#191: Early 17Lands draft data for The Hobbit

And today's preamble is imbalance in strategy is more painful than imbalance in colors.

And this was my thought when I was looking at this set so far.

As predicted in my Skeletons Without the Skeleton crew episode, aggro strategies are great.

As we were going to see later when you look through the cards, also the one drops that I indicated are going to lead to the most atrocious curve outs in this format and some two drops like the Desolation Prowler here in the picture.

are making aggressive strategies extremely potent in the hobbit set and there is of course the other side of that coin it makes the non-aggressive strategies well sort of pathetic as we can see by the results of the semi deck we're going to look through them um soon and again i predicted that in the skeletons but now we see the numbers and they are unfortunately confirmed And there is a lot of talk when we look at the new set about the imbalance in color.

So black is busted and green is very weak or whatever, depending on the set.

And of course, it's a problem.

But I think that imbalance in strategic approach is even worse because it leads to very limited... possibilities to solve the format.

If the format is so aggressive and does not have the tools to combat aggressive strategies, well, the whole lane of control decks is all but closed off.

I think that this is a bigger problem than color imbalance, because color imbalance might mean, okay, blue is weak in this set, let's try to avoid blue unless you open some kind of an Atrocious Bomb, but it can have multiple strategies available.

You can make a control deck, you can make a mid-range deck, you can make an aggressive deck, and all of those can coexist.

But imbalances strategy will mean that at least some of those options are not really available.

And because they are not really available, the draft gameplay experience is somewhat limited.

And I had a couple of those drafts in the last days when a couple of times I've been paired to a very good black-red deck and I lost the coin flip and I felt like, any draw I had in my deck could not have dealt with it because I was playing white-blue and maybe I did not have the right creatures to match with what they were deploying and it was just like a game, a non-game basically.

And I don't have those very often.

I usually at least put up a fight when I'm playing unless I make some of my famous keep and I think sizey men in the chat Can confirm.

I sometimes do very questionable keeps after which I draw the exact line that we needed in our coaching session.

But yeah, I think that we should start acknowledging that imbalance is not does not mean one thing it does not mean that the color is weaker or something imbalance is a broader topic and imbalances strategy is one of the aspects of format imbalances and i think a more detrimental to the general experience of the set all right with that out of the way let's look at the color imbalance um Color imbalance in this set as seen through the color popularity rankings.