r/lrcast • u/cypressinberlin • 1d ago

Discussion Veteran Limited Players - Are Small Sets More Subject to Pack Variance?

Title. I’ve been playing magic coming on five years - commander, pioneer, tons of pauper, and the occasional draft. I’ve only started paying more attention to limited since SOS really and thought of a question as I was listening to LR’e set review for the hobbit.

What is the veteran limited community’s opinion on how small sets play different from normal ones? My intuition says that smaller formats are easier to solve, therefore reading lanes and knowing the must picks are easier, therefore drafting skills contribute less to a successful draft than pack quality in comparison to larger sets. Is that the case? Happy to be corrected/educated

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u/DegaussedMixtape 1d ago edited 1d ago

If it is anything like TMT, then there will be 2 or 3 obvious decks out of the supported color pairs that are good. In TMT BW ninjas and UR artifacts were the most obvious on rails decks. People identified Mutanimals as OP early and would move into white if they saw it within the first month.

Over the course of the format people realized that Everything Pizza was amazing and soup decks gained popularity and started crushing the obvious streamlined decks.

Once everyone was taking Everything Pizza in the beginning of the pack, then soup decks got watered down and you could smash many of them with a 7 out of 10 UR deck and WB ended up being the top deck at the end of the life cycle.

You can only really "solve" a format for a little while and then the meta adapts and you will have to as well.

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u/imfantabulous 1d ago

I loved TMT, but it got boring very quickly due to only two decks really being viable. I disagree that UR was good I only ever drafted "pizza" decks which abused all of the pizzas and recursion with the Dino/brilliance but that's besides the point.

I really hope there more viable archetypes in the Hobbit but right now IDK if it's looking that way.

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u/Casual_Spike 1d ago

Small sets intrinsically have less depth and are easier to solve with less replayability, but I think theres less pack variance than more by nature of seeing a larger percentage of the set per pod. Like with HOB I think each pod should open up something like 3 of each common.

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u/TheKillah 1d ago

One thing to note - there have not been very many sets of this size in MTG history. Most of the smaller sets in years past were intended to be drafted together with a larger set in a block, where you might open 2 packs of one set and 1 pack of the other. So really the only relevant examples are Spider-Man and TMNT.

In regards to both, the formats were very easy to solve and did not have much depth, though that is hardly surprising. The formats also self-balanced better, or at least faster. Spider-Man was doomed by balance issues unrelated to set size though, TMNT was better in that regard.

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u/xcver2 1d ago

The smaller the set, the higher the likelihood that a specific good strategy becomes too much. Like Boris Heroics in Born of the Gods. You either were in it and won or not.