Making a small set around a party of 13 nearly indistinguishable small guys with beards seems like an uphill battle no matter what you do.

The Hobbit should have been a handful of commander precons with more new cards than usual. There are some cool cards but also a lot of bulk, especially for how small the set is.

Was The Hobbit Just a Cash Grab?

/YES

The fact they didnt reprint nazgul is criminal.

The second they stopped caring about draft all was lost. Draft is the apotheosis of magic: skill, strategy, immersion, and a little bit of luck in a format with the lowest barrier to entry and the highest skill ceiling

Issue with the Hobbit set is the same issue with the Hobbit movies, over padded to make it bigger than it should be with junk and garbage to pad it out. This should have been either a small set or just precon decks. Basically same issue Spider-Man had.

It’s just like the how the hobbit movies felt! Disappointing, overstretching the source material, and a cash grab!

Damn dude, just wanted to say I love the vibe of that room

1:30 it's ok to pine for the past, when the past was better.

The entirety of UB is a very obvious cash crab. Of course the designers have done excellent work in some cases, but overall Wizards the company has not been subtle that they are just doing this for the money.

8:08 part of why I wish the Draft Night bundles didn't have collector boosters. It's a cool product idea, but they're always close to the price of a play booster box 💀

The major problem I see with virtually all of these UB sets is that they seem to be crammed to the gills with every single iconic and beloved character, moment, setting, etc. that then leaves no room for additional sets to release with any substance to offer.

The hobbit is a story, the set didn't capture that story. The lead designer hadn't read the book so it became more of cameo set. Being a small book they could have leaned so much more into telling that story rather than trying to touch on what they thought were the most popular moments. They didn't have a huge universe to compress into a single set like with Spiderman, Marvel even lord of the rings, yet still managed to make it feel glossed over.

I think the reason there were no Commander pre-cons for this set is that the set essentially IS commander pre-cons. When they decided to put UB into Standard, the pre-cons they were designing got converted into a draftable set late on in the design life cycle, but they didn't have time to design new commander pre-cons to go along with it.

1:45 6 sets a year, but also Mystery Booster Commander (not coming to a store near you) and also the Zeta set (ALSO not coming to a store near you) and Foundations still being legal (but getting no reprints at a store near you).

I know it’s anecdotal, but my LGS actually fired draft every week for Hobbit and I went every Friday. Our lowest was 10 and at our highest we had 23 split between two pods. Hobbit draft was a ton of fun when we didn’t do pick-2. Red/Green was nasty, but Black was pretty dominant.

Hasbro-WoTC don't care for players. Even when they talk about new players joining, they don't care at all. It's all for the stockholders and that's precisely why that omitted selling precons. They just don't give a toss, they just want shares.

16:19 they did reprint the LotR precons before this set dropped. This only slightly mitigates the lack of Hobbit precons as it's not something they were actively cross-promoting with The Hobbit's release.

I still think the Hobbit set should have remained a small set but have accompanied a reprinting of the Lord of the Rings set and as a draft format should have followed the old block format: LTR-HOB-LTR (and should have been designed accordingly)

Hobbit did feel a bit forgettable. It wasn't awful, it just kind of exists. Got a couple new cards for my Frodo and Sam deck but that was about it.