Rough Drafts - A Limited Magic Podcast
Aug 27, 2026 · 42 min · 13 segments
As my Hobbit experiment draws to a close, it's time to pull the veil off The Data and compare my own card evaluation to the aggregate. My pre-data tier list…
So my expectations for how well each color pair, how well each su- supported color pair was doing was that I assumed that black was dominant.
Um, my prediction was black-red was the best deck in the format by a wide margin, um, with black-green being a solid deck, above average, but not as high as black-red.
That white-blue and white-red were sort of middle of the pack, and then green-blue was struggling.
I was really not impressed by green-blue as a deck, nor was I impressed with a lot of the green and the blue cards.
And I'm happy to say that this evaluation of the format that I had was, was really good.
[laughs] Um, we have number-one deck in the format, highest drafted, and highest win rate.
Black-red at 57.2. That's, um, about two, one and a half to two percentage points above the format average of, like, 55.5. Um, in second place was Golgari at 56.4.
In third and fourth, very close to each other, was Boros at 55.6, Azorius at 55.4, and bringing up the rear in, like, a distant fifth place is Simic at 51.5.
The one thing that really surprised me was I did expect Rakdos to be more dominant than it is here.
Um, so I was surprised that this, that Rakdos wasn't as dominant as it was, which is kind of a, some foreshadowing into me underrating a lot of the white cards in particular.
I do feel like I had a good sense of how the colors and the color pairs lined up with one another in this format, so pretty satisfied here.
I did also look at the format speed page, um, which is, like, this graph on Seventeen Lands that compares, like, the average number of turns a game lasts in each format and the game win rate on the play.
And I had heard a little bit of discussion by accident about the play-draw disparity in this format, but it is, it is wild.
I also felt this, that, um, the player on the play had a huge advantage in The Hobbit, um, just because I kept feeling like...
I mentioned this a bit last week, but if you're playing Amass, like, you're in the Amass mirror, the player on the play always gets to make their Amass army just big enough so the opponent can't profitably block in the first couple turns.
And so when you're on the draw versus Amass, you just end up incidentally taking, like, 10 points of damage off their army because it's literally impossible to block if they have a good Amass sequence.
So my expectations for how well each color pair, how well each su- supported color pair was doing was that I assumed that black was dominant.
Um, my prediction was black-red was the best deck in the format by a wide margin, um, with black-green being a solid deck, above average, but not as high as black-red.
That white-blue and white-red were sort of middle of the pack, and then green-blue was struggling.
I was really not impressed by green-blue as a deck, nor was I impressed with a lot of the green and the blue cards.
And I'm happy to say that this evaluation of the format that I had was, was really good.
[laughs] Um, we have number-one deck in the format, highest drafted, and highest win rate.
Black-red at 57.2. That's, um, about two, one and a half to two percentage points above the format average of, like, 55.5. Um, in second place was Golgari at 56.4.
In third and fourth, very close to each other, was Boros at 55.6, Azorius at 55.4, and bringing up the rear in, like, a distant fifth place is Simic at 51.5.
The one thing that really surprised me was I did expect Rakdos to be more dominant than it is here.
Um, so I was surprised that this, that Rakdos wasn't as dominant as it was, which is kind of a, some foreshadowing into me underrating a lot of the white cards in particular.
I do feel like I had a good sense of how the colors and the color pairs lined up with one another in this format, so pretty satisfied here.
I did also look at the format speed page, um, which is, like, this graph on Seventeen Lands that compares, like, the average number of turns a game lasts in each format and the game win rate on the play.
And I had heard a little bit of discussion by accident about the play-draw disparity in this format, but it is, it is wild.
I also felt this, that, um, the player on the play had a huge advantage in The Hobbit, um, just because I kept feeling like...
I mentioned this a bit last week, but if you're playing Amass, like, you're in the Amass mirror, the player on the play always gets to make their Amass army just big enough so the opponent can't profitably block in the first couple turns.
And so when you're on the draw versus Amass, you just end up incidentally taking, like, 10 points of damage off their army because it's literally impossible to block if they have a good Amass sequence.
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