I'm currently taking a break from playing the Limited Arena Champs Qualifier which has gone pretty well so far. I've won far more matches than I lost, and converted my first run by doing exactly what I said I wouldn't: drafting white. The Arena Limited Champs format has been announced, complete with a 250k prize pool. Sure enough, Reality Fracture and Star Trek will be the two formats we get to play in the event, and regardless of how I do this weekend I have an invite for that event locked up. We'll be playing best of three for once, which means as soon as this 2,000 Prize cash tournament weekend is over, I'll be pivoting my play and content to best of three Limited. For now I'd like to discuss when and why we should get into aggressive decks in the current Reality Fracture environment. Like myself, almost everyone wants to draft Blue in this event. There's a lot of quality drafters and players, and while us Limited diehards will get to play softer opponents without ranks being involved, we still need to navigate the drafts well to give ourselves a good chance. My current feeling is to let the draft come to me and take what I'm given. It's honestly a rarity these days because the rares and uncommons tend to be really strong relative to commons, and Reality Fracture is no different. However, I don't like playing slow grindy decks that can't create some inevitability, and that often happens if you're forcing those decks despite others at the table not giving you late pick value cards. You just end up bringing a knife to a gun fight. Aggressive white decks are a great place to be in my opinion if a majority of players try to play slower magic. There's a lot of value to be gained in the least drafted color, and you can really punish opponents who keep slower draws. Here's my first deck of the event, which went 7-0: BW Aggro Funnily enough in the Arena Direct BW Aggro was also a 7-0 deck for me, and I don't think I've drafted this archetype at all before. We can find lifegain synergies, or pile up on Empower Jace to make sure we're never running out of gas while also cranking up the pressure. This deck relied heavily on lifegain synergies between Lyra, Archangel of Dawn and the Unflinching Hortimancers. Murmuring Volume was a late addition when I realized I had the ghouls, but I also don't like playing 17 or more lands in this archetype because you really need to draw spells together to turn the diamonds in the rough into actual diamonds. Black-white has access to great removal so it's easy to keep pushing damage if you can get on the board quickly as a lot of the soup decks in this format need to take turns to set up with cards like Protege's Awakening or Way of the Mind Sculptor. Those are turns you need to get in for big chunks of damage. Aggro decks do have a bit of an issue with Empower Jace as you don't want to spend a lot of your damage output on hitting Empowered Jaces, so attacking him becomes incredibly contextual. Often times I'll attack a 3-loyalty Jace for like 1 or 2 damage instead of killing it outright, enabling me to get the opponent in lethal range. The longer the game goes, the worse it becomes for you. Yoshimaru, Beloved Companion made an appearance in my deck for the first time and it was great with the Twisted Fates on multiple occasions, but it does feel quite bad to play on turn 3 since it's easily killed and almost always outsized. Aside from black, I really like blue as a supporting color for white aggro decks. Unsummon can become an all-star if you can pressure the opponent enough, making it a great card to pick up in the middle of a pack. Blue is obviously the best color in the format, but you also utilize cards other decks don't necessarily pick early and can focus a bit on surveil synergies to make your late pick Phantasms really do work. Azorious Aggro Here's an Azorious Deck I got close to trophying with and came up just short. Rakdos is another aggro deck that has an extremely high ceiling, however I find you need a lot of uncommons to make it really fire on all cylinders, so I tend to avoid it unless I pick up some of the Rakdos uncommons later in a pack. Stingerquill Voxmancer is a huge enabler for a lot of the archetype and without it I really don't like Rakdos aggro all that much. Often I just run out of gas without any real plan for a long game but cross my fingers I draw enough burn to finish the job. Even with blue highly contested you can still play soupy decks, but a lot of them will focus on red uncommons such as Kiora of Fire and Ashes or Craftwork Crusher. I tend to draft those Gruul+ decks as Jund if I'm not Temur. I think Gruul gets to splash for any removal pretty easily with access to cards like Fblthp, Knows the Way and Something Worth Saving in addition to landcyclers and Murmuring Volume. Green decks also ramp often, making the landcyclers a lot better than in other archetypes because they give you flood resistance in addition to extra colored sources for your splashes. Aggro decks can really punish these landcycler starts though, which is why I'm slowly coming around to attacking their life total more, and slowing down on trying to win a resources arms race. I do really want to be in white if I'm aggressive though because it has a lot of lifegain and counter synergies that I think help push you over the hump. I'm excited to get started on best of three this next week but for now I'm going to get back to trying to earn some cash this weekend. For everyone playing I hope you managed to make some cash yourselves!

I usually write quite a bit about Booster Draft when a new set comes out, and generally the Draft format is just a more curated experience of Limited than Sealed. With the newer structure of Arena that's constantly putting out Arena Directs (seemingly every other week), Sealed is a much more useful skill than it used to be. While the Hobbit Sealed format was not very popular, I actually found it a bit refreshing. There was only a handful of truly broken rares, and most of the sealed decks played Black cards of some variety because of how deep the color was. Reality Fracture is almost the polar opposite of Hobbit. In Reality Fracture you're not ignoring any colors, and should be focusing a lot more on playing your bomb rares. Hopefully you have some, because despite what a lot of the Sealed truthers will have you believe, the rares are extremely important in a format this grindy. Generally the first thing you should be looking at when opening a sealed pool is your rares, obviously, but after that you should look at your fixing and in Reality Fracture that includes land cyclers. A lot of formats you don't want to rely heavily on land cycling as part of your mana base, but in this format you absolutely can, and should. While aggressive decks exist, most people build their deck with a bunch of colors, whether it's correct for their pool, or not. When I think it's correct to build your deck a bunch of different colors, and in a way that wants to play long drawn out games, is when you have all the tools necessary, or at least a lot of them. To play long games and win you need bombs, removal, and functional mana so you can actually get to the mid and end game. Bombs is pluralized for a reason. Just because you have an Ajani Unrelenting doesn't give you inevitability. This format has crazy amounts of card advantage, and while Ajani can reset the board and win quickly if unchecked, this format is also quite good at dealing with planeswalkers. That means Ajani won't single-handedly carry an otherwise bad pool, you need to be able to keep up with the opponent's engines and play a normal game of Magic. You want to avoid filler in this format because you're going to see a large percentage of your deck. This means you want to put cards in your deck that generate more than just a single card's worth of value if possible. This comes in so many forms in this set: Cards that create Heartwoods, have some other prepared value, draw raw cards, or at the very least remove problematic creatures. Anything that empowers Jace is by default more than 1 card worth of value. Aside from rares, there a few really key uncommons in the format from my experience. Number one is, of course, Kiora of Fire and Ashes. Kiora is one of the best cards in the format and a card you obviously want to priorize playing. Craftwork Crusher is next on the list. Craftwork Crusher almost always dominates the battlefield, generates value, and removes problematic creatures. I think both of the cards I listed are pretty obviously strong, and the one that I think gets a lot less attention is Way of the Mindsculptor. Way of the Mindsculptor with any additional Empower Jace support allows you to churn through your deck aggressively, and find threats or removal almost at will. Since the format is all about keeping your opponents best threats off the battlefield and deploying your own (as opposed to formats that favor tempo) Way of the Mindsculptor is a card I almost always squeeze into my deck, even as a splash, as long as I'm empowering Jace enough. Additionally, Way of the Mindsculptor almost always comes with Way of the Paradox, and the synergy between the two is absolutely incredible. It allows you to draw through your deck quickly and also make extra land drops so you can cast your extra cards even faster. Example Sealed As far as color balance, I think white is the weakest color, but not like some colors in Hobbit where it's unplayable. If anything, the issue is how strong blue is relative to other colors. At common we have Mindseeker Oculus which is just unbelievably strong for a common, and fuels Way of the Mindsculptor in addition to getting on board early and generating card advantage. While I do think the best decks are just playing 3-5 colors with a lot of good rares, sometimes your pool is just not good enough to play long games. People have realized you can play slower decks but you can also take advantage of that and do something lower to the ground. Here's a 7-0 deck that's extremely unpowered, and attacking people trying to play a slower grindier game. BW Aggro Sealed This deck had a lot of hard hitting cheap creatures and removal, but basically no rares. While I did have Repurposed Enforcer and a Darklight Phoenix, these aren't exactly the highest impact rares, and Darklight Phoenix is just a Snare Thopter for the most part. This deck could keep up against grindier ones because of all the Empower Jace attached to random three-power bodies, allowing me to rarely flood out and continue to draw gas. I had a small self-mill package with a few payoffs in the graveyard, but mostly it just turned the Metamages into fliers to close the games out. This is certainly one of the most underpowered decks I opened but I hit the right matchups and was able to close out some closer games with tight play and aggressive starts leaving my opponents on the back foot. I do feel really burned out playing this format because the decks all feel extremely similar. While there's a lot of "pretend" archetypes, people are mostly just playing Empower Jace synergies and great rares, and you can almost be sure if someone has Mountain in their deck they're casting Kiora. We're mostly building our deck with removal and the few powerful threats at lower rarities. Overall, I liked Hobbit Sealed more than this format because Hobbit Sealed felt like a much more level playing field where the play mattered quite a bit, and understanding how to sequence into Cruel Bent Blade paid off a lot. In Reality Fracture Sealed if you open a lower than average pool it feels really difficult to put together a winning deck. With the Arena Champs qualifier next weekend I'll pivot most of my attention back to Booster Draft, and may even play in a paper Limited Champs Qualifier at the end of the month, schedule permitting. It seems like the reception of this format is overall positive, which is great because it's the kind of format I generally enjoy, however this one just isn't quite hitting for me. I still like it, just not as much as formats that felt a lot more fleshed out like MOM and SOS.

After early access and even on the first couple of release days I was pretty down on this Draft environment. I've come around on it, at least a little, and it's all thanks to one little uncommon. Fblthp, Impossibly Lost is my favorite card in the format, hands down. Well, if you want to count Splinter Twin, maybe second. Fblthp has so many on words on it that it was one of those cards I intuited as a conditional two mana Divination. That conditional Divination happens to be a Divination more than I thought it would, and also it has the ability to go over anything because of the words "you win the game if-" on it. As it turns out, it's not so hard to make that "if" happen when the commons and uncommons support it well enough. Originally I thought Dimir's plan should be self-mill and set up for a big flashback Recursive Recruitment. Getting two chonky bodies is nice and all, but the format's powerful and it's not a solid plan against some of the great synergies and bombs of the format. It's just too easy to go over the top of that. In Innistrad we made a bunch of Spider Spawning tokens and that was enough because very little went over the top of that so long as you had some other interaction and life gain. For Reality Fracture we have to go about things a bit differently. Our cards are a lot more powerful as well, so we get to play this two mana Divination that also allows us to win the game in the event we go just long enough, or, make a couple of fliers to sneak one through when we're empty in our library. All that's really required of the baseline Dimir version of the deck is a solid amount of interaction and the common mill creatures such as Theorix Metamage and Void Extrapolator. Ideally we also get a copy or two of Paradox Shaper but that's not even required. In fact many people will think Shaper is required but as long as you have enough ways to churn through your deck you can easily win without it. Fblthp can also be splashed in decks like Rakdos as well, and potentially even Golgari so long as your deck can present enough creatures to trigger Fblthp for a game-winning attack. Just make sure to back it up with a counter or protection spell. I'd avoid it in blue without black, though it still can work. We wouldn't get the easy ways to mill ourselves, making it far less reliable without Void Extrapolator. Theorix Metamage makes it possible, still. The last part of the secret sauce is just any way to get Fblthp back from the graveyard, and most reliable is a single copy of Theoretical Necromancer. This allows you to mill through your deck and even if you hit Fblthp you're bound to mill the Necromancer at some point too. Metamage is really important because it can also close in your aggressive plan as your core commons that you pick up late are both it and Extrapolator which curve nicely together. Here's an example deck, and this deck would have been just as good with only 2 Fblthp. While this deck isn't particularly aggressive, it can be, and the 1-drops here facilitate a turn 2 Fblthp trigger to draw 2 cards. On top of that, by putting your opponent at a low life total early they have to play the game really cautiously and usually won't be able to outrace you. Stingerquill Voxmancer is nice at facilitating that sequence and is also a body in play to swing with when on the final turn you alpha strike with a Fblthp in play and an empty graveyard. Ideally we don't play expensive cards that aren't super high impact because we're drawing extras off of Fblthp and just want to reload our hand and unload it repeatedly. If you notice, I have literally no Empower Jace cards in this deck, and while that's not a goal or anything it's the mechanic most people are after so we don't have to fight over those cards. We just take the self-mill creatures and play our deck more linearly. This deck certainly may get worse as more people draft it, and of course, as more people learn how to play around it. I'm sure I caught an opponent or two off guard with Fblthp winning on a turn where I started with 9 cards in my deck. That's the spot where you really want a Paradox Shaper in your deck so you can just draw the best card in your deck repeatedly if they stop spending mana to protect themselves and eventually you'll just grind them out. This deck easily went 7-1 and the loss was when I kept a hand without a 1 or 2 drop when that's the majority of the deck. I likely should have mulliganed given the deck was very forgiving due to Fblthp letting me draw extra and the deck not being super mana hungry, so it can certainly play well on a six card hand. Here's another version of the deck that lost no games at all, with the same recipe and far less uncommons. As you can see I didn't even have a Paradox Shaper in this deck, though I did pick up a Sublime Epiphany that got passed to me which won me a lot of games, especially given I saw every card in my deck in every game. I ended up winning every single game with Fblthp's ability. This deck had the whole recipe: Interaction, Fblthp, a Theoretical Necromancer to bring back a milled Fblthp, and some self-mill. I'd like to note that Fatehold Chronologist plays a nice role in this deck as an early value play that is often ignored because it's not threatening but can trigger Fblthp easily for card advantage as the game develops. Regardless, this archetype is very replicable and doesn't require anything difficult to pick up except the single copy of Fblthp. While I always thought Fblthp was good and cool, I didn't realize how often it would be able to win games. It really is a draft-around uncommon despite seeming so innocent. Right now I'm grinding Arena Directs and Sealed is a completely different animal as it's all about rares and raw power more so than synergy but I'm excited to get back to trying to draft this archetype repeatedly and perfecting it. Dimir is definitely my early front runner for best archetype in the format but there's a lot more to explore!

Just a few days ago, I had the privilege of playing Early Access Reality Fracture Limited. If you've been following my content, you know I had high expectations for this set, on the heels of what I consider one of my least favorite draft formats of all time: The Hobbit. Many people hyped up how cool Fracture Limited looked. When I finally played it, honestly, I was fairly disappointed. That's not to say it's not a solid set. I'd rate it as slightly above average, certainly more fun than the last two sets. However, I was hoping for an all-timer and instead got a format that was just solid. Fracture is not a blisteringly-fast set, though once the set hits the gen pop, people will likely figure out how to draft the aggressive decks better. Empower Jace is the talk of the town, and with good reason. It's a mechanic that saves this set for Limited. Most of the cards, by design, are pushed in the Limited space, which pushes out the archetypes a bit. When I'm in Temur colors, I mostly feel that's the direction I want to go, despite it being Simic's mechanic. Following the pattern for other decks, like Dimir Self-Mill and Golgari Death Touch, trample didn't pan out. I haven't detected a massive color imbalance yet. I prefer drafting blue to any other color because of the Empower Jace mechanic. That's my general preference going into any slower set because blue has access to the most card advantage. If I'm not getting run over, I have time to set up and draw extra cards. So that's not imbalance. It's more so preference intertwined with the color pie doing its job. Initially, I felt like I knew who won the games on the first few turns, despite the games going long. I also think my decks were quite weak in the beginning. One set "mechanic" I'm unsure about is the "twins" in every pack. Every pack will have a card that has its twin. This means that as you develop an understanding of the format, you'll often be able to tell what the person feeding you took if they take either half of the twin pair, which are uncommons and rares, so it happens frequently. Let's take a look at a few of my decks and see how they improved over time. First Fracture Draft Deck This Boros deck was my first draft of the format. I could have drafted better, as I barely read the draft commons before the event and didn't have a plan. Ultimately, as you can see, the plan became Rescue Girl and Warrior's Blades. Rescue Girl is an interesting card because it can feel like the best or worst card in your deck. While it's easy to get stuff like Blades to combo with it, it's a below-rate, fragile creature that requires more cards to see its full potential and potentially a lot of mana. I love the card, but drafting around it won't be optimal. White felt like the weakest color but not by a substantial amount. I think I won a single game with this deck, but I performed badly during my "just reading the cards" phase of figuring it out. Deck 2 My second deck was extremely underpowered. This deck looked like it had some of the tools to win a game or two, but I think I went 0-2 before just starting a new draft. This is a normal deck with a decent curve and soft synergies between the black self-mill creatures. Without premium removal and any higher-power cards, it's hard to overwhelm your opponent with a deck like this. Rakdos is a reasonable archetype. However, you want to focus on synergies and get many of the enablers and payoffs for the "ping" archetype. Otherwise, you risk running out of gas against decks with more Empower Jace that draw a lot of cards and win a resource battle. At this point, I had a few more low-power, underwhelming decks and decided I was going to try and push the boundaries and soup it up. Soup I started this draft with a pick-one-pack-one Tenured Tethermage. I leveraged it into splashing a bunch of colors with some dual lands and cards, like Arcane Amphisbaena, that made the game go long. The "Way of" cards overperformed, and I plan to take those more aggressively now, which I was not doing initially. Face Yourself was a card I wasn't sure about, but it massively overperformed in this deck. I could often cast it from slightly behind with an Empowered Jace token in play, which meant I kept the creature tokens I created. I turned games where I was behind into a game state that was, at a bare minimum, at parity. This set is slow enough that you can draft decks for power level and go back to the "soup" decks like in Strixhaven. This time, it's not just a pile of removal. We have to create a cohesive plan. This deck overperformed, only losing to the Splinter Twin combo. I tried to draft this, as evident by my sideboard, but someone else at my table also opened a Splinter Twin and got all the combo pieces. After seeing Splinter Twin on the bonus sheet and a direct combo with a reskinned Pestermite at common, I became pretty excited at the set's prospects. This will be a combo we see more often than you'd think because it's legitimately a good combo that's easy to put together when Splinter Twin is opened. Jund The last deck I'll go over is this Jund deck. There aren't any truly broken rares or anything, but this deck had all the tools I want. While I had planned on a Golgari deck, I picked up a late Kiora of Fire and Ashes with a couple of dual lands ready to go. I decided to push the set's bounds and double splash it off of Heartwood tokens and other fixing. This worked out better than I thought. Kiora won me almost every game I played. It's an uncommon that plays like a good rare and a card I'll be aggressive about taking. I liked the synergy of Jiang Yanggu, Never Alone with Heartwood tokens allowing me to pump Tenured Tethermage multiple times a turn or to just sink extra mana into Kiora. Paradox Shaper overperformed as well. This creature can self-fulfill milling yourself out and getting to zero cards, allowing you to draw the best card in your graveyard every turn. A pair of them is ideal to loop each other against removal. If you can stabilize and compete in a long game, Paradox Shaper is an excellent win condition for that deck style. Overall, I started to enjoy the format more as I ignored the drawn-out archetypes and focused on splashing around and taking the most powerful card within a few reasonable colors. Splashing felt great, and almost necessary, rather than something I'd want to avoid if my mana wasn't ideal like in The Hobbit. The set will be out full swing this week. We even have Arena Directs and Arena Limited Champs Qualifiers coming up for this set, so I'll focus all my Magic energy on Limited. I'm curious about Standard these days, so maybe I'll check that out when the events are over. Even though the set's archetypes are underwhelming, it's still fun, but just not one I'll consider an all-timer like I was hoping.

Reality Fracture is just around the corner (as of writing). It's coming faster than I anticipated, with the Early Access event as soon as next week, where I will be a participant. From just a quick glance at the set, I'm super excited about the release. We looked at a few cards last time. Now that the full set has been previewed, let's examine a few more. Seasoned Cryomancer Seasoned Cryomancer is a twist on Seasoned Pyromancer, but the first thing I'll point out is that it's a meaningfully different card. Seasoned Pyromancer asked you to discard cards first, and then you drew. Either way, you'd get the cards. Ideally, you'd empty your hand and play it to draw extra cards. With Cryomancer, we're always forced to draw first, so we always have to discard. This makes the card a lot worse. Even if the exile effect from the graveyard is better than Pyromancer's, that's not that exciting. This card would be good in the context of the old-school days of Mono Blue Devotion in mirrors where there was a lot of on-board combat. Then we'd get a lot of value out of the stun counters. However, in normal constructed Magic, this card feels too weak unless you're taking advantage of the looting effect for a deck that wants to dump cards into the graveyard while stabilizing the board and getting on board. This will be a pretty cool Cube card for the Reanimator archetype. Outside of that, this card is too weak in a higher-powered Standard. Extrapolate the Impossible This is an extremely cool design. I've often said that Demonic Tutor would probably be a safe card to print in most Standard formats, and this fits that mold in some ways. Extrapolate the Impossible gets a massive boost because of the number of iterations for certain cards, such as Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast. There are situations and decks where you could turn this into a functional Demonic Tutor. If that is the case, this may be a card to look out for, specifically in formats like Pioneer or Modern, more so than Standard, but I could see it landing anywhere. Decks like Lotus Field are the most likely landing spots. With so many cards coming out, and such little focus on Pioneer recently, there may be some hidden combo decks this card could enable. Bear in mind that this card will have you access your sideboard, not just some massive trade binder you brought with you. It will create a deck-building puzzle to solve, which I always find interesting. We've had cards like Mastermind's Acquisition see play, and this is a more efficient version with clever deckbuilding. I can't wait to see a deck that takes advantage of this powerful and efficient effect. Simalcrum Shaper Simalcrum Shaper is a flat-out remake of Solemn Simalcrum, an invitational card that saw a lot of play in its day. While Solemn has gone the way of the dodo, as it's too cost-inefficient in 2026, Simalcrum Shaper seems incredibly efficient for the effect. It could enable some explosive starts in Standard when combined with Llanowar Elves. There's not much to discuss about a card like this because its effect is tried and true. What really matters is what we're enabling with a card like this, and if it can help make five-drops playable in Standard again. Cards like Vivien Reid used to be dominant in Standard but are now too clunky. Simalcrum Shaper could go a long way in supporting decks trying to go bigger while dropping an annoying roadblock that can net an extra card. This is a super nice card that has the potential to see play, assuming the format isn't dominated by really fast Prowess-type decks after rotation. Lich's Relic Lich's Relic is an interesting and uniquely designed equipment, which may open more space for future equipment design. While this reads like a potential Commander plant, it's potentially a solid tutor target for cards like Stoneforge Mystic or anything else that finds equipment and provides immediate utility. Lich's Relic is also flexible because it can be played for one mana without killing anything. This is the kind of card you can have in your sideboard or leave in against control decks that often bring in one or two big creatures, making you thread the needle on whether you want removal post-board for those one or two copies of Baneslayer Angel. It's a solid card that won't see a ton of play. It feels like it's almost good enough to see play in small numbers in low-curve aggressive black decks. Ajani Resolute The last two-mana planeswalker we saw was one of the worst ever planeswalkers. Sorry Tibalt. Ajani is much better than Tibalt, as it has an archetype it's looking to inspire. However, it's much more meme than a real card. Ajani wants you to be in a life gain deck that's playing many creatures to take advantage of the ultimate. This card was custom printed for a deck like old Modern Soul Sisters. However, decks like that are vastly underpowered. You can build your deck around Ajani Resolute, but my analysis is to stay away. The card types you need to support a card like this are generally too weak, and the overall strategy is not optimal. It's cool to see a two-mana planeswalker, but this ain't it. Stingcaster Mage Stingcaster Mage is red's answer to Snapcaster Mage. I'll be the first to tell you this isn't nearly as good as Snapcaster because of flash's absence. It's still good enough to see play and almost certainly will. Stingcaster Mage wants you to play at sorcery speed. Its most fitting home is in decks like Burn, as it can leverage reacting to Lightning Bolt while attacking that same turn. Stingmaster wants you to avoid counterspells in the same deck. Discard works well with it, so we'll likely see it flashback several copies of Duress in Standard. While this card design is tested and true, it will be cool to see whether its existence pushes people out of blue decks to leverage it, and we see more tap-out midrange playing this card. Stingcaster Mage looks like a potential Standard staple for years to come. There's plenty more Reality Fracture to examine. I may continue for another week, but then I'll discuss Limited after I get my hands on it a bit. I'm excited to play it for the first time next week, and this set looks like it has the makings of an absolute masterpiece. Time will tell, but I hope I'm right.

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. 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. Lakeshore Apothecary 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.

While the Hobbit was a letdown as someone who loves the IP, I'm looking forward to getting back into Magic's own IP with Reality Fracture. I will preface this by saying that while I haven't read all the cards yet, I've read enough to see a massive power-level spike from Hobbit to Fracture, and the set looks quite good so far. Let's look at some cards that stuck out to me. Pompous Battlemage For whatever reason, one of the first cards that caught my attention was this little Battlemage. Pompous Battlemage is like a powered-down version of the blue one-drops that have been making the rounds in Standard the last few years, such as Elusive Otter and Stormchaser's Talent. While it's not on the level of either of those cards, this one-drop is still exciting. In a focused Prowess deck, it is a part of your low-mana curve of Prowess creatures, and it enables a Prowess trigger with a free rummage spell. Multiple copies yield powerful draws. If Stormchaser's Talent was still around, then we'd see many fast starts with both. Pompous Battlemage alone is not a powerful card, but it's a nice tool for the Prowess toolbox if it gets lower to the ground. This is a sick card that I can't wait to see played in Izzet shells. Overwrite the Multiverse A callback to Sunfall, Overwrite the Multiverse seems too expensive at six mana for Standard. It's still the kind of card you may see as a one-of in the main deck or sideboard of a deck like Dimir Control as a vehicle to various creature-heavy decks. This is an Empower Jace card, which gives you a Jace token planeswalker that has -1 surveil and - 3 draw a card. It can be attacked like a normal planeswalker, but its existence will lead to a nice mini-game like Battles from MOM. It's a cool mechanic, and I'm excited to see how it plays out. It should lengthen games by giving you a higher life total, as the winning player in a close game will often want to strike down the Jace to keep the opponent from getting back into the game. Getting back to Overwrite the Multiverse, since the card relates to Sunfall at five mana, this would be worse than Sunfall, which is a win-con by itself. Overwrite will likely at best draw an extra card. It's hard to kill more than three creatures with it and still be alive to cast it. Thus, its ability to empower Jace seems worse than a 4/4 creature or whatever you would end up getting from Sunfall. Even though this card is fairly powerful, it's too overcosted to make a huge dent in Standard outside of niche one-of play. However, I like that a tool like this exists and will potentially shoehorn Empower into games now and then. Garruk, Veiled Butcher Historically, my favorite Standard formats have been dominated by decks with solid five- or six-mana planeswalkers. Garruk looks exactly like that style of planeswalker. There's been a lot of power creep and Standard has more than doubled in size since then. My expectations are lower, though I love the looks of this card. Every mode on this card seems great in certain spots. The +2 can pick off one-toughness creatures that would otherwise be in the way of making the -2 sacrifice ability good. On an empty board, we get to attack the opponent's hand. Garruk seems like it will play best in and against black midrange decks. If those exist, I would expect to see Garruk make its way into at least the sideboards of these decks because it has so much value built into it. It can even exile creatures like Bloodghast that would make it a far less effective tool. Hexhaven Invigorator This card has made the rounds on the internet, which is how it caught my eye and how I first learned the previews were out. Hexhaven Instigator looks innocuous, but it has the potential for a turn three or four kill in Modern, which is why I bring it up. If you can Farseek into this with all Stomping Ground-like lands and Mine Collapse on the same turn, you can put Valakut into play, ping it again, get more lands, and win with all the triggers. Does this seem like a good deck? Well, no, not in a format with Solitude, but the redundancy with Scapeshift means that it could work. Outside of these kinds of interactions, this card looks bad. I doubt it will see any play unless used for a combo like Valakut. It's nice to see a green Phyrexial Obliterator, but both it and the combo will likely be too weak. Enlightened Confidant I know this is part of the set's lore, but it's still cool to see a timeshifted Dark Confidant. Enlightened Confidant might play better than it appears. If you can clear the path and connect with Enlightened Confidant in a low-curve deck, you're essentially drawing a card every time you connect, or a high percentage of the time, because white aggressive decks often don't load up on three-drops or anything more expensive. You can always gain life outside of combat and draw extra cards that way. Regardless, this two-drop can snowball, meaning it demands answers early. For this card to be good, we need to solve for how it gains life outside of combat. That's not to say we need to build a Soul Sisters-style, life-gain deck. However, if we can complement it with cards that gain a little life in addition to having other more meaningful effects, then this card should slot in nicely. There's a good chance we'd see this in a normal Standard format. When Standard is fresher after rotation, this may see play after a massive metagame adjustment. It's a solid card, nothing is broken, and it could see play in some Constructed decks. Sphinx of False Conclusions Maybe I'm crazy, but even with only two toughness, this card looks phenomenal. Sphinx of False Conclusions is versatile, lets you play Magic at instant speed with counter magic up, and protects itself. Often, the issue with some of these flash creatures at higher mana costs is you tap out to cast them. Then, they cast removal like Go for the Throat while you're tapped out in the end step. Sphinx, however, will respawn in that step, attack, and add a loot to smooth your draw. Sphinx can also ambush an opponent's attacker, trade, and leave you with a sizable threat on the battlefield. If this card sees play, I expect to see more cards like Torch the Tower in the format and fewer copies of Burst Lightning. I'd love to build a nice blue tempo deck after rotation that features this Sphinx at the top of the curve. Reality Fracture looks like an incredible set so far. I like the idea behind Empower Jace, and prepare is an awesome mechanic. I'm excited to see how the Limited format reshuffles. From my first examination, it seems like it will also heavily impact Standard for a nice shake-up. There are a lot of cards to examine and discuss, so I'm sure I'll be doing this for a few weeks. Stay tuned.

I can usually provide some thoughts in advance of a set release because I've attended the Early Access event. However, this time Early Access was canceled, so I had to do some guesswork. Most people focused on Sealed the first week because of the ongoing juicy Arena Direct. I had a good time playing the least balanced Sealed format I've ever participated in because the gameplay was pretty fun. There was enough card diversity combined with an excellent prize structure that made it palatable. Hobbit Draft isn't as fun because we're not playing for anything exciting. There's an event in a few weeks for cash prizes in Hobbit Draft, so I've wanted to stay focused on it to find a nice edge. Hobbit is a small set, and you can really feel it. One major reason is that most of the rares aren't that strong. While you can feel the strong ones, most can trade for a removal spell. As long as you have access to removal, you're usually not getting run over by a singular rare. Below is a screenshot from a prior article where I made some educated guesses on how I felt the archetypes would shape up. I must say, I feel like a genius. Pre-Hobbit Predictions Black is by far the deepest color. While most consider it the best color, a lot of that feeling is from Sealed. It's incredibly deep, has access to the best removal, and has some hard-hitting creatures at common and uncommon, which is generally black's major downside in other draft formats. Is black the best color in draft, though? I don't think so. From what I've witnessed and played, I'd position myself in blue right now. The commons work so well together. It's where I'd want to be as long as you're not fighting for the color. Specifically, Azorious, but you can have any other non-green support color. The combination of Master's Councillors and Lakeshore Apothecary gives the necessary redundancy in the two-drop slot. Combined with all cards that either recruit or draw a card, the deck is extremely consistent and punishing. Blue having extra cards means it's more likely to find all its land drops and hit every spot on the curve. Because of Plunder the Trollshaws, it can easily pull ahead on raw card advantage, an area of struggle for all other colors. While blue is a little lackluster at rare and uncommon, the commons create this consistent curve out that is an excellent spot to be in if you can be one of the only blue drafters at the table. In a world where people are fighting over the black cards, blue is where I'd want to be. This is an issue of self-correction. It's safe to draft black because it's so deep and can support so many players. It's a bigger issue in blue if you're fighting for copies of Lakeshore Apothecary. However, the deck I want most right now is Azorious, rather than a Rakdos that would seldom be fully open. Hobbit has a real issue with color balance. Specifically, I can't find much of a reason to be in green without a lot of rares. The commons are so weak relative to the format that it seems impossible to move into green without a bomb rare pushing me in that direction. This is problematic in a small set since it's only supporting five archetypes. If one color is completely unusable, that leaves you with only three decks left. I believe this is a three-deck metagame, but it's not necessarily the supported archetypes. The three decks you can draft are: 1) Base Blue, any supporting color (usually Azorious) 2) Base Black any supporting color 3) Boros Dwarves Those are the only three decks I'm looking to get into. The gold signpost uncommons are mostly weak or superfluous. Bard the Bowman is fairly strong, but it's not a great reason to be in Azorious without a good supporting cast. Cards like Bolg are playable but interchangeable with other five-drops. None of the signpost uncommons pull me into an archetype. I'm mostly determining whether blue or black is open, diving headfirst into those colors, and filling out the support color later. Boros is the only supported archetype I want to get into, usually only with a rare to start. Sometimes because blue and black are both contested, you first pick a Celebrate the Mountain-King and find your lane. I'd tend to avoid other archetypes because without an abundance of rares it'll be tough to beat the powerful common core that black and blue provide. In a less open environment, like the cash prize event, it will be interesting to see how different it will feel. Will the player base be biased against green cards? Arena ranked draft has a massive player pool with many drafting only a handful of times. They won't be biased against green so much. If everyone's in the know, then it's more difficult to compete with eight people for the same three archetypes. Even then, I will avoid green as much as possible because I don't like more than one or two commons. They're not as good as the fourth- or fifth-best blue or black commons. I usually advocate for staying open. In this set, you should look for one of the three archetypes I mentioned. You don't have much opportunity to play other archetypes given the set's size and restrictions, so one of these three archetypes should generally be open. It's reasonable to play green if you're a black deck. That's the only spot where I'd find myself in green, unless I was a heavy blue deck and picked up a couple of green rares to support it. The Hobbit isn't a very fun draft set, mostly because of its size and color-balance issues. The gameplay is good and challenging. Outside of that, there aren't many hidden archetypes to draft. There's nothing that makes me want to crack another pack and keep drafting, especially without some kind of bonus sheet to hold it together. It's fine for a week or so. After that, it's basically solved, and you're just going through the motions of drafting the same couple of decks.

I went on vacation to Disney World last week (as of writing) and had a great time. However, I missed the first few days of Hobbit's release and had to play catch-up when I got home on Saturday. I started my journey with a couple of quick drafts to read the cards and get used to the set before diving into the equitable Arena Directs. It started a bit rough initially, and it took me until about my 15th run to get a box. My win rate was still solid. I kept losing deep into the event and getting gems back, so it didn't phase me. Eventually, I played 25 Arena Directs, earning five Collector Booster Boxes with a win rate a smidge over 70%. The win rate cap is about 70%, as there are several people with serious volume who can achieve that, so I must be doing something right. Hobbit is a small set. While it only supports five color combinations, you can go off the beaten path because a lot of the gold cards are hybrid, so you can play them in other spots. In fact, one of my most commonly played archetypes is Orzhov when it's not a supported archetype. It's well known that black is the best color, at least in Sealed, and it's the best by an amount I haven't seen before. It's good for just about every reason a color can be good. It has great two-drops, tons of removal relative to other colors, and great rares and uncommons. Every black common is at least playable, and many of them are outright good. I've followed a blueprint for building my Sealed decks. At one point, I stopped reading my blue and green cards. This isn't to say there are not spots where you should play those colors. Unless I have a few rares pulling me in that direction, it's usually not how I build decks. While Rakdos is known as great because of its depth at common and uncommon, I often play Boros or Orzhov, and, in some capacity, always Mardu. Take a look. This is only the last 22 of 25 pools. I had a BG and UB deck off-screen, two of the first decks I built before I figured it out. Regardless of what colors I play, I prioritize two things. The first is two-drops. This set can be blisteringly fast, so you want a healthy amount of twos in your deck, even if they're not the premium ones. One reason for that is the Crude Bent Blade. You need something early to make that card less punishing on later turns because most players who open it play it. The format is also fast-paced, and you want to deal damage early and leverage the board state so you can always attack. Sometimes this means taking a turn off from killing their great creature to play one of your own, thus swinging the race in your favor on a successive turn with timely removal. This brings me to the next thing I prioritize: removal. Removal is important because there are a few creatures that can dominate games. It's also hard to win on the draw if you can't kill anything and are forced to block into their open mana. Rares are usually the name of the game in Sealed deck. Even though there are some really good ones, this set is not all about rares. Normally, Sealed deck is slow. You can spend time setting up for your big splashy rares, take turns off drawing cards, or developing mana fixing or whatever else. However, in Hobbit you'll be dead before you get to untap with the rare you were playing towards. I like to splash my good rares and play the core colors with the most two-drops and removal, and then fill out the rest of my deck with a nice curve. I don't want it to be really top-heavy. Missing a play on a turn is basically game over. This also means I'm low on playing value cards, one example being Ragged Short Spear. I don't want to spend time casting it unless I need it for synergies. Thror's Map is a cool card that I go out of my way to avoid playing, despite it enabling splashes. It's fine in blue decks for a repeatable source of card selection, but I don't want the tempo loss incurred from playing it early. I'll happily play it if I have a few copies of Stir Up Trouble. I've learned my lesson otherwise. I've also been looking at deckbuilding through the lens that most of my matches will be against black decks. Cards that are good against Crude Bent Blade increase a notch in favorability for me. That means a card like Goblin-town Flunkies is more palatable than normal. The same is true for Fearsome Goblin Pair, a card that makes it impossible for your opponent to cast the Bent Blade without being punished immediately by a massive amount of power and toughness. The black mirrors get grindy with trades happening nearly every turn. You win via tempo occasionally. You usually leverage early tempo to buy enough time later in the game to put together a solid attack plan. You need some way to grind. There's not much raw card draw, and we need mana sinks like equipment or adventures. While Smaug, the Great Calamity doesn't look great, it kills most creatures in the format and provides a big must-answer threat in the late game. In Rakdos mirrors, it's a good way to pull ahead on spells. One card I see people cutting far too often is Gathering of Darkness. I've watched a lot of great players to see what they're doing differently. I often see them cut this Gravedigger effect when they don't have bomb creatures to bring back. You don't need bomb creatures for this to pull you ahead on raw spells. Getting back a Ravening Warg that trades is great on its own. Golgari has gotten a lot of love as one of the better color combinations. My theory is they're winning despite putting green cards in their deck, not because of it. There's basically no good green common, a couple of average ones, and the uncommons are equally as bad. Without rares, I don't see myself putting green cards in my deck often, but there are some corner cases. To me, it's just that: a corner case. Blue seems a lot better, but it requires synergies. In Sealed deck, that's the luck of the draw. I'm more interested in figuring blue out in draft next week after this event is over. There are a few rares that would pull me into blue in some cases. Some pools will be anomalies. For example, you may get six Azorious rares with multiple Bard's Company or similar, and then you'll go down that path. In general, look for a good curve, good removal, and I like to have a couple of equipment to make creature sizing customizable for various game states. I advise avoiding soup decks. While there's plenty of fixing to enable it, the format is powerful and punishing. Adding variance for perceived power is a net negative in this format. I may change my mind in a best of three. Even in that case, you can sideboard into it when the opponent's deck lines up in that spot. The Hobbit Sealed format is probably the worst balanced set I've ever seen. I also find the format's gameplay relatively fun and refreshing. It's a lot of close grindy games where every combat stage is relevant. A suboptimal color balance doesn't mean you can't have fun if you enjoy what the set asks you to do. I happen to enjoy it. There are a lot of small decisions on moving equipment, casting removal, sequencing around Cruel Bent Blade, and a variety of other things that make the games tight and reward you for good play. I personally love that, so I'm actually having fun playing it. I took a few days off from the Arena Direct so I don't burn out, but I plan to play more over the weekend. There will be more Hobbit Arena Directs and also a draft event with $2,000 prizes. I'll be diving deep into the format, so I can prep for those events. Next week, I'll work on draft and hopefully get to play some colors other than just Mardu. I'll let you know.

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.

We just witnessed the first Pro Tour in a long time with a Limited top 8. I haven't gone back to watch the draft, as I've been so burnt out from Marvel Limited that I can't comment on how the draft went. I know Yuuki Ichikawa, a long-time Pro Tour mainstay, hoisted the trophy in the end. Yuuki not only won the Pro Tour, but he may benefit from one of the most exciting announcements — reinstatement of the Hall of Fame. The new rules are simple. There's a minimum of five top finishes from some of the most prestigious tournaments to get on the ballot. Unfortunately, not all top finishes are weighed equally. In addition to the five top-finishes requirement, candidates have to receive 60% of the vote from a hand-selected group of 40 voters to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. There's a shortlist of players on the ballot. Let's take a look below. Javier Dominguez Marcio Carvalho Ken Yukuhiro Jean-Emmanuel Depraz Ondrej Strasky Andrea Mengucci Brad Nelson Jan-Moritz Merkel Sam Pardee Andrew Cuneo Yuta Takahashi Yuuki Ichi Kawa Akira Asahara Eduardo Sajgalik Logan Nettles Mike Sigrist Matt Nass Shahar Shenhar These are the names on the ballot in order of top finishes. Hey! That's me on there. But don't worry, I'm not getting in any time soon. This is a list of truly incredible players. While I do not have a ballot, and as far as I know, no one on the ballot has a vote, which is a good thing, I'll break down who would be on my ballot and why. 1. Javier Dominguez Javier has been nothing short of dominant for nearly a decade now. My career mostly started in 2015 when I first got back into the game and returned with a roar, winning Player of the Year during my first full year on the tour. At the time, Javier was a relatively unknown player. I first played against Javier the following season deep into Pro Tour Eldritch Moon. I was impressed by how fast he played and how well he processed the complicated board state, especially not knowing him at all. It didn't take long after that for Javier to rack up more accolades than anyone, except maybe Seth Manfield, winning Worlds twice since then as the hallmark of his finishes. To me, any two-time World champ should eventually be in the Hall of Fame. For years, I said I'd vote for Shahar the second he was eligible on back-to-back Worlds wins and not PT top 8s. An accomplishment like this is so rare that it deserves to be celebrated. There are far more people with five or six PT top 8s than there are double Worlds winners. Javier is one of them, in combination with all-time top-five stats. Javier is a slam dunk. 2. Ken Yukuhiro The last time I was allowed to vote, Ken was sixth on my ballot. I didn't vote for him because I knew from talking with friends who weren't voting for him that he didn't have a shot at getting in. I found him worthy then, and he's put up three Pro Tour top 8s since, including a win. Ken usually brings a unique deck to events and is an unbelievable deck builder. My fondest memory of Ken involved testing for Worlds one year. I was playing on a burner MTGO account, so he didn't know it was me, but I knew it was him. I must have played him ten times in leagues. He played the exact list he brought to Worlds, a Mono Blue Flash deck. I played Dimir Midrange with The Scarab God, and we played some epic games. I learned a lot playing against him and tuned my deck for the matchup. Of course, I got to battle him again on day one. I lost a close match, which was how many matches on MTGO played out, as it was a tough matchup. I had the instinct to cut Glint-Sleeve Siphoner from my main deck before the event because of Goblin Chainwhirler's dominance. Ultimately, I decided not to because I thought there would be some control. I knew Ken would bring this deck, and I felt comfortable against RB Midrange. Ken's one blemish on his resume is from this tournament, in which he got DQd for not pointing out he drew a sideboard card in game one against Shahar in a top 4 win. This was a harsh penalty. It taught him a lesson, but it was a reason why some wouldn't vote for him at the time. I never held this lapse in judgment against him, but it was reasonable at the time to wait and see how things played out. I haven't heard anything similar since then, and with many years under his belt, his reputation is stellar. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who has played as long as he has who hasn't had an awkward situation happen. Pros highly regard Ken as one of the world's best deck builders. It's unusual to see players with that title also have results as good as his. Ken is another slam-dunk candidate who I'd be shocked if he's not selected. 3. Jean-Emmanuel Depraz JED is one of the best players I've ever had the pleasure of watching. He has finished in the Worlds finals multiple times and has played fantastically each time I've seen him. He has a unique mind for the game, but his biggest handicap is his deck choices. He often plays decks that perform poorly at Pro events, yet still has a longer list of accolades than most could ever dream. I remember this issue standing out in MPL's first year. During my first time playing against Jean, he played his pet Phoenix deck, which was incredibly bad in the format. Despite this, his familiarity with the deck enabled him to overperform. I recall thinking it would be a bye for me because of his deck choice. I did win, but the match was much tougher than I anticipated. There's a shortlist of people I've watched play or played against where it almost hurts when I notice they're better than me. The following is a list of players who have impressed me in this manner. Ben Stark: We were both around 16 years old and knew each other online. We talked at a team Pro Tour and played a game waiting for rounds. He played so well, clean, and fast. For literally the first time in my life, I felt outclassed by my opponent. At the time, I had played against all the best players in the world, including Jon Finkel, but Ben impressed me the most, likely due to a combination of his talent and age. Luis-Scott Vargas: When I have watched LSV and played against him at Grand Prix, his incredible processing speed and accuracy have felt unfair. No one has ever doubted how great Luis is, and he outperforms expectations. Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa: The first time I played against Paulo was in a testing house side draft. En route to the house, Jacob Wilson and I discussed a Pro Tour fantasy draft, killing time by selecting the entire team. Paulo was the last pick in the fantasy draft. He had been silver the prior year, and we expected that he was washed and didn't play anymore. In the house draft, it took me less than a game to realize that he's one of the best players, if not the best player, whom I've ever played against. He made a weird play on turn four that I asked him about. Six or seven turns later, he gave a brilliant, well-thought-out explanation about his reasoning for the play. There were plenty of other players in the house who I thought would make me feel outclassed. None of them did, except for Paulo. There may be another name or two I could add to this list, which has become a bit of a tangent, but you can see what I mean about JED. He is in an elite class of players who are World Champions with robust results to back up their reputations — and who have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. While I wouldn't be shocked if JED misses this round, I would be disappointed. After my first three choices, it gets more complicated. There are many deserving names on this list, almost all of whom have dedicated so much time, energy, and effort to this game and have been incredible ambassadors for the game. There are two names I'm going to float who are both reasonable for induction into the Hall of Fame. 4b. Marcio Carvalho Marcio is no doubt one of the best to have ever played the game. He almost has enough accolades to get into the Hall of Fame twice. Unfortunately, Marcio has a checkered past, and many players believe he should be eliminated from induction forever. Personally, I like to see the good in people, and I hope they can learn from their mistakes and better themselves. To me, people who do that are worth honoring and celebrating. One problem is Marcio, who was banned many years ago, broke trust that most players won't ever forgive. If it were up to me, I'd probably wait another cycle because of the massive backlog of deserving players, and I'd let him in if he remains clean. I believe anyone caught cheating or similar while in the Hall of Fame should be permanently banned, but that is not the case here, and his infraction was well over a decade ago. I like Marcio. We get along, so I may be a bit biased. Similar to Ken from years ago, I would not put Marcio's name on a ballot because I don't think he has a chance to get in currently, as a large swath of voters will never vote for him. 4a. Sam Pardee Sam is a close personal friend of mine. I am biased, but it's my job to hype Sam up because of this relationship. Sam doesn't have all the flashy Worlds wins and such like other Hall of Fame contenders. He has one "fake", as self-described by Sam, top finish, which is a MOCS top 4 in a 16-person event that cut to the top 2. However, he has a win and has shown consistently that he's one of the best players in the game. There was an old pro I respect, I believe Paul Rietzl, who once said that he considers whether there was ever an argument for that person to be the best player in the world when voting for Hall of Fame induction. If I held anything against voting for Sam, it would be that he never lined up like this for me, but he did play in a tough era with Seth, Javier, JED, Paulo, etc. Sam definitely could have been in the top 3 for many years. However good you think he is, I assure you he's better. Sam is not only incredible on the field, but he's one of my favorite people I've ever met off the field. He's genuinely kind-hearted, generous, and happy at all times, which is something I try to emulate myself. I once asked Sam if he could try to get me a PT-stamped card during one of the first PTs I missed. He didn't respond to me or "ya ya'd" me. I love stamped cards and asked for some common that wasn't a Constructed staple. I believe it was Deduce. I didn't expect him to actually get it. Then one day, a package arrived at my house with no return address. It was marked as coming from Denver, so I suspected it was from Sam, Matt, or both. Inside the package, there was a puzzle box. It took me around 10 minutes to figure it out and open it. When I did, I found a bunch of crumpled-up cards. There was Basic Mountain Origin art (the crappy landbox basics I used in the finals of PT Origins), a foreign-stamped Longtusk Cub (the card I made the biggest blunder of my career with in the top 8 of PT Ixalan), and of course, the stamped Deduce. This is the kind of person Sam is. He will go so far out of his way to make people happy that it feels impossible to keep up. This translates over to Sam as a teammate. My first real testing team was face-to-face games. It was a small team with Sam, Alex Hayne, Jacob Wilson, Jon Stern, Josh McClain, and Dave Shiels as the core members. Dave put in a word for me to get on the team. I tested with them from that point on. Without a doubt, Sam was the most important member of the team. He didn't speak without confidence and knowledge. He always had a good grasp of both Constructed and Limited. Whenever anyone was uncertain about a deck choice, Sam was the person we trusted. Sam is probably my favorite teammate ever and one of my favorite people. To boot, he has recently achieved dominant stats, and he's someone I'd want to honor. I really hope Sam can sneak in, and I think his reputation can help get him there. I believe there are a few viable selections from the rest of the list. The voting will be tough, especially with how the system works. Let's say there are ten or so players who could have made it in past years. Three of these are a cut above the rest, and then the rest of the players are fighting for that last slot, so the votes will trip over each other. Fifteen voters may write down Sam, ten may choose Ondre, five Mengu, five Marcio, and so on. I would love it if induction into the Hall of Fame were just meeting a specific number of top finishes, rather than also including that players are voted in based on intangibles. I would have increased the number to seven or eight top finishes and inducted everyone who met that threshold at the next ceremony. The TLDR of this post is that my ballot would be: 1. Javier 2. Ken 3. JED 4. Sammy P There is a list of at least five or so other players who I believe have had finishes good enough to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. I hope that we continue to see the maximum number of players this year and the next cycle. PT champ Yukiro Ichikawa, Yuta Takahashi, and maybe Ondrej Strasky are all valid picks, as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see any of their names written down, but unfortunately, I doubt any are selected for induction this time.

The Hobbit is a few short days away. While we don't have every card yet (as of writing), we have a majority of them. Now that a good bit of the set is out, let's look at some of the more interesting cards. Most Decrepit Old Bird Most Decrepit Old Bird is a super-exciting return to the threshold mechanic. While a one-mana 1/1 flier isn't anything to write home about, its adventure mode makes it an excellent card to pair with cards like Arclight Phoenix in Pioneer or beyond. If your deck can fill the graveyard fast, MDOB can become a real threat as a 2/2 flier that activates its threshold mechanic and gives you an extra card. I suspect that the card's playability is hampered because Speak Secrets is a Sorcery. It would be excellent if that were an instant. As a Sorcery, you're forced to decide during early turns whether to leave a counterspell or a piece of interaction or to commit to Speak Secrets. This card looks excellent, but it may be a bit dated for non-Standard formats. In Standard, I could see this making appearances in decks like Izzet Prowess since it sets up Flow State and provides another one-drop that's not a liability into removal, as later copies will draw extra cards rather than be mostly dead like Elusive Otter. I'm excited to try this one in Izzet Phoenix in Pioneer if that format ever gets any love. I'm also excited to try it in Standard Izzet decks. This is one of the set's stronger cards, but that's not saying much. Bilbo's Gambit There is an interesting remand or reprieve effect here. While Bilbo's Gambit doesn't replace itself like Reprieve does, it can do a lot of work at stopping an opponent from finishing a combo turn. It also works well against sweepers, especially cheap ones they could cast again on their turn, or even a more expensive one later in the game. You could always play Silence and cast it during their upkeep, preventing them from doing any of these things. You have to cast Silence proactively, before they show you what they're doing. Bilbo's Gambit can be used reactively, and you can hold it up while holding a flash creature. This card is mostly niche and far from a staple in any deck. Regardless, I won't be surprised if white aggressive decks adopt a copy or two as versatile interaction and as a card that can function in spots where you lack extra sideboard room. It's not a broken card nor a staple. It's just a new, solid tool to chew your opponent's turn. I'd expect to see it mostly in sideboards but potentially across all formats. Kili, the Resourceful Kili is a powerful payoff for a deck focusing on equipment. It helps activate Storied due to being a Legendary. Once you have Kili and an equipment, you're two-thirds of the way there, so it doesn't take much to finish and create an Enduring Story. Colossus Hammer is the obvious card to pair with Kili. It's cheap to cast, draws an extra card, and packs a punch with the first equip. Between Swords in this set and older sets, as well as a bevy of other strong equipment, there's a home for Kili as both a powerful cost reduction tool and a value creature. We may even see Kili in Modern with Colossus Hammer because of its efficiency and flexibility to play a fast or slow game. It's a strong card that makes you re-evaluate every piece of equipment in any legal format. Fateful Discovery While this card is likely too expensive to see real Constructed play, it's potentially so powerful that it could break that paradigm. One historic thing about artifacts is that many produce mana. If they also draw a card every time they enter, then that seems ripe for abuse, as you can fill your deck with artifact mana, draw cards, make mana, and maybe cast a Hurkyl's Recall to do it again. Fateful Discovery is, without question, a true build-around that might have a shot in any format with enough cheap or free artifact mana spells. It's far more likely to see play in formats like Commander and Vintage. It doesn't specify non-token, so there are ways to make treasures and start ripping through your entire deck. This screams Vintage Cube, but I could see it being fun in other cubes. I'm hoping there's even more to do with the card. It will be hard to find a card I like more than this one in this set, despite it likely being too cost-inefficient to see real competitive play. This is a card I'll have fun with in various Limited formats. Beorn the Fierce As far as five-drops go, Beorn the Fierce is fairly strong. In optimal conditions, Beorn comes down on turn four with a mana creature, turning that mana dork into a 3/3. If you were able to put a bear into play on a previous turn, you'll also draw two cards. I'm not sure how many passable bears we have in Standard. I'm guessing there aren't many, so Beorn will have to act alone to get to three. Unfortunately, as cool as this card is, it will be too expensive for current Standard. It's acceptable if you can stick it and immediately draw two cards. What Beorn ends up doing is threatening to win the game in a turn or two if left untouched. This sounds great, but that's basically every five-mana card, and the format is so fast that most of those won't see play either. It's a cool design and a powerful card that will be a nightmare in Limited. It's too weak to see Constructed play because it doesn't put +1/+1 counters and once it dies you lose the power and toughness buff. Gandalf, Golin's Bane While an interesting version of Gandalf, this card ultimately looks weak. Flameshape lets you draw two cards if you build your deck so that you're constantly putting cheap Wizards into play. We've seen competitive Wizard decks in several formats, especially Arena-only, though I'm not sure this card is better than other things you could do in those decks. Additionally, this card is, at best, supplementary as a Wizard payoff. It is not a reason to build around Wizards. In theory, Gandalf the creature can hit pretty hard with a bunch of cantrips that Wizard decks typically would play. It's also a weak three-mana creature that is held together by Flameshape giving you enough card advantage where I could envision a world where we play Gandalf. I'm still skeptical in current large Standard that borderline cards like Gandalf ever make their way into top-tier Standard decks. I'd love for Gandalf to be a good card worth playing and building around. However, because current Magic cards are so strong, I'll need to see more incentive to play eight or more other Wizards to make Gandalf pop. It's a cool card, but it's not quite there. The Hobbit looks on the weaker side of sets so far. I like how the equipment packages look, at least for Limited, so I'm curious to see what else comes out. I'm really excited to get my hands on a new Limited set.