Wizards of the Coast’s latest Universes Beyond set, The Hobbit, is out now. And while we’ve all already seen articles, reels and TikToks of those lucky enough to pull themselves one of the 500 gold Smaugs, if you dig past the card gallery there are design and product choices that show that Wizards put in the effort to ensure the set would land in a way that resonated with fans — especially given the success of Tales of Middle-Earth.
An Unexpected Draft Party
Rather than bolt on the usual eight-player draft pod, The Hobbit was designed around Pick-Two Draft, a four-player format where you take two cards instead of one. Having played a Pick-Two Draft with this set, I feel like it was appropriate to help accelerate the drafting process given the likelihood of coming across the same card/s as the draft progresses. I definitely noticed the smaller set size during the draft, but in some ways this also makes draft more approachable for newcomers, which is welcome for any Universes Beyond set.
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Standard’s Unexpected Journey
Unlike Tales of Middle-Earth, The Hobbit is Standard-legal. With around ~190 unique cards, players of the format will have a few new options to think about now when building their decks. There’s a companion Eternal set, HOC, that features a small subset of cards, including reprints of 40 cards from the Tales of Middle-Earth set.
With such a small list of cards, there is understandably no preconstructed Commander deck in this set. However, there are two Scene Boxes, Crack the Plates and Treasures of Smaug, which each include three Play Boosters and six borderless foil cards that lock together into a display panorama.
Roads Go Ever, Ever On
Unlike Peter Jackson, who was forced by the Hollywood bigwigs to extract three movies of content in his adaptation, Wizards had the freedom to choose the size of the set. Despite going small, especially compared to some recent releases, The Hobbit is still built from one relatively slim, whimsical children’s book, and yet the set needed new mechanics to do it justice.
Storied and Recruit are new, and Amass returns reskinned as Goblin armies. The design team did well to find actual mechanical hooks in a story that’s mostly songs, riddles, and a burglar with cold feet.
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There and Back Again, and Worth the Trip
Whether it’s the draft format, the Standard push, or squeezing new mechanics out of a book this slim, none of it feels like Wizards phoning it in. Every one of these choices points to a team that sat down and thought about how this set should play, not just how it should sell.
After Tales of Middle-Earth set the bar this high, that was never a given, but The Hobbit clears it.
Quest Daily was supplied product from the latest set for the purpose of this article.
