuff to draft, it would open up lanes for the other drafters. The person playing Izzet won't be taking black cards, so that frees up black cards more than having to fight six other players at the table for it.
It's an impossible task to make every color and color pair perfectly balanced. However, if you make cards strong enough to pull someone into a wide-open lane, you can ensure every color pair is represented in each pod. If some of these signpost cards aren't there, there's no reason to dive into that color pair. Even if you open a great rare, there's no additional upside left.
2. Singular Card Archetypes
Spider-Man and Hobbit have the same best archetype — Azorius.
The keyword was "modified" in Spider-Man. It used various +1/+1 counters on cards to achieve that goal. They did a good job with the card design to make that a real possibility, with the exception of Skyward Spider.
This card was the reason that deck was completely busted. It was the best deck in that format. The data may have given Selesnya the nod, but a great Azorius deck was the peak and was reflected by how many copies of this card you had.
In Hobbit, Azorius is in a similar boat with Lakeshore Apothecary. Lakeshore Apothecary copies are still floating around tables far too late. Because of how strong black is, it's easy to get multiple copies and have the sick curve-outs that require a strong two-drop. On top of Lakeshore, they made an uncommon two-drop that acts as a payoff for drawing an extra card in a turn, Master's Councillors. Between the two, you can often get three or four copies of both combined and have a consistent curve, using Recruit to fix your draw steps, trigger your two-drop, and even go wide.
Let's pretend Lakeshore Apothecary was a three-drop 2/2 with no other changes to the set. Azorius would go from being arguably the best color combination to the worst. One error and it's over for an entire archetype. This is likely what happens when we see archetypes like Simic massively underperform. There's a piece missing, and in a small set, you're going to be playing against the same two or three archetypes every single time.
On the reverse, Crude Bent Blade is a powerful, game-warping three-drop in black. I've had plenty of great black decks in this format without them. The depth is why black is so good. The consistent curve-outs of Azorius make it feel better, but it's contingent on how many good two-drops you get, whereas black has plenty of playable two-drops.
While I don't have an issue with these archetypes relying on one card, I fear it's cutting it too close. Being wrong in that one slot can make the archetype unplayable, reducing the playable archetypes by 20%. Potentially, a full 40% of the card pool is heavily affected because there are only five supported archetypes.
What happens, or should happen, with these signpost deck-defining commons is that you need to take them aggressively, and they'll usually end up in different seats. People fight over the same color, which isn't necessarily deep enough to support that many players.
Having a healthier balance of payoffs is important. While Hobbit did a good job adding a second two-drop at uncommon, it would be nice to see a better mix of payoffs and supporting cards across the archetype, rather than just one at common. More redundancy in payoffs and supporting cast, or you're walking a tightrope on how well the archetype will perform and how it feels to play.
3. No One-Mana Interaction/Instants
One of the worst parts about a small set is realizing an hour into playing that there aren't any one-mana instants. This means that every time your opponent has one mana up, they can't do anything, leaving no room for decisions. Because the set is small, you know what instants they could have by heart and often don't need to play around the spells. It's simply, "Oh, if they don't have Pinecone Strike here, they're dead because they only have two untapped mana."
The games become uninteresting quickly, making the format stale. This also contributes to the play-draw disparity because it's harder to come back from behind without one-mana cards.
While I advocate for putting cards like Shock into these formats, there has to be a way to solve how easy it is to predict your opponent's cards. The last time I played Hobbit on stream, multiple chatters asked how I knew they had a Settle the Wreckage when I played confidently and aggressively around it. It's simple. Because of the game's context and the available card pool, it made no sense for it to be any other card in their hand. They could have bluffed for several turns by playing overly aggressively and then leaving up four mana, dead on board, with two white mana available. But that's just how people play when they want to win the game with a Settle.
One way to solve the card predictability issue is something tried, tested, and beloved — the bonus sheet. A well-curated bonus sheet is the best thing that's happened to Limited in years. If there are holes in the Universes Beyond sets, like no one-mana instants in Hobbit, then add Shock to the bonus sheet as an uncommon, and there's something they could be representing.
I've been an advocate for these smaller sets, as Ninja Turtles did everything right by having bonus sheet cards and a lot of fixing. You could cross-pollinate your Pizza decks with cards from all archetypes, making the experience far more repeatable.
This is likely the last time I'll write about Hobbit Limited without any new developments. I'm excited to move on to the next Limited set. I've been enjoying playing a little Lord of the Rings Limited to fill the void.
Comments