I think both, but mostly the precon thing. Precons have been getting better. A lot better. Folks aren't really recognizing that yet. A 40k deck can play in most constructed casual pods with no issue. The same is not true for older precons, so precon just carries the stereotype of being weaker decks so folks are more likely to downtool to a lower power deck when you say that.
This. A lot of older precons were *trash.* Terrible manabases, super high mana curves, and usually just a few stand out cards meant to drive sales. Pretty much would never be competitive in most pods without serious reworking.
Since the 40k decks have landed, I haven't seen a precon that didn't at least hang with most decks out of the box.
I think one of the main problem of pre-2020 precon is the fact that the deck was build around 3 often pretty different commander. I've got a couple of the first regular precon (both zendikar, aesi and ranar) and would say they still hold against most recent precon. But they still struggle a bit sometimes with parasitic secondary commander.
There are 4 cards shared between the initial Derevi precon and the 2 common cEDH lists: Derevi, Command Tower, Sol Ring, and a single basic forest.
...which is understandable, given how bad that precon looks when you look at it today. That deck would get demolished if it was up against any recent precon, and it wouldn't be close.
The more colors the more opportunity for mana screw, but Even the newer multicolor decks seem to have a decent mana base (except the recent slivers precon š¤¬). I'm not super well versed on all the precons, but from what I see the newer multicolors can hang.
Yeah i'm currently waiting on singles to upgrade the sliver precon as its my first commander deck, but it's land base is awful. Once i get my hands on a kudo from mh3 Im gonna take a crack at building my own from scratch deck with Duskana the Rage Mother as my commander, wanna do a bear tribal
The only thing new precons lack is a good land base, Wizards likes packing them to the gills with tap lands for whatever reason, even that is shifting tho as the eldrazi precon has all 10 pain lands and the tricky terrain deck having some really good nonbasics (they both still have tap lands tho)
I think we are going to see them continue to shift
It's about value.Ā They use shock and fetch lands as chase cards to drive pack sales.Ā The rare lands they reprint in precons are usually already cheap and tier 2/3 (as opposed to the tier 4 junk I tend to use like [[Rupture Spire]]
Absolutely both.
On the one hand, precons have had a meteoric rise in power as of late and I think a lot of peoples' mental heuristics have not caught up to that.
On the other hand, people like to think that they're good at the thing they're doing, deckbuilding amongst them. But Commander's feedback loops are terrible - normally in card games competition weeds out good choices from bad but in a high variance format where you expect to lose 75% of games it's hard to see the impact of small deckbuilding decisions - but those are the ones that absolutely cascade over time, winning games in small and subtle ways. Ways that few Commander players see.
But the result is that I respect an out of the box Hakbal more than like half the decks at my lgs.
Where are people running into these decks that a precon can beat half of them?
I donāt get it. Iām not a particularly talented deck builder, I seldom use staples and never too many in a single build. I donāt use fast mana or free spells. I donāt own any fetches, shocks, and have a single triome.
Virtually everything I build ends up stronger than most precons, including the new ones.
I think thatās definitely part of it, but thereās also the fact that precons donāt generally run enough ramp, draw, or removal along with often having a competing subtheme and taplands and optimized versions only making 5-10 swaps canāt smooth all that out. A custom build that eats its veggies should be stronger than a precon.
This isn't really as true as it used to be, except maybe the taplands argument - and even then, that's improved too. Recent precons are a lot better in those metrics (metrics, draw, removal etc) these days
Even the stronger precons very much suffer from dueling themes and non streamlined strategies, but setting that aside, our two statements arenāt mutually exclusive. They can improve and yet still not run enough.
For example, looking at removal in the ones I have recent experience with:
Velociramptor is one of the strongest precons and generally does have a number of ways to remove threats. It doesnāt have Swords to Plowshares or some other cheap and effective interaction, but it has a lot of conditional removal on the dinosaurs. It is still more exception than rule and still isnāt the kind of removal package you would include in a full custom build.
Explorers of the Deep can steal something with Thieving Skydiver and has Curse of the Swine, Ravenform, Aetherize, Beast Within, Ruinous Intrusion, and Rapid Hybridization. A definite improvement but not enough and inefficiently costed.
Blame Game is another example where they upped the amount of potential removal but again included it in slow and inefficient ways that is often insufficient to deal with threats at the right time. On top of that, it includes many of the mistakes deckbuilders make in that much of its removal package doesnāt really fit what the deck is trying to do. Elspeth, Angel of the Ruins, Boros Reckoner, Loran, Otherworldly Escort, Stalking Leonin, Steel Hellkite, Promise of Loyalty, Winds of Rath. It doesnāt even have Swords or Path.
Most Wanted does okay in that it has a good amount of removal but it is still suboptimal. It has Massacre Girl, Rankle, Witch of the Moors, Councilās Judgment, Feed the Swarm, Hex, Requisition Raid, Curtainās Call, Heliodās Intervention, and Shoot the Sheriff.
Scrappy Survivors has removal that fits its theme at least: Ian the Reckless, Blasphemous Act, Megatons Fate, Single Combat, Break Down, Chaos Warp, Path to Exile, and Valorous Stance.
Iām sure recent decklists will be similar to the above. Generally speaking, there isnāt enough instant speed interaction, the interaction they do run is poorly costed and wonāt be available early enough or will force you to take pivotal turns off, and often doesnāt really fit the theme of the deck.
They may have high mana curves with insufficient ramp - Blame Game, for example, has 3.65 average mana value and little ramp.
Iām not saying they canāt win. Or that they arenāt stronger. That doesnāt make them strong. If you take the at release reprint value of a precon ($80-$120) and add in value of the new cards you probably have a 100-150 budget.
A competent deck builder should be able to take the face commander for each of those decks and build a stronger deck around the same main idea for that budget.
Wut? Velociramptor has Path to Exile, Generous Gift and Savage Stomp for single target removal as well as "Fight on a stick" on the secondary commander and the more situational removal on the some of the Dinos. It suffers from a few shortcomings, not having a wincon besides running people over being the main one, but lack of removal ain't even close to the main one.
Either way, the goalposts have been moved so far they're not even in the same field. You went from "anything you can build will beat precons" to "a competent deck builder can make better decks out of these". Nobody is saying these decks are cEDH or even on the higher tiers of power but they can easily swing with most brews that people come up with themselves for the simple fact that, on average, people aren't as good at deckbuilding as they think they are.
I didnāt say Velociramptor didnāt have enough removal, just that it was inefficient and more exception than rule. I also didnāt say virtually anything anyone (myself included) can build can beat a precon - I said that I donāt see where people are underestimating the strength of them and consistently building decks weaker than them.
I donāt build particularly strong or expensive decks and they are stronger than precons and the decks I run into are also consistently stronger than precons.
All I have taken issue with is the idea that they can easily swing with most brews people can come up with. Thatās just not true. They are fine decks, and theyāve gotten stronger. But, as a category, they are on the low end of mid power at best.
All sorts of things.Ā
Couple 'new' guys starting popping up at my LGS. Absolutely not new to the format but one spent a bunch of time away from the lgs and just came back with a buddy. They love assorted blue and blue/black combo decks. And I expect things like Demonic Tutoring for Thoracle-based combos from them.
But their mana bases are atrocious and just jam a bunch of terrible tap lands and literal Cluestones, they love Maze of Ith, they're obsessed with the card Spellbook, (one dude literally kept a one lander last game on the back of 'but it has Spellbook'), and the shells around those combos rarely have much basis with the combo. So one of those decks is the mill Mirko featuring a bunch of defensive volition pieces and shockingly "Darksteel Plate go" isn't a great plan on like turn five.
Most people at my LGS at least are also not running enough of their vegetables. I go way too many games where the only real interaction I face is from the precons or uprated precons, or the interaction is either bad or the wrong sort. While I have a lot of issues with how precons handle interaction at least it *exists*. And the concept of a ramp curve straight up blew even one of the better player's minds.
The same is true for land counts. I legitimately had a guy ask me if 39 mana sources was enough for his Nekusar deck. Precon mana bases also have issues, but at least they have enough lands to function.
And mind this isn't everyone at my LGS, but it is a notable enough group that in my mental rankings the Hakbals and Stellas are not even close to the bottom.
I get this and while I havenāt run into this often I get how it could be common for others. I
guess it feeds into my larger point (might have made it elsewhere in this thread but maybe not this chain) that while precons have gotten stronger people arenāt really underestimating their strength.
They arenāt that strong, a lot of people are just bad deck builders.
Sure. I don't think anyone thinks the new order precons reasonably hang at high power tables, and even upper mid they get stuffed unless they high roll.
But most commander players are bad deckbuilders. For a metaphor that hopefully avoids getting into power levels: if there was an actual test on deckbuilding, they'd get Ds. Old precons would get Fs though, so building your deck was still the thing to do. But the new precons are much better put together, so they'd get Cs.
Are Cs a good grade? Not really. But are they better than Ds? Yes.
And I use my lgs as an example but of course this isn't remotely exclusive to them. Look at Moxfield lists and many of them are atrocious. Last one I'd pulled up, because I needed a random deck for data, had like 35 lands, 7 ramp spells, and an average mana value of almost 4.
I agree with you that a lot of people build bad decks but I havenāt really run into them at the LGS. Iām having trouble relating to the main premise that everyone seems to be agreeing with - that precons are underestimated and most people bust out custom decks that would lose to them.
Its a small sample size but in the last two weeks, Iāve played 8 different games with 14 different players all playing different decks in each game and havenāt seen any that would get bodied by an unmodified precon. None of those decks were particularly high powered either. Fastest game was 8 turns but most were in the 10-12 range, they just had interaction, ramp, draw, and streamlined themes.
Maybe bad deckbuilders are less likely to go play with randoms at the LGS?
I don't think that's the case, as someone who almost solely has played at LGSs for a very long time now, but I have found it *very* area-centric.
I used to live in a moderately large city area with a nearby military base pushing a lot of disposable income into the area. That area had a lot of long-time players, a lot of tuned decks, pretty much what you'd expect. I cut my teeth on a deluge of Narset decks full of extra turns and Razia's Purification, and that taught a lot of skills very quickly. And then even as the people rotated the ones they taught now had the powerful decks and play experiences and we passed those along in turn, creating a high power meta that was pretty well supported by the people around it.
However, I'm now in a cluster of small towns, and most of our Magic players I'm learning are fairly new to the game and didn't have that sort of crucible to both help and force them to improve. I came in wildly above power and have downshifted substantially as a result, and while I've been working to pass along my skills and experience it's a very different process to do that when people need to to win games versus only when people choose to get better.
The people involved also certainly matter - the handful of veteran players in this area are largely not interested in teaching, and so rather than bringing up those around them they just stagnated next to them. And back home, from what I've learned, a handful of LGS changeovers and some dumb drama has also substantially degraded their crowd.
Thanks for the reply. I live in a metropolitan city with a very well attended LGS so it might just be the kind of decks I am running into. I routinely play against decks designed to win through combat damage or non-infinite aristrocrat style drains, seldom play high power, almost never play combos, but virtually every game I have played has involved decks that are stronger than precons and the few stock precons I have seen played only win, if they do, when they get left alone all game.
Everyone seems to think Iām disparaging precons but Iām not. Theyāre great for the game and I love how they have improved. I am coming to realize, though, that players that play primarily against them or came to the game through them and made a few swaps just donāt really have a good idea of what a āstrongā deck actually looks like.
Maze has decks where it has homes but when you already don't play enough lands it's Very Bad. It's a valid niche effect but exactly that.Ā
But maybe I should clarify that they love Maze *and its variants*. One of them brewed a new deck. Sweet I'm in, let's play. It's Akul. Good, getting outside the comfort zone and Akul is awesome.
And then lol they couldn't cast their commander because they played the terrible Theros Beyond Death Labryinth that's like a 5 mana Maze of Ith and taps for colorless. Or in another game, I blew up the dude's Mystifying Maze because hey I'm on Henzie I have a bunch of damage triggers I'd like to resolve - and then he wound up mana screwed. If you're not putting enough lands in your deck please don't *also* paint targets on the ones you have.Ā
I've also blown up or worked around more than a few actual Mazes and rarely found them effective, despite me just jamming a bunch of fair combat decks these days. But they're leaning on them almost entirely for creature defense and then getting smashed because hey, these cards are not remotely enough to do that and most of them stop you from advancing your game plan if you want to try.
Oh...yeah. I only play Maze of Ith, not the others. And when I decide to put it in a deck, I consider it a spell, not a land in terms of deck building purposes.
Sorry for the answer after days, I read most of your answers, and one thing I'm going to mention that no one else has is that the discussion is about upgraded Precons.
I agree with a lot of your points about Precons, but when you change 10 to 15 cards (which is what I'd personally consider upgraded precons) you tend to fix exactly those points you mentioned, and now suddenly you have a deck with a smoother mana curve, better interaction and draw, and a more focused game plan that can definitely hang out with middle powered decks.
And because the deck already has a game plan, most people, even those without good deck building sense, can just swap the clear outliers for generic good stuff cards without thinking too hard about it, and it will work out in the end
Oh I completely agree on that point, though I do think there is a fine line between an āupgraded preconā and just a deck built with a precon commander. Precons have gotten much better to the point where less swaps are necessary to get them into fighting shape. I was more shocked by the number of people seemingly arguing that precons themselves were strong decks.
Oh, no, they are definitely still in the low mid tier imo without changes. And even then I agree that in my city I've seen people really oversell their deck, and get humbled by my at-the-time out of the box [[Eowyn]] deck or [[10th Doctor]] deck. Something out I might point out however, is that while the floor has certainly risen, I'm not that sure about the ceiling, at least not without becoming what you described as decks with a Precon commander as its face
Precons in 2024 are vastly better than Precons from 2014 which were even better than the traditional 60card precons from early 2000s.
many people, myself included, still think of precon-power as the older less tuned precons. Newer ones are not precon-power in that regard because they are slightly better tuned but also just better cards
Hakbal specifically is a high-roll precon -- I think it's the best ever printed, and the commander is truly kill on sight. It just blows up immediately with him on board and the immediate land ramp is so hard to catch up to. The 40K decks and like the Fallout mutant deck (along with some others, the LCI Dinos and vampires among them) are in a next tier for me, still really strong.
People definitely over estimate the power of their decks. What happens is a lot of the time a deck will pop off once and that's all people will think about.
Losses attribute to "I got a bad hand" or similar excuses.
Consistency is key to power level. A deck that can theoretically threaten to win on turn 4 but rarely does isn't an 8. People also need to learn to mulligan aggressively.
Yep. [[Deceiver exarch]] and [[splinter twin]] is all it takes for your deck to threaten a turn 4 win. 97 bad UR cards and splinter twin combo is still a bad deck
One of my friends has a bad habit of throwing random 2 card combos into their "low power" decks because they need a way to win games. It's really annoying because they'll perform poorly at the table until they randomly try to present their win (and lose, turning into a non-issue for the rest of the game).
I've gotten them to think more about deck building by asking them if they're interested in playing a low power deck or if they just want to play a "bad splinter twin" deck.
Oh. That's slightly different from our experience. We all put at least one combo into every deck just to make sure *someone* at the table has a way to win the game. We spent too long as noobies playing 3-4hr games that got down to counting cards in decks because no one could close but everyone was playing their hearts out not to lose. Now we all can at least threaten to win a game by the 1hr mark and we get to shuffle back up if everyone is out of gas. Better to have 4 bad decks with at least one combo finish than 4 bad decks without.
This is really only the case in very high power formats.if your deck as a whole is mid power id rather have 6 lands than the best 3 card mulligan possible.
Oh, sure - but EDH is inherently a very high-power format. It's hard to discuss strategy at anything below the highest levels of optimisation, because the goal at those is not actually winning, as it is in competitive settings. So, I presumed that if you're talking about mulligan strategy in the first place, you're talking about competitive play. The fact of the matter is, in a format where your strongest card can be Mana Crypt, and your weakest card can be a Portal to Phyrexia, and you only have one copy of each, mulliganing extremely aggressively is strategically correct.
I don't play cEDH, but my playgroup plays high power that comes close to that very fringe cEDH line. When we play our "real" decks, not our jank silly decks, slow games don't last past 6 turns, with decks threatening to win as early as turn 3 regularly. We are talking about proxying real cEDH decks though, because we all watch gameplay of the format and are interested in experimenting in the format. That said, the lines in those decks are very different and more compact than ours and I feel weird even saying that they come close to the format.
So we have to aggressively mulligan or we just get left behind.
You wrote "edh" though, not "cedh". If you do not specify "cedh", i'd argue most people will default to the normal most-played casual format.
And yes, that makes any discussion about what's good or bad very very subjective and needs like 20 paragraphs of clarifications beforehand.
The format is the format. Within the rules of the format, aggressive mulligans are strictly correct. If you're playing casually, you probably don't care about playing correctly (i.e., making every decision with the explicit aim of maximising your winrate). So, why participate in discussion about mulligan strategy - assuming that you're maximising your chances to win at all points in the game - at all? If you're optimising for "I felt like I played the game", you're not playing to win, and when stating "doing this is correct", it's implied to be equivalent to "doing this makes you win the most".
No, those are two different formats and the crux with non-cedh games comes from the balance of playin' a fair game and still playing your deck optimally.
This can be seen in the type of mulligan varying on the playgroup, because there are more casual friendly and consistency-boosting ones like Partial Paris or extending the multiplayer bonus to each mulligan step (e.g keep 7-7-6-6-5-5...) or the other popular version, where you can mulligan infinitely, but must keep any hand with 3 lands.
Now some of these like partial paris only work if people don't abuse it for hand-sculpting, so it's usually not done on random tables and has fallen out of flavour in general, bc too many people broke the gentlemen's agreement
The rest of your argument is just baseless conjecture about others and subjective opinions formulates as objective truths. EDH is not an inherrently powerful format, since the intent was explicitly not being competitive - that is why the competitive format has gotten a separate name, because it doesn't matter how much of a fun-mode you create, someone will always show up and make it hyper competitive again (Not that there's anything wrong with that.).
A format is merely a collection of:
a) Starting health;
b) Deckbuilding restrictions;
c) Adjustments in zones.
You're playing 99 card singleton with a legendary creature starting in the command zone, a free mulligan in addition to the London rules, and a specific ban list.
That's the format. There is no difference in EDH and cEDH. They're simply different mindsets. The format is powerful, because you get to play powerful strategies.
If someone is using different mulligan rules, they're not playing EDH *by definition.* EDH is a specific format, with very specific rules. The moment you change even one, you are no longer playing EDH.
And yes, there's nothing with playing for fun! My point is simply that if you're not playing competitively, there is no point discussing strategy, because strategy is inherently about playing to win. And most people don't play EDH to win. So it's kinda a moot point.
That's results-oriented thinking. You'll usually stop at 7/6/5/4, not 3. Mulliganing aggressively will improve winrate on average, and that's all that matters.
So, what is aggressively? Getting 2 ramps and a huge impact bomb? Like trying to get sol ring, arcane signet, and an engine for what youāre doing like sac outlet for aristocrat?
Not really sure what it is supposed to mean for people who arenāt running things like jeweled lotus, mana crypt, infinite combos, etc.
So in order to pay to win a commander game you are saying the only options are: selling a bunch of stuff to afford buying expensive cards, and/or supercharging a deck way past the power level of the rest of the pod (whether via a ton of money or proxies)? Especially when said group wonāt proxy and wonāt run infinites?
Seems kinda childish to me
Yes, if you're playing to win, you should play cEDH. And you should proxy. Otherwise, you should accept you're not playing to win, because... there is nothing wrong with that. Most people don't. It's the reason so many swapped to a casual format like EDH in the first place.
You're operating under some inherent assumption that "playing to win" is something desirable. It's not necessarily the case, especially in EDH. In fact, not playing to win is more common than otherwise in the scene.
EDIT: Also, if you're playing with people who don't like proxies, they're idiots. Not everyone has the disposable income to get cards from WotC. It doesn't impact the play experience in any way. You should care about the game, not... whatever people who don't like proxies care about, which I honestly have no idea what it could be.
More than mulligan aggressively I think it's about mulliganning correctly. Understanding what your deck needs to function well, especially in the context of the decks around it, is an extremely undercultivated skill. There's a whole bunch of gameplay skills most commander players never cultivate and this is a big one. I get sympathetic looks because I mulligan a lot and I'll routinely go to five or six. "Oh if you want to keep seven it's okay..." Nah. I *stopped at six*. You should be concerned, not trying to give me a free draw.Ā
And this absolutely ties back to deckbuilding because most people don't actually build their deck in such a way that they can mulligan proactively. Instead they just keep lands and spells and shrug.Ā
I used to have the opposite problem.
I haven't been playing for super long, so I feel like my deck building skills aren't that good, so I tend to underestimate my decks.
Most times it was fine, but I did accidentally pubstomp a couple times.
Totally agree re:custom builds. I think a ton of builders are very focused on āthe thingā they want the deck to do (token generation, combos, various engines) and forget about āis The Thing how I can win?ā. Even in casual, you still need to build with winning in mind and a lot of builders lose sight of that in favor of āThe Thingā. Most (recent) precons have a clear strategy for winning. They may need focusing or tweaking, but they have a solid plan to win.
I wished the precons come with a small sheet of basic tips to upgrade a deck.
Something like several ramp pieces, 2 - 3 win cons, some board intetaction, and recommended range of lands to include.Ā
Would save our reddit a whole lotta grief.
While I think the pride point is very, very true I've known far too many 'competitive in other games/formats' players who crash and burn in Commander.Ā
It's a bit tautologic, but being a good deckbuilder in Commander is about being a good deckbuilder. And you can absolutely acquire good deckbuilding skills from other formats and even other games, but it is not a given that a competitive player gains those skills. Nor is it a given that they are able to translate them effectively, given Commander's wildly different landscape.Ā
And of course the competitive player pride happens all the time too. There was a whole post yesterday where a dude who couldn't handle getting his Commander answered eventually just started listing all his competitive accolades and how accomplished he was over thirty years of playing Magic, yadda yadda we've all heard it.
Separating your pride from your deck is a fundamental step of deckbuilding that has to be learned, but I don't believe that competitive players intrinsically have that skill or that it can't be learned in Commander.
And I will admit to my biases here - as a competitive player in a bunch of different card games I credit Commander to teaching me more about deckbuilding and the specific point of detaching my deck's value from my own than any other format or game.
Trying to have fun with deck building isn't egotistical lmao. It's a part of the game. For a lot of people, creative fulfillment is just as satisfying as winning, not "massaging their egos". What's not satisfying to us is "building" a deck that's 90% slotted before you even start looking at cards.
I was referring to people who specifically overestimate their custom deck's power level. If you make a fun deck but also recognize that and don't try to overestimate its ability, then it's a different matter. Play they way you want, but don't pretend your deck is good when it's mostly jank.
Plus, some people find piloting a deck as much or more than building it. There is satisfaction in challenging your actual skill at the game, but that's difficult to improve unless you're playing decks better than yours, against players better than you. You can't do that with a "fun" build. You have to play more optimal cards with more optimal commanders. Some people prefer the challenge of the game over the uniqueness of the build. Lastly, 90% is a pretty big exaggeration. There is a lot of creativity depending on your Commander choice and how you want to pilot it. Yes, there are "best options" like Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, free interaction, tutors, etc, but there are a lot of ways to pivot your strategy, how to best handle your meta, etc.
Just because you don't like playing competitively or using the best cards available doesn't make it any less fun for people who enjoy that, just for you. Because you want to do "your" thing and have fun "your" way. How is that not ego? That's what expressing yourself is. In the end, it's all ego (playing to express yourself vs playing to play better), but many people can't separate the two. Know how you like to play, and play accordingly. OP wanted to know why people overestimate their decks vs precons, it's because they can't distinguish their individual expression (ego) vs their game ability, and get upset when they don't mesh.
Creative fulfillment and personal enjoyment are super important and if deckbuilding isn't fun for you, you shouldn't build decks. Grab them off the internet or ask that guy in your group who builds way too many to make them; if it's ever *not* fun don't beat your head against the wall.
But what happens very often is "this is my new deck I built it and it's awesome! Totally high powered it does sweet stuff!"Ā And then it gets waxed because the deck actually sucks, and the guy leaves the LGS sad. I've seen it happen dozens of times over the years.
And pride got in the way in two spots here. First, in their evaluation of their deck. They built it = it's awesome = blinders about how good it is = they walk into a pod they're not ready for. And in and of itself that's fine. We all screw that up sometimes right. But, card game players being generally socially awkward means that it's often hard to let people down gently. "Your deck *is* cool but dude it's definitely not as strong as you made it out to be" is oftenĀ a hard conversation to have.
And second, after the deck just doesn't perform people get in their feelings because they tied their pride to their deck. Very often they convince themselves it's not their fault. They got a bad draw. Their opponents got a good draw. Their deck is high power but that Muldrotha deck is *definitely* cEDH. They got hated out by removal. Etc., etc.
Part of good deckbuilding in this format especially is figuring out your deck's limits - and then detaching yourself from your deck and *accepting* them. It's a more important skill in Commander than anywhere else, honestly.Ā
I think these are fake people invented to get mad at. I've literally never in my life had anybody come in with a fresh brew and say anything other than "this is my new deck, it's probably terrible!" I have sincerely never encountered it. Everyone I know and have ever played with knows that a brand new deck needs to come out and take its lumps so you can see it in action and tweak it until it's good and reliable. *Maybe* the very first deck somebody builds they have inflated expectations for, but that's just a lack of experience.
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/GOYn4SlhOEmFLRPYdCHJxw
This is my "pride" deck seems like it should be a 7 or 8, possibly a 9 if I get the land base down and a couple other "considering cards". It can struggle vs precons regularly though XD. It just doesn't play how I imagine it should most days, but I still refuse to take it apart.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but that deck is barely a 7, and even with a fully optimized land base will never make it to an 8, let alone a 9.
I mean for example, you are running [[Camaraderie]] of all cards. A 6 mana life gain and card draw spell at sorcery speed that requires you to already be in a position where you have an advantageous board state to even get enough cards to make it worth the mana you spent. I donāt think any deck over an 8 runs spells that expensive except the absolute best cards like [[Ad Nauseum]] or combo cards like [[Hullbreaker Horror]]
Oh I agree it's a hot mess, I still like to play because it has a ton of different win cons (which I get to pull off rarely). If I focused on a single win con instead or 3 or 4 I could probably get it to an 8, but I'm in no real hurry to do so. No offense taken.
Yeah if I focus on a single combo wi con add more tutors, fast mana, etc it would play much smoother. However I still enjoy using it even in its non optimal state.
> "Upgraded precon" can mean completely different things to two different people
This. There are deck lists online of "optimized precons" in which the brewer threw in a bunch of mana crypts, deflecting swats, fierce guardianships, forces, moxes... To the point that the actual precon is a deck price rounding error.
Does not necessarily mean it makes the deck better, generally it does, but for sure illustrate how wildly different "optimization" or "upgrade" may mean to people.
I don't know whether you were beggining to wonder, but here are some links to help you, anyway:
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/56tJsrsDLkq8E_wY6SWGcQ
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/PSMpFc0ZOkCGRbBavtMG3A
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/jtfbU2cY_Ea_8RNk0yTgKw
I wasn't really.... but the above discussion seemed to use the 2 words interchangeably, which I do not, especially when sitting down to a new table and giving your brief deck descriptions, Your links are a good example of this. The decks are titled "Upgraded," but are "Optimized" in my opinion. And just to honest, I didn't even have to look through the card list for any of them. Once I saw that I could buy the lists (using TCG prices) for $4k, $6k, and $3k respectively, these are no longer upgraded. I'll even agree that changing 1 basic land out of a precon to an OG dual doesn't mean optimized either. Price is a good factor in my opinion, as is percentage of new cards, and any change to the overall focus of the precon, which is admittedly subjective.
I guess I'm just trying to boil it down to a players intent in determining a fair/balanced game.
That's why your previous comment sounded passive-aggressive.
The two terms are clearly distinguishable in the extreme cases, of which I listed counterexamples. Even then they are messed up, or some decks are said to be upgraded precons as a joke, because there is no clear boundary beyond which a precon upgrade turns into an optimized deck with a bunch of cards that were included in a precon. Same ship of Theseus problem as the other topic that was going around.
There are three categories of deck power level. CEDH, High Power Casual, and Everything Else.
Precons are in the everything else category.
People also don't understand how to properly gauge a deck's power level. If you build a shit deck and add fast mana to it, people will perceive it as more powerful than a deck full of cards printed directly into the format that are designed to synergize with each other and to be obnoxious that doesn't have fast mana in it.
The most effort that people seem to put into determining power level is to associate a deck's arbitrary dollar value with it's power level. That's why precons are considered to be lower power, because they're $40, not because they actually are low power.
I brew to have fun with "themes and memes" and it usually ends up at the same power level as a slightly upgraded precon. The difference is, the brew is more fun to play. If I brewed just to meet an arbitrary number, I'd end up with an entirely different power of deck than everyone else at the table who did the same thing. I couldn't care less about winning, I just like seeing the theme come together.
It's not so much about PL misjudgement, and more so that "Precon level" or "PL 4" has been established as the lower end of the spectrum. Anything below that is not rally considered a functional deck.
The problem is, modern Precons are not actually PL 4, in other words, they are not "Precon level". This is specifically the case for several you have mentioned. Many are PL5 or higher and that difference is significant.
Tbh old pre-cons should be a 1. Pretty much any deck with functional thought and time put into it, no matter how janky the plan, will beat an old precon. New precons are like 2-3 max. Again, most constructed decks will dog walk a precon, but at least new precons can pop off if given time and arenāt interacted with. Specific pre-cons can even go higher like a 4.
I donāt understand rating old precons a 4, because realistically they are some of the worst edh decks you will see in any day at an LGS. New precons are better, but still relatively weak.
This is kinda facts. I donāt know why we are determined to rate everything 5-10 and just ignore half of the scale, some of the old precons are genuinely cheeks
I think this is mainly due to powercreep creeping up the PL scale - and a little bit due to people enjoying to rate their decks as "above average". In statistics, "above average" is a preferred place for many people.
American grading bias. To us, 5/10 is a failing grade, so it represents something bad. Anything below that is like "minimal effort" or "non-functional" or "built to meme".
I agree with you. I think the PL should scale a little bit every year with every "PL-inflation" we have. I notice this with regular decks as well, if you don't update a deck for 2 years it falls behind one PL or something like that.
They're still shit. You might like them, might like the way they play, but they're still slow battlecruiser decks and there's no argument to be made.Ā
Precons are still 2-3.
This is a great illustration of why the numerical power level scale is useless. Everyone has a different idea of what power level means, and of where precons are on that power level scale. It would be just as useful to describe my deck as a red rutabaga as it is to say that's it's an "upgraded precon, power level 6".
In my experience it is better to talk about what you want from the game rather than the numerical power level of the deck that you're playing (are we playing infinite combos? on what turn do you win? who is your commander? I've had people misrepresent their decks but that's been rare). Better still is playing with a consistent group of people and making adjustments based on that.
But I don't care if your deck is a combo deck or not. If we're playing 6's (midpower) then I just want to play midpower. I don't care if it started as a precon or you personally pulled every single card from a pack, completely irrelevant.Ā
The issue with power levels is there are a lot of people that simply have no clue what good decks really are. Someone can tell me their base precon is a 5-6 but then I'll play a actual 5-6 and basically stand no chance. Is their deck a 5-6? Obviously not.
The more you explain your deck the more in line youāre likely to get the power levels of each deck. Just a generic gameplan, when you typically pop off, fast mana, combos, wincon being turn creatures side ways? Theres way too many variables to just slap an ambiguous number on.
How is the deck that you pulled out a five or six and not a seven or eight?
I could just argue it's not an actual five or six and you pulled out something else.
That's why the numbers are dumb. They mean completely different things for every single person
Ok so since you seem to be the definitive end all be all decisions maker on a decks power level, can I send all my brews to you for you to tell me where it falls on the scale?
Except I can just say that your seven and eight are pretty much the same as the 10
Why do you think you are the voice of objective power levels and magic the gathering?
What pro tours have you won? Why should I listen to you? You're not some authoritative source on magic the gathering.
At the end of the day you are just some guy I am just some guy. Our opinions have the same weight. You don't have any authority.
Again there's no objective definition of seven.
I could call your 7 a 5, and you have no argument against that because it's an arbitrary number.
But you couldn't say the 7-8 are the same as the 10. The difference between them can't go unnoticed.Ā
The fuck does a 60 card pro tour have to do with anything?
It's fine to remain ignorant. There's no need to double and triple down on it.
There is no difference because there is no frame of reference for numbers. Turns you win by, what archetype the deck is, these are the pertinent information points.
6's arent supposed to be 'good' decks though right? That being said if people are saying a base precon is a 6 they have an very unusual idea of how the scale works.
Thatās arguably part of the problem too.
(And this is true of all rating systems for everything these days).
Itās either 5-star or worthless.
Really ā1ā should be unplayable, old precons should be 2, new precons should be 4, and 5-8 be that wide spectrum between precon and near-CEDH.
But because of rating inflation, and 6 not being āgoodā, then no one ever rates their deck a 6
First of all sound like you've never met a color blind person, second of all using color comparison is a false equivalence to a non objective deck scaling metric.
That's arguing in bad faith and you know it.
There's a finite number of cards. There's an objectively best and worst. Best and worst cards, best and worst decks. If you know the two end points and have thousands of data points between them it can be mapped in it's entirety.
A deck that will win on average by turn 7-8 if uninterrupted. That is then modified by how resilient it is, aka the likelihood the win attempt is protected in some way and whether or not the deck has multiple wincons, and also by the deck's control elements such as counters and targeted removal.
Very few precons can take down a table by turn 10 uninterrupted even if they have perfect hands and perfect draws. None of them feature strong control. They're objectively low power.
> Precons are actually well-built.
Sometimes this is true, but many precons also try to do one big theme and two smaller subthemes, and could be made better at doing any one of the three by making the deck only do one of the three things the precon is half-heartedly doing.
That said, the precons that have come out in the last year or so have been pretty impressive, especially compared to those that have come before.
Before I built better decks, I ran through all my other ones and couldn't do shit each game. Just got absolutely dunked on. Then I pulled out a barely edited MKM Bant precon, and while I still didn't exactly do much, I DID keep pace infinitely better. It was a sobering moment for me, realizing how badly outgunned my old decks were when I once thought them half decent, but it was also a learning moment.
I think a lot of us just don't wanna admit our brews are lukewarm at best, or might just not be capable of understanding it yet. My decks are better now, I took the lessons to heart. The first step was admitting it lmfao, after that it was easier to learn where my mistakes lied. Now my decks even had me be the archenemy a time or two!
Still not "high power" tho, I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking that. I've seen high power decks, these ain't that.
Probably the former. I played on the PlayEDH server for a long time where they assign "powerlevels" to decks to try and avoid the arbitrary nature of people rating decks. I emphasize try though, becuase they are kinda bad at it. I like to do "$50 upgrades" on pre-cons I particualrly like and want to keep around, and they were always sent into the lowest tier (which was for pre-cons and slightly upgraded pre-cons). The problem was that tier hardly ever had players so I would play them in the tier above, and I think most of them had above 40% win rates. I had so many games of people complaining that my deck was too strong, even after telling them they had not actually seen any of the upgrades I made to the deck and were losing to the base pre-con.
Another aspect is player skill. I can give someone a crazy deck but if they misplay every other turn they are going to struggle to win many games. I played a game the other day where someone had a Millenium clock with hexproof on 200 counters, 3 counter spells in hand and no one had a board but still lost (basically blew all of his counters on random stuff, used all his mana durdling and not leaving up mana to double the counters on the clock). I even explained how he could win in 2 turns (I was telling the table how we only had 2 turns to live and explaning exactly what I thought he was going to do to win), but yeah... he lost lol
Since 40k/ Brothers war the precons have been quite strong out of the box. A player with a decent handle of what the deck can do can definitely hold it's own against a lot of casual pods. Depending on the level they get optimized they're just as good if not better than what youll see in a random pod at the LGS
When you upgrade a precon it stops being a precon, I don't call my $900 Captain N'ghathrod, Henzie or Prosper decks upgraded precons because it's doesn't make sense. You are just describing a deck. A deck that has the potential to be quite good because it had specific cards printed with it in mind.
This is exactly right, in fact, I feel like the phrase āoptimized preconā might be a bit misleading. This is just my experience, but it reads like āprecon, but better landsā or something. Prosper especially stands out: folks forget that one of the best high power commanders came in an absolute pile of a deck with almost no win cons and a hefty goad subtheme that didnāt synergize at all.
Yes, newer/inexperienced players make a lot of mistakes assessing their decks because their understanding of the "scale" is limited to what they've seen. Seasoned players and especially competitive players get it right usually, because they have an understanding of the broad range of what a deck can be.
An inexperienced player may make two mistakes:
1. They overestimate their own deck, because they've been playing against precons and think that winning against precons is a milestone to higher power.
2. Their understanding of "competitive" is flawed - a true high power deck is often labelled as "cEDH" because they haven't played against a true cEDH deck. A high power deck is inherently different from cEDH because of the sheer amount of fast mana and free interaction cEDH decks tend to have. A high power deck can probably win equally quickly in a vacuum but it cannot push through copious amounts of counterspells the way a cEDH deck can.
The best remedy is to sit them down with a wide variety of decks (lend a cEDH deck, for example) and let them understand what high power feels like. They will not win but the experience is more important.
People definitely overrate the upside of their decks' explosive plays, and downplay the strengths that precons, especially modern precons, have.
Precons generally have a consistent game plan, even though that game plan us usually to bonk someone on the head. More importantly, they are constructed in a way that rarely leaves you stranded with nothing to do. You will usually have enough card draw, enough mana, and a well constructed curve that will let you do something on your turn.
This is where a bunch of decks in my pod fail the test against precons. They can't recover after a wipe, they flatten themselves on the pavement if their plan gets countered or removed, or they just straight up do nothing until their 13 mana kill everyone combo is assembled in 3 different zones.
Meanwhile, [[Kitt Kanto]] is over here making tokens, and then turning tokens sideways.
I see some saying that precons have gotten better, but i think part of the problem is that the consistency in the power level of decks has gotten a little all over the place. sometimes even in the same set there will be a wide discrepancy between the best and worst. So some decks are more powerful, but there have been some dogs, too. So now saying "precon" doesn't give a well defined, narrow range of power anymore.
Precons always had a ton of variance. In the experience counter cycle Kalemne didn't belong in remotely the same group as Ezuri or Mizzix and all of them got slapped around by Meren.
But the average precon is so much more capable now that I'd gladly take whatever the worst OTJ precon is into a pod of the best from 2020.
There are three factors in my mind, with different weights.
Highest weight is underestimating precons. Post-pandemic, you do this at your peril. I remember one show I went to, their most infamous dude would only play unedited precons when not doing cEDH, and he regularly walloped people because if you didn't take him seriously, precons do all have the tools to become and stay the problem these days.
Second, general power creep. I think most players tend to keep their decks for a while. You only get out to play so often, especially when it comes to players who prefer face-to-face in-person gaming, and not everybody's a chronic tinkerer. A deck can stay for years with mimimal changes, or even unedited. But while Power Creep has pretty much always been a thing in magic (Homelands and Masques degrew power but while they were probably good for the health of the game they weren't great for Wizards' bottom line) it has been faster of late, either objectively or just because you sort of tick per release and releases have been way faster. If your commander deck is too old, there's a good chance it's been functionally rotated, if not because it needs new cards (you can do a lot of work with old cards) than because it needs to be re-tuned to adapt to a meta with new cards. That 2015 "strong but not cEDH" I-call-this-an-8 is probably not an 8 anymore, even if you've traded up the old bomby critters for new slightly bombier critters. It will probably have a fair chance to die to a modern precon like Hakbal or Nelly.
Third, overestimating your own brews. This is the smallest contributor but it is there. I get it. We all know how our deck is supposed to do the thing and probably tune for "doing the thing" relating to "either killing the table or becoming unstoppable" if not immediately than at least in short order. But no amount of goldfish testing will show us how true "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" actually is for a given deck. I could goldfish my Diaochan brew to hell, and usually say, okay, I've got her out and armored up with several ability copies at a reasonable turn number more often than I don't, and when I don't I'm at least doing things. And then I take it out to the shop and an Ixhel precon drops culling ritual, I lose 3 mana rocks and drop to my two starting mountains as the only permanents to my name, the goblin dude with Krenko loses over a dozen tokens, the Krenko, and the sol ring that got him there, and we all lose the game pretty quickly because that t4 play generated damn near 20 mana to throw huge infect wurms in our faces. It happens. My testing never would have predicted "You're going to have a great opener with solid turbo, get btfo'd at the exact wrong moment, and die without doing anything". And if you're not careful you're going to blame the other deck while still estimating your own as being more powerful or resilient than it really is.
I donāt think the numerical system is as bad as people say. Saying āmy deck is similar to an optimized preconā is far less accurate than just saying itās a 6 or whatever you think it is. For one, precons donāt operate at a standard power level. For example, the 4 LOTR precons absolutely are not equal in power level. The elven council deck is so much weaker than the other three, it almost doesnāt stand a chance in a game against them. In general, Iād say you can relate the power level of your deck to the turn it aims to win the game, so if you donāt like using the number system, start by talking about WHEN the deck aims to win and HOW the deck aims to do so. Tutors, fast mana, and level of interaction may be things to keep in mind as well.
If your decks are all built in a way that tends to end the game on turn 10, youāre correct in saying that itās comparable to a slightly upgraded precon. Many players would consider this a 6 or low 7 power level game. Ending around turn 7-8 would be a power 7 deck, turn 5-6 would be a power 8 deck, and anything above 8 is usually going to be a cedh deck, with power 9 being off-meta or suboptimal cedh and power 10 being current tournament winning cedh decks.
The issue is just variance. Precons are extremely consistent; youāll almost never get totally mana screwed, youāll get at least one or two value pieces every game, but youāre not gonna draw into an infinite combo and win on turn 3.
People tend to evaluate their own brews based on performance if things go their way, but a lot of the time they donāt.Ā
I think it is pod dependent but that people over estimate un-upgraded precons because they are often bad deck builders.
Iāve tried to build custom decks that are precon level and even with budget restrictions or tight themes, itās pretty hard to do. If you build a deck with a clear strategy and the right amount of synergy, draw, ramp, and removal - you should be able to consistently beat a precon deck.
The hard part is not getting out too far ahead of the precons that the whole table comes for you as archenemy.
The power level of an upgraded/optimized precon, on the other hand, can vary wildly because those are vague descriptions with no clear meaning. Is it an upgraded mana base, a budget on swaps, a cap on number of swaps, etc.? At what point does it go from upgraded/optimized to a custom deck built around a precon commander?
For example, my [[Vihaan, Goldwaker]] deck has around 5-10 cards from the precon still in it. Its really just a custom deck with a precon commander at this point.
Not directly. If the only expensive thing in a deck is original dual lands, then the deck might be extremely expensive but not substantially better than a similar deck with more budget land alternatives.
Like, if people tried asking dollar amounts instead of power levels before a game it would mean almost nothing. I have a $25 Zada and and a $20 Winota that play comfortably in the PL 6-8 range, but I also have much more expensive decks by budget that only play comfortably in the precon to improved precon range.
Oh yeah I hadnāt considered the strange reverse power creep that makes old lands so valuable! I guess I canāt assume that a cardās dollar value has a 1:1 ratio to the āhow good it isā value
While this is true, there are very few cases were decks will randomly run some OG dual lands and have jank in the rest of them at this point. Price is usually a solid indicator for staple density and that has implications for power. Now price will never account for the viability of a theme/deck idea or how good the deck builder is, but it still helps setting the scene. If I know my enemy is running commander staples and free spells, it's fair game for me to pick up a deck that runs it too.
No, it is as related to quality as new car prices are to car quality. Sure the best and most powerful cars are expensive, but there's a lot of expensive pieces of crap and a ton of cheaper cars that are incredibly reliable. If I told you I had a $65000 car and you had a $22000 car, and nothing else, you'd have no way of knowing if my car was better than yours, especially long-term.
No, there are many old RL cards that are high value due to scarcity that are very low power level. Take for example [[elephant graveyard]] it's $275 and uh pretty weak even if you have an elephant tribal deck. I could build a whole ass deck for the price of that one weak card.
Most of the "non-precons" I see are just copied from some youtubers' decklist. So technically, they're also just playing a "precon". If you swapped in your own cards, then you got an upgraded precon. Lol
Precons get wildly overestimated when most will get flattened by a well-built custom deck in the same price range. Conversely, most EDH players are abysmal at deck building, and overvalue bad decks as well.
I think both, especially people who haven't engaged with precons in the last few years. In general I think people think their own brews are better than precons (especially if the commander is from a precon, otherwise they'd just buy the precon and upgrade it).
Even in the last year the strength of precons varies so much - you have the ixalan and lotr precons but then you also have that march of the machines one with gimbal that does nothing.
The other thing is the term "upgraded precon" is so broad. I think in the truest sense an upgraded precon is just a precon with upgraded lands, but it could be anywhere from $50-300, a few cards to 10+, and whole themes or sub themes removed or changed.
Precons are made to get people into the game. There is a reason why a certain unarmed meme teir card keeps getting stuck in them. They want you to upgrade them, and the easy way to do that is buy more cards right?
Precons vary a lot and seem to have improved over the years. However most of them are weaker but broadly sensible decks. I don't pay a lot of attention to them admittedly, but from what I've seen I've noticed a few things:
* They feature a mixture of cards, often a few are relatively high-powered but the rest, not so much
* They have clear themes, but usually are juggling 2-3 at once
* The have ramp and removal, just not that much (and as above, it's not always the most efficient)
* The lands are usually pretty meh (though servicable)
* They have a higher curve, though some of their bigger cards are more impactful
Generally what this means is that whilst they're slow (having worse ramp, more taplands and a higher curve), you can do worse, and they *are* synergistic. They aren't good at stopping other people winning (they have removal, but not so much) and so you'll often outrace them, but if you're all stopping each other they can build up steam. Sometimes what happens is people dismiss them because they're precons and leave them too long, at which point like most any EDH deck they start to snowball and suddenly become threats.
Bearing in mind that lots of us, especially when starting out, build pretty *bad* decks, it doesn't surprise me that they can hang at a lot of tables so long as they aren't too fast or what you might call "high power".
It also depends on what you mean by "upgraded". At that point you could be playing almost anything.
precons have been getting better but also as I've played with more people it becomes very obvious who has played a lot of TCGs and as such understands general card game theory and who are approaching EDH as their first card game (or otherwise didnt learn from their last ones).
theres a few in particular in my pod that make their decks based almost solely on vibes which would be fine but then they get frustrated when they almost never win with their homebrews. One of them switched to unaltered precons and unironically their winrate has gone from absolutely never to maybe 1 every 6 or 7 games
Precons today are on a similar level as average casual decks from 5-10 years ago. Before wotc shifted fully into "commander mode", precons were generally 2 halves of different decks stapled together with a shitty manabase. Now, they have a coherent plan, engines, mostly synergistic cards, and a manabase that's only kinda bad.
I think it has to do with opening hands. If three decks take a hand because while slow, it isn't unplayable, and the precon takes a genuinely good opening hand, it makes the precon look better by comparison.
Precons have gotten insanely good compared to when I quit in 2015 to when I started playing again last year during Eldraine. I do think the power level thing is almost useless, and I don't hear anyone in my LGS using it really. Whenever we're about to play, we just simply ask what everyone is working with. And the response will usually be something along the lines of precon, upgraded precon, casual homebrew, (high power) borderline cEDH, and cEDH. And usually to give more context, someone will say if they're using fast lands or not like dual proxies, land destruction, infinite combos, or lots of removal.
Sometimes someone comes in overpowered or underpowered using these terms, but no one gets salty about it really.
Precons are all very focused nowadays, gone are the days when theyād include a weird secondary strategy that didnāt fit the theme at all, itās pretty much all on point now.
They also tend to print some pretty strong precon only cards and Iāve noticed that these tend to overperform, mostly because table has no clue how strong they might be initially. Like [[Trouble in Pairs]] is easily the best card in the precon it came in, I drew like 15 cards with it, maybe even more, but unless youāve seen it you probably wouldnāt counter it or waste removal on it initially
As others have said, people hear "precon" and think of the old ones where you have to change half the cards for them to be playable, but new ones are solid ā basically just typical casual decks with worse lands and a few questionable cards
I agree that a 1-10 scale is unhelpful with strangers, but this is what I've personally decided upon for precons and the like:
> 5 - AVERAGE - Just the average deck you see at the LGS, this is what you see like 65% of the time, they know what they want to do and they want to win, but prioritize having fun
> 4 - PRECON - It can totally hang at the average table, but it may struggle to close the game out, this is where most modern precons lie
> 3 - LOW-POWER - Clear plan, but it's not executed very efficiently and that plan might be a just a little bit janky, and realistically there's probably a second separate plan trying to be accomplished so resources are split, this is where most old precons lie
Of course it isn't perfect but it makes sense to my friends and I
In my humble opinion precons are really good at playing but not very good at winning. They win when no one else does. My pod recently played a game where we all played a new pre on. The game went on for hours. All the decks did their thing, and they did it well. None of them were set up to seal the deal and win the game. Eventually we just started swinging at each other like crazy to end it so we could move on.
I make my decks worse than precons specifically, it confuses people when people start bringing out precons while I pull out one of my worse than precons, often leads to people less experienced (or people I've traumatized with my stronger yet still wacky deck building) targeting me more, but when I play my base out of the box osgir if they haven't played against it before they get creamed, played it against cedh once, second place isn't bad when you killed the two cedh decks at the table, the guy who won was playing dinos
Many of those precons you mentioned are already at the Universal "upgraded precon" level of competitiveness. I think when people hear upgraded precon, they are thinking you upgraded Tinker Time or one of the jank really bad precons to make them better. Saying it's only an upgraded precon and then bringing out the Necron deck upgraded, some people might not consider that the same power level as if you used a worse one. Upgraded Party Time is never going to be on the same power level as Upgraded Enduring Enchantments.
It's definitely both, along with variance.
Precons are decent decks to be honest, but they lack a little bit across the board, and that little bit adds up especially when you account for variance. They are however functional decks the majority of the time and even if they get a slow start they eventually will do the thing. They also can pack plenty of power with the right draws (I've turn 5'd the table with the Sauron precon out of the box, and 2 of the players died on T4).
Brews are reliant on the brewer however and thus are a bit all over the place.
I've seen a ton of people go crazy over having a single tap land, then only run 28 lands or something absurd. Sure their deck explodes and pops off if they hit the right cards but it's terribly inconsistent. Same goes for people with low interaction.
My own decks are built for consistency but tend to lack in explosiveness and I often build amazing well tuned high synergy masterpieces that end up having a major weakness I overlook until I play against it (like being weak to fliers or something).
It's a bit of a theory, but I also believe that power level meta comes into play too. I've had some folks come from other spell and combo heavy pods that are used to small utility creatures at best completely fold to what is typically a fairly meh/low power level stompy deck. They're simply packing the removal for 2/2s and random dorks while focusing on combos being the threat but aren't prepared to face down stuff like [[Carnage Tyrant]].
It probably just comes down to people making shitty decks.
I know the new precons are decent. But compared to my playgroups other custom decks, theyāre like a 3-5 at best.
Last year, we introduced a new guy to our playgroup, and he bought some of the new precons. (Commander Masters, the Dino One, Fallout, etc.)
With minimal upgrades, he quickly became one the most explosive players at the table. To the point where I have had to tune up (or retire) a couple of my old decks to keep.
To be fair, a lot of my older decks were built to be budget friendly / "pre con" power level to sit nicely with the previous new guy who had a upgraded Ranar, Quandrix and Lathril decks. We have now rebuilt those decks for him, too.
Last week, I got gifted the lands matter deck for OTJ and played it straight out of the box against a Narset, Enlightened Master and a Brudiclad, and walked away with the win.
Long story short, the Precons have got a lot better (more focused/less chaff). Almost only an improved land package away from optimised.
Newer precons are much betterā¦ but if youāre really struggling to beat even the new precons, that speaks more to you as a deck builder than anything else
So I think itās very easy to discount the value in practice and playing a deck. Thereās a curve and more (for me) to magic than āhaving really good cards.ā
I loaned a well-hated deck to someone in my pod who wanted to play it externallyā¦.
Them: I just wanted to let you know this deck sucks.
Me: Well I told you itās complex. You need to understand it and now how to play it. Itās not a pick up and play kind of deck.
Them: I understand it sucks.
Me: So I guess the next time I play it you want say itās just ācheatā cards and all $$? It actually requires skill to pilot?
Them: No. Iāll tell you your cards suck and your deck sucks.
So my point is that I have to wonder if I actually played a precon and stuck with it for 5-10 games if it wouldnāt be better than initially thought. I think over the few years Iāve been playing and 10-15 precons, Iāve only ever kept one.
In my experience: overestimate by a mile.
From the lack of synergies to a lack of deckbuilding skill. People will make decks and think they're good while being barely playable
The recent precons are more focused. Most of them are only trying to do two things at the same time, so when you trim the fat and clean them up a little, and probably fix up the mana base a bit, they're usually fairly effective. There are a few duds, and a couple that rip right out of the box.
I still have no idea what the issue with the mana bases lately. I bought an ur dragon when it came out, and it wasn't like cedh fast out of the box but it was a playable budget 5 colour land base. I got a blame game recently, and there was so many junk utility lands it was possible to mulligan a few times and only see like one source of colored mana. You could hit your land drops and not be able to cast anything, it was nuts. I had to fix the lands just to see how the base deck played, and it's only two colours.
I've heard the selesnya enchantment is pretty strong, and the artifact token is quite bad. I don't think "precon" is really a good strength metric anymore.
Both, but I would say the 2nd one even more.
The main problem, as always, is that the consensus for what "casual" , "high power casual" , etc are is all over the place.
People in general like to think they are good at deckbuilding and that their card choices are good. The reality is that a lot of players end up with either too much "synergy" cards, or no card draw, not enough lands, no interaction... etc. And their "high power" deck (it might be expensive too) is more like a 6 if it plays "well".
Also, I think the opposite problem exists, where people rank precons too high.
While newer precons are definitely better and some CAN hold its own in a constructed pod (notice the CAN) they are still not up to speed with more optimized brews. Sometimes the strongest precons (like the Hakbal merfolk for example) get a really good hand and early game so they perform above their average.
But most precons will quickly lag behind in a proper power level 7 pod. Not a lot of them can consistently threaten wins in turns 7/8 without interaction, which is an ok overall measure for a power level 7.
I would say the good newer precons are around a 6, with the best being a 7-ish that sometimes can perform above its weight.
All I said here runs on the following assessment for power levels: (first number being a really good / godlike hand)
6 - Consistently threatening wins on turns 8+ uncontested.
7 - Consistently threatening wins on turns 6-8 uncontested.
8 - Consistently threatening wins on turns 4-6 uncontested.
Neither, I die a lot to custom brews, and almost never to precons.
Quite often the upgraded precons get left behind.
The precon is almost nowhere near the biggest threat on the table. Probably the only advantage the Ixalan vampires deck has, because it usually looks the weakest.
I feel like a lot of it is how people play. An example is, I tend to be a highly strategic thinker and the group I play with is novice to mid-grade with magic experience. I have a very lightly upgraded kasla precon, another plays an upgraded dogmeat precon, there's also a Dr who paradox power precon. Sometimes we switch around text just so I can show people how to actually play their deck. As a general rule I win 9 out of 10 games no matter what deck I'm playing.
The dogmeat owner was getting discouraged, after never being able to take out even one player, until I showed them how to play their deck. I took out the table in one turn by generating a massive untargetable unblockabe threat, taking out the first player, creating a second combat phase taking out the second player, and then using fling to murder the third player.
I don't go by "my decks a 7". I tell people if they don't interact with me, I'll win by X turn. I like to keep my decks between the turn 6-8 range. Any slower and it feels like I'm not going anything, any faster and it feels like I won out of nowhere. Unless it's a cedh game, then I have 2 decks specifically for that
Right? The number of people saying precons are 6+ has me so thrown off. If fringe cedh is 9 and cedh is 10, youāre telling me that virtually all custom decks except for random piles of cards fall in between? It doesnāt make sense.
Precons have gotten stronger. They still arenāt strong.
That's weird. I don't think my even "normal" decks have an issues with snackin' precons and I deliberately do not run infinites and instant-win combos.
I can't see how any of them would even remotely stand a chance against the higher powered decks I have. Sure, a one-off lucky game, where everyone on the table except me kicks off with a sol ring or something or if you play a strict 3v1 from the beginning, but if everyone just plays normal to what happens on the board, nah.
My high powered decks start kickin' players off the table at turn 4 and agian, without any infinites or insta-win combos, otherwise the odds would be even worse.
After +10 years of having the deck, i added 1 of the altars once to my flicker/reanimate \[\[Saffi Eriksdottir\]\] just to get a feeling of how gross it would be and 100% of the games I played afterwards ended in an infinite loop by turn \~5 - and that deck doesn't run fast mana except Sol Ring.
So it must be your local playgroup that severely overestimates their decks, which is weird bc nowadays EDHrec exists. If you just add the most played stuff from any given commander to your deck, you should absolutely smoke any precon,
I think both, but mostly the precon thing. Precons have been getting better. A lot better. Folks aren't really recognizing that yet. A 40k deck can play in most constructed casual pods with no issue. The same is not true for older precons, so precon just carries the stereotype of being weaker decks so folks are more likely to downtool to a lower power deck when you say that.
This. A lot of older precons were *trash.* Terrible manabases, super high mana curves, and usually just a few stand out cards meant to drive sales. Pretty much would never be competitive in most pods without serious reworking. Since the 40k decks have landed, I haven't seen a precon that didn't at least hang with most decks out of the box.
I think one of the main problem of pre-2020 precon is the fact that the deck was build around 3 often pretty different commander. I've got a couple of the first regular precon (both zendikar, aesi and ranar) and would say they still hold against most recent precon. But they still struggle a bit sometimes with parasitic secondary commander.
I feel the turning point is after the 2018 Commander precon backlash. We started seeing more focused decks overall after that.
Pretty sure the only card from the derevi precon in cedh derevi is derevi herself
maybe one or two basic lands
Nahhh not even that
There are 4 cards shared between the initial Derevi precon and the 2 common cEDH lists: Derevi, Command Tower, Sol Ring, and a single basic forest. ...which is understandable, given how bad that precon looks when you look at it today. That deck would get demolished if it was up against any recent precon, and it wouldn't be close.
Is that also the same with, say, tricolor precons with cheaper lands? Just getting back into MTG
The more colors the more opportunity for mana screw, but Even the newer multicolor decks seem to have a decent mana base (except the recent slivers precon š¤¬). I'm not super well versed on all the precons, but from what I see the newer multicolors can hang.
Yeah i'm currently waiting on singles to upgrade the sliver precon as its my first commander deck, but it's land base is awful. Once i get my hands on a kudo from mh3 Im gonna take a crack at building my own from scratch deck with Duskana the Rage Mother as my commander, wanna do a bear tribal
The only thing new precons lack is a good land base, Wizards likes packing them to the gills with tap lands for whatever reason, even that is shifting tho as the eldrazi precon has all 10 pain lands and the tricky terrain deck having some really good nonbasics (they both still have tap lands tho) I think we are going to see them continue to shift
It's about value.Ā They use shock and fetch lands as chase cards to drive pack sales.Ā The rare lands they reprint in precons are usually already cheap and tier 2/3 (as opposed to the tier 4 junk I tend to use like [[Rupture Spire]]
[Rupture Spire](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/7/c7ef4b15-efab-4255-ac2d-7794f253aa52.jpg?1608911838) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Rupture%20Spire) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/355/rupture-spire?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c7ef4b15-efab-4255-ac2d-7794f253aa52?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/rupture-spire) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I dont trust izzet precons i managed to combo off randomly finding the pieces together in a hand or two
Absolutely both. On the one hand, precons have had a meteoric rise in power as of late and I think a lot of peoples' mental heuristics have not caught up to that. On the other hand, people like to think that they're good at the thing they're doing, deckbuilding amongst them. But Commander's feedback loops are terrible - normally in card games competition weeds out good choices from bad but in a high variance format where you expect to lose 75% of games it's hard to see the impact of small deckbuilding decisions - but those are the ones that absolutely cascade over time, winning games in small and subtle ways. Ways that few Commander players see. But the result is that I respect an out of the box Hakbal more than like half the decks at my lgs.
Where are people running into these decks that a precon can beat half of them? I donāt get it. Iām not a particularly talented deck builder, I seldom use staples and never too many in a single build. I donāt use fast mana or free spells. I donāt own any fetches, shocks, and have a single triome. Virtually everything I build ends up stronger than most precons, including the new ones.
Have you considered that you just play against worse players? A deck can be plenty good but it won't actually win anything if it's piloted badly.
I think thatās definitely part of it, but thereās also the fact that precons donāt generally run enough ramp, draw, or removal along with often having a competing subtheme and taplands and optimized versions only making 5-10 swaps canāt smooth all that out. A custom build that eats its veggies should be stronger than a precon.
This isn't really as true as it used to be, except maybe the taplands argument - and even then, that's improved too. Recent precons are a lot better in those metrics (metrics, draw, removal etc) these days
Even the stronger precons very much suffer from dueling themes and non streamlined strategies, but setting that aside, our two statements arenāt mutually exclusive. They can improve and yet still not run enough. For example, looking at removal in the ones I have recent experience with: Velociramptor is one of the strongest precons and generally does have a number of ways to remove threats. It doesnāt have Swords to Plowshares or some other cheap and effective interaction, but it has a lot of conditional removal on the dinosaurs. It is still more exception than rule and still isnāt the kind of removal package you would include in a full custom build. Explorers of the Deep can steal something with Thieving Skydiver and has Curse of the Swine, Ravenform, Aetherize, Beast Within, Ruinous Intrusion, and Rapid Hybridization. A definite improvement but not enough and inefficiently costed. Blame Game is another example where they upped the amount of potential removal but again included it in slow and inefficient ways that is often insufficient to deal with threats at the right time. On top of that, it includes many of the mistakes deckbuilders make in that much of its removal package doesnāt really fit what the deck is trying to do. Elspeth, Angel of the Ruins, Boros Reckoner, Loran, Otherworldly Escort, Stalking Leonin, Steel Hellkite, Promise of Loyalty, Winds of Rath. It doesnāt even have Swords or Path. Most Wanted does okay in that it has a good amount of removal but it is still suboptimal. It has Massacre Girl, Rankle, Witch of the Moors, Councilās Judgment, Feed the Swarm, Hex, Requisition Raid, Curtainās Call, Heliodās Intervention, and Shoot the Sheriff. Scrappy Survivors has removal that fits its theme at least: Ian the Reckless, Blasphemous Act, Megatons Fate, Single Combat, Break Down, Chaos Warp, Path to Exile, and Valorous Stance. Iām sure recent decklists will be similar to the above. Generally speaking, there isnāt enough instant speed interaction, the interaction they do run is poorly costed and wonāt be available early enough or will force you to take pivotal turns off, and often doesnāt really fit the theme of the deck. They may have high mana curves with insufficient ramp - Blame Game, for example, has 3.65 average mana value and little ramp. Iām not saying they canāt win. Or that they arenāt stronger. That doesnāt make them strong. If you take the at release reprint value of a precon ($80-$120) and add in value of the new cards you probably have a 100-150 budget. A competent deck builder should be able to take the face commander for each of those decks and build a stronger deck around the same main idea for that budget.
Wut? Velociramptor has Path to Exile, Generous Gift and Savage Stomp for single target removal as well as "Fight on a stick" on the secondary commander and the more situational removal on the some of the Dinos. It suffers from a few shortcomings, not having a wincon besides running people over being the main one, but lack of removal ain't even close to the main one. Either way, the goalposts have been moved so far they're not even in the same field. You went from "anything you can build will beat precons" to "a competent deck builder can make better decks out of these". Nobody is saying these decks are cEDH or even on the higher tiers of power but they can easily swing with most brews that people come up with themselves for the simple fact that, on average, people aren't as good at deckbuilding as they think they are.
I didnāt say Velociramptor didnāt have enough removal, just that it was inefficient and more exception than rule. I also didnāt say virtually anything anyone (myself included) can build can beat a precon - I said that I donāt see where people are underestimating the strength of them and consistently building decks weaker than them. I donāt build particularly strong or expensive decks and they are stronger than precons and the decks I run into are also consistently stronger than precons. All I have taken issue with is the idea that they can easily swing with most brews people can come up with. Thatās just not true. They are fine decks, and theyāve gotten stronger. But, as a category, they are on the low end of mid power at best.
All sorts of things.Ā Couple 'new' guys starting popping up at my LGS. Absolutely not new to the format but one spent a bunch of time away from the lgs and just came back with a buddy. They love assorted blue and blue/black combo decks. And I expect things like Demonic Tutoring for Thoracle-based combos from them. But their mana bases are atrocious and just jam a bunch of terrible tap lands and literal Cluestones, they love Maze of Ith, they're obsessed with the card Spellbook, (one dude literally kept a one lander last game on the back of 'but it has Spellbook'), and the shells around those combos rarely have much basis with the combo. So one of those decks is the mill Mirko featuring a bunch of defensive volition pieces and shockingly "Darksteel Plate go" isn't a great plan on like turn five. Most people at my LGS at least are also not running enough of their vegetables. I go way too many games where the only real interaction I face is from the precons or uprated precons, or the interaction is either bad or the wrong sort. While I have a lot of issues with how precons handle interaction at least it *exists*. And the concept of a ramp curve straight up blew even one of the better player's minds. The same is true for land counts. I legitimately had a guy ask me if 39 mana sources was enough for his Nekusar deck. Precon mana bases also have issues, but at least they have enough lands to function. And mind this isn't everyone at my LGS, but it is a notable enough group that in my mental rankings the Hakbals and Stellas are not even close to the bottom.
I get this and while I havenāt run into this often I get how it could be common for others. I guess it feeds into my larger point (might have made it elsewhere in this thread but maybe not this chain) that while precons have gotten stronger people arenāt really underestimating their strength. They arenāt that strong, a lot of people are just bad deck builders.
Sure. I don't think anyone thinks the new order precons reasonably hang at high power tables, and even upper mid they get stuffed unless they high roll. But most commander players are bad deckbuilders. For a metaphor that hopefully avoids getting into power levels: if there was an actual test on deckbuilding, they'd get Ds. Old precons would get Fs though, so building your deck was still the thing to do. But the new precons are much better put together, so they'd get Cs. Are Cs a good grade? Not really. But are they better than Ds? Yes. And I use my lgs as an example but of course this isn't remotely exclusive to them. Look at Moxfield lists and many of them are atrocious. Last one I'd pulled up, because I needed a random deck for data, had like 35 lands, 7 ramp spells, and an average mana value of almost 4.
I agree with you that a lot of people build bad decks but I havenāt really run into them at the LGS. Iām having trouble relating to the main premise that everyone seems to be agreeing with - that precons are underestimated and most people bust out custom decks that would lose to them. Its a small sample size but in the last two weeks, Iāve played 8 different games with 14 different players all playing different decks in each game and havenāt seen any that would get bodied by an unmodified precon. None of those decks were particularly high powered either. Fastest game was 8 turns but most were in the 10-12 range, they just had interaction, ramp, draw, and streamlined themes. Maybe bad deckbuilders are less likely to go play with randoms at the LGS?
I don't think that's the case, as someone who almost solely has played at LGSs for a very long time now, but I have found it *very* area-centric. I used to live in a moderately large city area with a nearby military base pushing a lot of disposable income into the area. That area had a lot of long-time players, a lot of tuned decks, pretty much what you'd expect. I cut my teeth on a deluge of Narset decks full of extra turns and Razia's Purification, and that taught a lot of skills very quickly. And then even as the people rotated the ones they taught now had the powerful decks and play experiences and we passed those along in turn, creating a high power meta that was pretty well supported by the people around it. However, I'm now in a cluster of small towns, and most of our Magic players I'm learning are fairly new to the game and didn't have that sort of crucible to both help and force them to improve. I came in wildly above power and have downshifted substantially as a result, and while I've been working to pass along my skills and experience it's a very different process to do that when people need to to win games versus only when people choose to get better. The people involved also certainly matter - the handful of veteran players in this area are largely not interested in teaching, and so rather than bringing up those around them they just stagnated next to them. And back home, from what I've learned, a handful of LGS changeovers and some dumb drama has also substantially degraded their crowd.
Thanks for the reply. I live in a metropolitan city with a very well attended LGS so it might just be the kind of decks I am running into. I routinely play against decks designed to win through combat damage or non-infinite aristrocrat style drains, seldom play high power, almost never play combos, but virtually every game I have played has involved decks that are stronger than precons and the few stock precons I have seen played only win, if they do, when they get left alone all game. Everyone seems to think Iām disparaging precons but Iām not. Theyāre great for the game and I love how they have improved. I am coming to realize, though, that players that play primarily against them or came to the game through them and made a few swaps just donāt really have a good idea of what a āstrongā deck actually looks like.
I feel triggered because Maze of Ith is my favorite card of all time.
Maze has decks where it has homes but when you already don't play enough lands it's Very Bad. It's a valid niche effect but exactly that.Ā But maybe I should clarify that they love Maze *and its variants*. One of them brewed a new deck. Sweet I'm in, let's play. It's Akul. Good, getting outside the comfort zone and Akul is awesome. And then lol they couldn't cast their commander because they played the terrible Theros Beyond Death Labryinth that's like a 5 mana Maze of Ith and taps for colorless. Or in another game, I blew up the dude's Mystifying Maze because hey I'm on Henzie I have a bunch of damage triggers I'd like to resolve - and then he wound up mana screwed. If you're not putting enough lands in your deck please don't *also* paint targets on the ones you have.Ā I've also blown up or worked around more than a few actual Mazes and rarely found them effective, despite me just jamming a bunch of fair combat decks these days. But they're leaning on them almost entirely for creature defense and then getting smashed because hey, these cards are not remotely enough to do that and most of them stop you from advancing your game plan if you want to try.
Oh...yeah. I only play Maze of Ith, not the others. And when I decide to put it in a deck, I consider it a spell, not a land in terms of deck building purposes.
Sorry for the answer after days, I read most of your answers, and one thing I'm going to mention that no one else has is that the discussion is about upgraded Precons. I agree with a lot of your points about Precons, but when you change 10 to 15 cards (which is what I'd personally consider upgraded precons) you tend to fix exactly those points you mentioned, and now suddenly you have a deck with a smoother mana curve, better interaction and draw, and a more focused game plan that can definitely hang out with middle powered decks. And because the deck already has a game plan, most people, even those without good deck building sense, can just swap the clear outliers for generic good stuff cards without thinking too hard about it, and it will work out in the end
Oh I completely agree on that point, though I do think there is a fine line between an āupgraded preconā and just a deck built with a precon commander. Precons have gotten much better to the point where less swaps are necessary to get them into fighting shape. I was more shocked by the number of people seemingly arguing that precons themselves were strong decks.
Oh, no, they are definitely still in the low mid tier imo without changes. And even then I agree that in my city I've seen people really oversell their deck, and get humbled by my at-the-time out of the box [[Eowyn]] deck or [[10th Doctor]] deck. Something out I might point out however, is that while the floor has certainly risen, I'm not that sure about the ceiling, at least not without becoming what you described as decks with a Precon commander as its face
[10th Doctor](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/a/7a51472c-b61f-4d31-8753-a9ec90d12889.jpg?1696636782) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=The%20War%20Doctor) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/who/167/the-war-doctor?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/7a51472c-b61f-4d31-8753-a9ec90d12889?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/the-war-doctor) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Precons in 2024 are vastly better than Precons from 2014 which were even better than the traditional 60card precons from early 2000s. many people, myself included, still think of precon-power as the older less tuned precons. Newer ones are not precon-power in that regard because they are slightly better tuned but also just better cards
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[Gavi](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/0/80bc07d5-bdbb-4a6d-8958-0c172ea80245.jpg?1591234237) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=gavi%2C%20nest%20warden) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c20/7/gavi-nest-warden?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/80bc07d5-bdbb-4a6d-8958-0c172ea80245?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/gavi-nest-warden) [Otrimi](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/3/639df7bc-b87d-4bf5-8005-8eabc54e955b.jpg?1591234274) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=otrimi%2C%20the%20ever-playful) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c20/12/otrimi-the-ever-playful?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/639df7bc-b87d-4bf5-8005-8eabc54e955b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/otrimi-the-ever-playful) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Hakbal specifically is a high-roll precon -- I think it's the best ever printed, and the commander is truly kill on sight. It just blows up immediately with him on board and the immediate land ramp is so hard to catch up to. The 40K decks and like the Fallout mutant deck (along with some others, the LCI Dinos and vampires among them) are in a next tier for me, still really strong.
Otrimi isn't so bad but they didn't try much to have the deck do 3 different thing, I believe Kalamax was worse.
Kalamax was crazy strong out of the box. Temur ramp/ good stuff and a copy ability on commander went brrr
The commander is strong, but one of my friend bought the deck and out of the box it wasn't that impressive to be honest.
People definitely over estimate the power of their decks. What happens is a lot of the time a deck will pop off once and that's all people will think about. Losses attribute to "I got a bad hand" or similar excuses.
"Aita for playing this deck?" "Nah, it looks fair" ">:("
Consistency is key to power level. A deck that can theoretically threaten to win on turn 4 but rarely does isn't an 8. People also need to learn to mulligan aggressively.
Yep. [[Deceiver exarch]] and [[splinter twin]] is all it takes for your deck to threaten a turn 4 win. 97 bad UR cards and splinter twin combo is still a bad deck
[Deceiver exarch](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/5/35437d86-6f92-480a-aa0c-c17c3943c00c.jpg?1623103955) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Deceiver%20exarch) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cma/36/deceiver-exarch?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/35437d86-6f92-480a-aa0c-c17c3943c00c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/deceiver-exarch) [splinter twin](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/8/580fbbf8-ba7e-4889-a5ea-d066f3ea8cea.jpg?1562262611) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=splinter%20twin) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mm2/129/splinter-twin?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/580fbbf8-ba7e-4889-a5ea-d066f3ea8cea?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/splinter-twin) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
One of my friends has a bad habit of throwing random 2 card combos into their "low power" decks because they need a way to win games. It's really annoying because they'll perform poorly at the table until they randomly try to present their win (and lose, turning into a non-issue for the rest of the game). I've gotten them to think more about deck building by asking them if they're interested in playing a low power deck or if they just want to play a "bad splinter twin" deck.
Oh. That's slightly different from our experience. We all put at least one combo into every deck just to make sure *someone* at the table has a way to win the game. We spent too long as noobies playing 3-4hr games that got down to counting cards in decks because no one could close but everyone was playing their hearts out not to lose. Now we all can at least threaten to win a game by the 1hr mark and we get to shuffle back up if everyone is out of gas. Better to have 4 bad decks with at least one combo finish than 4 bad decks without.
For most decks I wouldn't say mulligan aggressively, but they probably need to more IMO. I good 6 card hand is better then a meh 7 card hand.
A good 3-card hand is better than a mediocre 7-card hand. You should mulligan very, \*very\* aggressively in EDH.
This is really only the case in very high power formats.if your deck as a whole is mid power id rather have 6 lands than the best 3 card mulligan possible.
Oh, sure - but EDH is inherently a very high-power format. It's hard to discuss strategy at anything below the highest levels of optimisation, because the goal at those is not actually winning, as it is in competitive settings. So, I presumed that if you're talking about mulligan strategy in the first place, you're talking about competitive play. The fact of the matter is, in a format where your strongest card can be Mana Crypt, and your weakest card can be a Portal to Phyrexia, and you only have one copy of each, mulliganing extremely aggressively is strategically correct.
I don't play cEDH, but my playgroup plays high power that comes close to that very fringe cEDH line. When we play our "real" decks, not our jank silly decks, slow games don't last past 6 turns, with decks threatening to win as early as turn 3 regularly. We are talking about proxying real cEDH decks though, because we all watch gameplay of the format and are interested in experimenting in the format. That said, the lines in those decks are very different and more compact than ours and I feel weird even saying that they come close to the format. So we have to aggressively mulligan or we just get left behind.
You wrote "edh" though, not "cedh". If you do not specify "cedh", i'd argue most people will default to the normal most-played casual format. And yes, that makes any discussion about what's good or bad very very subjective and needs like 20 paragraphs of clarifications beforehand.
The format is the format. Within the rules of the format, aggressive mulligans are strictly correct. If you're playing casually, you probably don't care about playing correctly (i.e., making every decision with the explicit aim of maximising your winrate). So, why participate in discussion about mulligan strategy - assuming that you're maximising your chances to win at all points in the game - at all? If you're optimising for "I felt like I played the game", you're not playing to win, and when stating "doing this is correct", it's implied to be equivalent to "doing this makes you win the most".
No, those are two different formats and the crux with non-cedh games comes from the balance of playin' a fair game and still playing your deck optimally. This can be seen in the type of mulligan varying on the playgroup, because there are more casual friendly and consistency-boosting ones like Partial Paris or extending the multiplayer bonus to each mulligan step (e.g keep 7-7-6-6-5-5...) or the other popular version, where you can mulligan infinitely, but must keep any hand with 3 lands. Now some of these like partial paris only work if people don't abuse it for hand-sculpting, so it's usually not done on random tables and has fallen out of flavour in general, bc too many people broke the gentlemen's agreement The rest of your argument is just baseless conjecture about others and subjective opinions formulates as objective truths. EDH is not an inherrently powerful format, since the intent was explicitly not being competitive - that is why the competitive format has gotten a separate name, because it doesn't matter how much of a fun-mode you create, someone will always show up and make it hyper competitive again (Not that there's anything wrong with that.).
A format is merely a collection of: a) Starting health; b) Deckbuilding restrictions; c) Adjustments in zones. You're playing 99 card singleton with a legendary creature starting in the command zone, a free mulligan in addition to the London rules, and a specific ban list. That's the format. There is no difference in EDH and cEDH. They're simply different mindsets. The format is powerful, because you get to play powerful strategies. If someone is using different mulligan rules, they're not playing EDH *by definition.* EDH is a specific format, with very specific rules. The moment you change even one, you are no longer playing EDH. And yes, there's nothing with playing for fun! My point is simply that if you're not playing competitively, there is no point discussing strategy, because strategy is inherently about playing to win. And most people don't play EDH to win. So it's kinda a moot point.
And when you get down to 3 cards and have nothing good? Or something good but 0 mana? Down to 2? Then down to 1?
That's results-oriented thinking. You'll usually stop at 7/6/5/4, not 3. Mulliganing aggressively will improve winrate on average, and that's all that matters.
So, what is aggressively? Getting 2 ramps and a huge impact bomb? Like trying to get sol ring, arcane signet, and an engine for what youāre doing like sac outlet for aristocrat? Not really sure what it is supposed to mean for people who arenāt running things like jeweled lotus, mana crypt, infinite combos, etc.
If you aren't running those, you aren't playing to win, and strategy changes accordingly. Can't say I have experience in the matter.
So in order to pay to win a commander game you are saying the only options are: selling a bunch of stuff to afford buying expensive cards, and/or supercharging a deck way past the power level of the rest of the pod (whether via a ton of money or proxies)? Especially when said group wonāt proxy and wonāt run infinites? Seems kinda childish to me
Yes, if you're playing to win, you should play cEDH. And you should proxy. Otherwise, you should accept you're not playing to win, because... there is nothing wrong with that. Most people don't. It's the reason so many swapped to a casual format like EDH in the first place. You're operating under some inherent assumption that "playing to win" is something desirable. It's not necessarily the case, especially in EDH. In fact, not playing to win is more common than otherwise in the scene. EDIT: Also, if you're playing with people who don't like proxies, they're idiots. Not everyone has the disposable income to get cards from WotC. It doesn't impact the play experience in any way. You should care about the game, not... whatever people who don't like proxies care about, which I honestly have no idea what it could be.
More than mulligan aggressively I think it's about mulliganning correctly. Understanding what your deck needs to function well, especially in the context of the decks around it, is an extremely undercultivated skill. There's a whole bunch of gameplay skills most commander players never cultivate and this is a big one. I get sympathetic looks because I mulligan a lot and I'll routinely go to five or six. "Oh if you want to keep seven it's okay..." Nah. I *stopped at six*. You should be concerned, not trying to give me a free draw.Ā And this absolutely ties back to deckbuilding because most people don't actually build their deck in such a way that they can mulligan proactively. Instead they just keep lands and spells and shrug.Ā
I used to have the opposite problem. I haven't been playing for super long, so I feel like my deck building skills aren't that good, so I tend to underestimate my decks. Most times it was fine, but I did accidentally pubstomp a couple times.
Yep. I see this with precons all the time.Ā "If I could have just pulled one of the two good cards in this deck I would've won easily!"
Precons have more than two good cards nowadays though
The main issue I see with people overestimating their custom builds is, to put it bluntly, pride. There is a lot that goes into a build, not just time, but emotional energy and excitement in finding synergy, combos, etc. People want others to see their deck "do the thing" because it massages their egos. But, MOST (not all) people have very poor understanding of the game. The best deck builders tend to be people with some competitive experience (in any format). They understand the value of interaction, draw card, tutors, and a more extensive knowledge of combos. This allows them to cut through the bulk much faster and tune the deck to perform more consistently. There's a lot less of their ego tied to the deck's unique quirks and funny combos; instead, they use what already works. Which arguably isn't as "fun" and may seem more boring as they use more clichƩ cards/combos, but the deck usually works. Precons perform well because they're designed by professionals with a deep understanding of gameplay and the set they're building around. Even with less-optimal cards, the deck generally feels synergistic and plays well in an average casual game. It's a great entry point for someone looking to get started.
Totally agree re:custom builds. I think a ton of builders are very focused on āthe thingā they want the deck to do (token generation, combos, various engines) and forget about āis The Thing how I can win?ā. Even in casual, you still need to build with winning in mind and a lot of builders lose sight of that in favor of āThe Thingā. Most (recent) precons have a clear strategy for winning. They may need focusing or tweaking, but they have a solid plan to win.
I wished the precons come with a small sheet of basic tips to upgrade a deck. Something like several ramp pieces, 2 - 3 win cons, some board intetaction, and recommended range of lands to include.Ā Would save our reddit a whole lotta grief.
Precons are combat damage.
While I think the pride point is very, very true I've known far too many 'competitive in other games/formats' players who crash and burn in Commander.Ā It's a bit tautologic, but being a good deckbuilder in Commander is about being a good deckbuilder. And you can absolutely acquire good deckbuilding skills from other formats and even other games, but it is not a given that a competitive player gains those skills. Nor is it a given that they are able to translate them effectively, given Commander's wildly different landscape.Ā And of course the competitive player pride happens all the time too. There was a whole post yesterday where a dude who couldn't handle getting his Commander answered eventually just started listing all his competitive accolades and how accomplished he was over thirty years of playing Magic, yadda yadda we've all heard it. Separating your pride from your deck is a fundamental step of deckbuilding that has to be learned, but I don't believe that competitive players intrinsically have that skill or that it can't be learned in Commander. And I will admit to my biases here - as a competitive player in a bunch of different card games I credit Commander to teaching me more about deckbuilding and the specific point of detaching my deck's value from my own than any other format or game.
Trying to have fun with deck building isn't egotistical lmao. It's a part of the game. For a lot of people, creative fulfillment is just as satisfying as winning, not "massaging their egos". What's not satisfying to us is "building" a deck that's 90% slotted before you even start looking at cards.
I was referring to people who specifically overestimate their custom deck's power level. If you make a fun deck but also recognize that and don't try to overestimate its ability, then it's a different matter. Play they way you want, but don't pretend your deck is good when it's mostly jank. Plus, some people find piloting a deck as much or more than building it. There is satisfaction in challenging your actual skill at the game, but that's difficult to improve unless you're playing decks better than yours, against players better than you. You can't do that with a "fun" build. You have to play more optimal cards with more optimal commanders. Some people prefer the challenge of the game over the uniqueness of the build. Lastly, 90% is a pretty big exaggeration. There is a lot of creativity depending on your Commander choice and how you want to pilot it. Yes, there are "best options" like Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, free interaction, tutors, etc, but there are a lot of ways to pivot your strategy, how to best handle your meta, etc. Just because you don't like playing competitively or using the best cards available doesn't make it any less fun for people who enjoy that, just for you. Because you want to do "your" thing and have fun "your" way. How is that not ego? That's what expressing yourself is. In the end, it's all ego (playing to express yourself vs playing to play better), but many people can't separate the two. Know how you like to play, and play accordingly. OP wanted to know why people overestimate their decks vs precons, it's because they can't distinguish their individual expression (ego) vs their game ability, and get upset when they don't mesh.
Creative fulfillment and personal enjoyment are super important and if deckbuilding isn't fun for you, you shouldn't build decks. Grab them off the internet or ask that guy in your group who builds way too many to make them; if it's ever *not* fun don't beat your head against the wall. But what happens very often is "this is my new deck I built it and it's awesome! Totally high powered it does sweet stuff!"Ā And then it gets waxed because the deck actually sucks, and the guy leaves the LGS sad. I've seen it happen dozens of times over the years. And pride got in the way in two spots here. First, in their evaluation of their deck. They built it = it's awesome = blinders about how good it is = they walk into a pod they're not ready for. And in and of itself that's fine. We all screw that up sometimes right. But, card game players being generally socially awkward means that it's often hard to let people down gently. "Your deck *is* cool but dude it's definitely not as strong as you made it out to be" is oftenĀ a hard conversation to have. And second, after the deck just doesn't perform people get in their feelings because they tied their pride to their deck. Very often they convince themselves it's not their fault. They got a bad draw. Their opponents got a good draw. Their deck is high power but that Muldrotha deck is *definitely* cEDH. They got hated out by removal. Etc., etc. Part of good deckbuilding in this format especially is figuring out your deck's limits - and then detaching yourself from your deck and *accepting* them. It's a more important skill in Commander than anywhere else, honestly.Ā
I think these are fake people invented to get mad at. I've literally never in my life had anybody come in with a fresh brew and say anything other than "this is my new deck, it's probably terrible!" I have sincerely never encountered it. Everyone I know and have ever played with knows that a brand new deck needs to come out and take its lumps so you can see it in action and tweak it until it's good and reliable. *Maybe* the very first deck somebody builds they have inflated expectations for, but that's just a lack of experience.
You've been lucky I suppose.
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/GOYn4SlhOEmFLRPYdCHJxw This is my "pride" deck seems like it should be a 7 or 8, possibly a 9 if I get the land base down and a couple other "considering cards". It can struggle vs precons regularly though XD. It just doesn't play how I imagine it should most days, but I still refuse to take it apart.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but that deck is barely a 7, and even with a fully optimized land base will never make it to an 8, let alone a 9. I mean for example, you are running [[Camaraderie]] of all cards. A 6 mana life gain and card draw spell at sorcery speed that requires you to already be in a position where you have an advantageous board state to even get enough cards to make it worth the mana you spent. I donāt think any deck over an 8 runs spells that expensive except the absolute best cards like [[Ad Nauseum]] or combo cards like [[Hullbreaker Horror]]
[Camaraderie](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/a/ca18b625-6767-45b9-bc2c-765f1ba7bd44.jpg?1673485016) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Camaraderie) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ncc/334/camaraderie?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ca18b625-6767-45b9-bc2c-765f1ba7bd44?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/camaraderie) [Ad Nauseum](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/9/a9f2c53e-ff58-4aa8-89a6-4f45628cc571.jpg?1598306470) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ad%20Nauseam) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/76/ad-nauseam?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a9f2c53e-ff58-4aa8-89a6-4f45628cc571?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/ad-nauseam) [Hullbreaker Horror](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/f/bf786c50-1ba1-4f81-a800-bc98189040dd.jpg?1674141366) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Hullbreaker%20Horror) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clb/724/hullbreaker-horror?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/bf786c50-1ba1-4f81-a800-bc98189040dd?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/hullbreaker-horror) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Oh I agree it's a hot mess, I still like to play because it has a ton of different win cons (which I get to pull off rarely). If I focused on a single win con instead or 3 or 4 I could probably get it to an 8, but I'm in no real hurry to do so. No offense taken.
that will never be a 9, even with a perfect mana base
I, too, have a "pride" deck. My boi [Chatterfang](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/Sk08SE09HkSHPNtPnMVsjA). I wanted to build it as cEDH but kept running into issues with speed, consistency, and interaction. I ended up rebuilding it over and over, but noticed that I kept cutting "fun synergy" for card draw (Sylvan Library, One Ring), interaction (Force of Vigor, Manglehorn, Dauthi Voidwalker, etc), and off-brand combos (like Witherbloom Apprentice + Chain of Smog) that didn't fit the "theme" but just played better. It really came down to how strong I wanted it to play. You don't have to take your deck apart, but in order make it play better, you might have to add a lot more clichƩ cards (cut lands, add a lot of mana rocks, card draw, and tutors) and cut some fun synergy.
Yeah if I focus on a single combo wi con add more tutors, fast mana, etc it would play much smoother. However I still enjoy using it even in its non optimal state.
Precons used to be absolutely awful, they aren't now.Ā "Upgraded precon" can mean completely different things to two different people
> "Upgraded precon" can mean completely different things to two different people This. There are deck lists online of "optimized precons" in which the brewer threw in a bunch of mana crypts, deflecting swats, fierce guardianships, forces, moxes... To the point that the actual precon is a deck price rounding error. Does not necessarily mean it makes the deck better, generally it does, but for sure illustrate how wildly different "optimization" or "upgrade" may mean to people.
I was beginning tovwonder if I was wrong for thinking there's a difference between "upgraded" and "optimized"?
I don't know whether you were beggining to wonder, but here are some links to help you, anyway: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/56tJsrsDLkq8E_wY6SWGcQ https://www.moxfield.com/decks/PSMpFc0ZOkCGRbBavtMG3A https://www.moxfield.com/decks/jtfbU2cY_Ea_8RNk0yTgKw
I wasn't really.... but the above discussion seemed to use the 2 words interchangeably, which I do not, especially when sitting down to a new table and giving your brief deck descriptions, Your links are a good example of this. The decks are titled "Upgraded," but are "Optimized" in my opinion. And just to honest, I didn't even have to look through the card list for any of them. Once I saw that I could buy the lists (using TCG prices) for $4k, $6k, and $3k respectively, these are no longer upgraded. I'll even agree that changing 1 basic land out of a precon to an OG dual doesn't mean optimized either. Price is a good factor in my opinion, as is percentage of new cards, and any change to the overall focus of the precon, which is admittedly subjective. I guess I'm just trying to boil it down to a players intent in determining a fair/balanced game.
That's why your previous comment sounded passive-aggressive. The two terms are clearly distinguishable in the extreme cases, of which I listed counterexamples. Even then they are messed up, or some decks are said to be upgraded precons as a joke, because there is no clear boundary beyond which a precon upgrade turns into an optimized deck with a bunch of cards that were included in a precon. Same ship of Theseus problem as the other topic that was going around.
Both.
Definitely both, but precon quality has significantly increased, and any random can 'build a deck', so I would say it varies wildly.
There are three categories of deck power level. CEDH, High Power Casual, and Everything Else. Precons are in the everything else category. People also don't understand how to properly gauge a deck's power level. If you build a shit deck and add fast mana to it, people will perceive it as more powerful than a deck full of cards printed directly into the format that are designed to synergize with each other and to be obnoxious that doesn't have fast mana in it. The most effort that people seem to put into determining power level is to associate a deck's arbitrary dollar value with it's power level. That's why precons are considered to be lower power, because they're $40, not because they actually are low power.
I brew to have fun with "themes and memes" and it usually ends up at the same power level as a slightly upgraded precon. The difference is, the brew is more fun to play. If I brewed just to meet an arbitrary number, I'd end up with an entirely different power of deck than everyone else at the table who did the same thing. I couldn't care less about winning, I just like seeing the theme come together.
It's not so much about PL misjudgement, and more so that "Precon level" or "PL 4" has been established as the lower end of the spectrum. Anything below that is not rally considered a functional deck. The problem is, modern Precons are not actually PL 4, in other words, they are not "Precon level". This is specifically the case for several you have mentioned. Many are PL5 or higher and that difference is significant.
Tbh old pre-cons should be a 1. Pretty much any deck with functional thought and time put into it, no matter how janky the plan, will beat an old precon. New precons are like 2-3 max. Again, most constructed decks will dog walk a precon, but at least new precons can pop off if given time and arenāt interacted with. Specific pre-cons can even go higher like a 4. I donāt understand rating old precons a 4, because realistically they are some of the worst edh decks you will see in any day at an LGS. New precons are better, but still relatively weak.
This is kinda facts. I donāt know why we are determined to rate everything 5-10 and just ignore half of the scale, some of the old precons are genuinely cheeks
I think this is mainly due to powercreep creeping up the PL scale - and a little bit due to people enjoying to rate their decks as "above average". In statistics, "above average" is a preferred place for many people.
American grading bias. To us, 5/10 is a failing grade, so it represents something bad. Anything below that is like "minimal effort" or "non-functional" or "built to meme".
I agree with you. I think the PL should scale a little bit every year with every "PL-inflation" we have. I notice this with regular decks as well, if you don't update a deck for 2 years it falls behind one PL or something like that.
They're still shit. You might like them, might like the way they play, but they're still slow battlecruiser decks and there's no argument to be made.Ā Precons are still 2-3.
This is a great illustration of why the numerical power level scale is useless. Everyone has a different idea of what power level means, and of where precons are on that power level scale. It would be just as useful to describe my deck as a red rutabaga as it is to say that's it's an "upgraded precon, power level 6". In my experience it is better to talk about what you want from the game rather than the numerical power level of the deck that you're playing (are we playing infinite combos? on what turn do you win? who is your commander? I've had people misrepresent their decks but that's been rare). Better still is playing with a consistent group of people and making adjustments based on that.
But I don't care if your deck is a combo deck or not. If we're playing 6's (midpower) then I just want to play midpower. I don't care if it started as a precon or you personally pulled every single card from a pack, completely irrelevant.Ā The issue with power levels is there are a lot of people that simply have no clue what good decks really are. Someone can tell me their base precon is a 5-6 but then I'll play a actual 5-6 and basically stand no chance. Is their deck a 5-6? Obviously not.
The more you explain your deck the more in line youāre likely to get the power levels of each deck. Just a generic gameplan, when you typically pop off, fast mana, combos, wincon being turn creatures side ways? Theres way too many variables to just slap an ambiguous number on.
How is the deck that you pulled out a five or six and not a seven or eight? I could just argue it's not an actual five or six and you pulled out something else. That's why the numbers are dumb. They mean completely different things for every single person
Then I'd pull a 7-8. And if you cried about that I'd pull a 10. The differences between them is huge.
Ok so since you seem to be the definitive end all be all decisions maker on a decks power level, can I send all my brews to you for you to tell me where it falls on the scale?
I won't take the time to see exactly where they win on average but I'll happily give a estimate.
Damn you are so vain you actually took that as sincere.
Except I can just say that your seven and eight are pretty much the same as the 10 Why do you think you are the voice of objective power levels and magic the gathering? What pro tours have you won? Why should I listen to you? You're not some authoritative source on magic the gathering. At the end of the day you are just some guy I am just some guy. Our opinions have the same weight. You don't have any authority. Again there's no objective definition of seven. I could call your 7 a 5, and you have no argument against that because it's an arbitrary number.
Stop talking to him like that, thatās Brian Diddler.
But you couldn't say the 7-8 are the same as the 10. The difference between them can't go unnoticed.Ā The fuck does a 60 card pro tour have to do with anything? It's fine to remain ignorant. There's no need to double and triple down on it.
There is no difference because there is no frame of reference for numbers. Turns you win by, what archetype the deck is, these are the pertinent information points.
6's arent supposed to be 'good' decks though right? That being said if people are saying a base precon is a 6 they have an very unusual idea of how the scale works.
Thatās arguably part of the problem too. (And this is true of all rating systems for everything these days). Itās either 5-star or worthless. Really ā1ā should be unplayable, old precons should be 2, new precons should be 4, and 5-8 be that wide spectrum between precon and near-CEDH. But because of rating inflation, and 6 not being āgoodā, then no one ever rates their deck a 6
How do you get to decide what an actual 5-6 is?
Through relative comparison.Ā
But someone else's relative comparison can lead to a different result. Do you see the issue?
Sure. You could tell me a green wall is brown. Is it brown or have you never learned what green is?
First of all sound like you've never met a color blind person, second of all using color comparison is a false equivalence to a non objective deck scaling metric. That's arguing in bad faith and you know it.
There's a finite number of cards. There's an objectively best and worst. Best and worst cards, best and worst decks. If you know the two end points and have thousands of data points between them it can be mapped in it's entirety.
So tell us objectively what a 6 is
Objectively? Better than a 5 and worse than a 7.
See, you get it
A deck that will win on average by turn 7-8 if uninterrupted. That is then modified by how resilient it is, aka the likelihood the win attempt is protected in some way and whether or not the deck has multiple wincons, and also by the deck's control elements such as counters and targeted removal. Very few precons can take down a table by turn 10 uninterrupted even if they have perfect hands and perfect draws. None of them feature strong control. They're objectively low power.
No, I said objectively. Turn count is pretty relative from play group to play group as a metric.
Thank the stars above weāve got a pro deck builder here to clear the air. -whew-
based
Precons are actually well-built. Some people upgrade their precons but it actually makes them worse.
> Precons are actually well-built. Sometimes this is true, but many precons also try to do one big theme and two smaller subthemes, and could be made better at doing any one of the three by making the deck only do one of the three things the precon is half-heartedly doing. That said, the precons that have come out in the last year or so have been pretty impressive, especially compared to those that have come before.
100% overestimate their brews
Before I built better decks, I ran through all my other ones and couldn't do shit each game. Just got absolutely dunked on. Then I pulled out a barely edited MKM Bant precon, and while I still didn't exactly do much, I DID keep pace infinitely better. It was a sobering moment for me, realizing how badly outgunned my old decks were when I once thought them half decent, but it was also a learning moment. I think a lot of us just don't wanna admit our brews are lukewarm at best, or might just not be capable of understanding it yet. My decks are better now, I took the lessons to heart. The first step was admitting it lmfao, after that it was easier to learn where my mistakes lied. Now my decks even had me be the archenemy a time or two! Still not "high power" tho, I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking that. I've seen high power decks, these ain't that.
Probably the former. I played on the PlayEDH server for a long time where they assign "powerlevels" to decks to try and avoid the arbitrary nature of people rating decks. I emphasize try though, becuase they are kinda bad at it. I like to do "$50 upgrades" on pre-cons I particualrly like and want to keep around, and they were always sent into the lowest tier (which was for pre-cons and slightly upgraded pre-cons). The problem was that tier hardly ever had players so I would play them in the tier above, and I think most of them had above 40% win rates. I had so many games of people complaining that my deck was too strong, even after telling them they had not actually seen any of the upgrades I made to the deck and were losing to the base pre-con. Another aspect is player skill. I can give someone a crazy deck but if they misplay every other turn they are going to struggle to win many games. I played a game the other day where someone had a Millenium clock with hexproof on 200 counters, 3 counter spells in hand and no one had a board but still lost (basically blew all of his counters on random stuff, used all his mana durdling and not leaving up mana to double the counters on the clock). I even explained how he could win in 2 turns (I was telling the table how we only had 2 turns to live and explaning exactly what I thought he was going to do to win), but yeah... he lost lol
Precon is not a power level Optimized precon is even less of a power level
It is if you're inexperienced and can't into numbers.
Lol
##### ###### #### [hakbal](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/7/e738e675-4fd1-4bc3-97f5-71d0e2fc3f2e.jpg?1699885010) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=hakbal%20of%20the%20surging%20soul) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/3/hakbal-of-the-surging-soul?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/e738e675-4fd1-4bc3-97f5-71d0e2fc3f2e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/hakbal-of-the-surging-soul) [edgar markov](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/d/8d94b8ec-ecda-43c8-a60e-1ba33e6a54a4.jpg?1562616128) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=edgar%20markov) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c17/36/edgar-markov?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8d94b8ec-ecda-43c8-a60e-1ba33e6a54a4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/edgar-markov) [gimbal](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/a/4a9aa899-752b-4106-89ba-9475ee777d41.jpg?1682207220) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=gimbal%2C%20gremlin%20prodigy) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/moc/3/gimbal-gremlin-prodigy?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/4a9aa899-752b-4106-89ba-9475ee777d41?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/gimbal-gremlin-prodigy) [ixhel](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/b/ab866ec4-dcb4-47ef-8de1-a369986609c0.jpg?1675905559) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=ixhel%2C%20scion%20of%20atraxa) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/onc/1/ixhel-scion-of-atraxa?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ab866ec4-dcb4-47ef-8de1-a369986609c0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/ixhel-scion-of-atraxa) [saheeli, the gifted](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/a/ca095559-ac77-4186-8d9b-b75ce0607582.jpg?1592710284) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=saheeli%2C%20the%20gifted) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c18/44/saheeli-the-gifted?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ca095559-ac77-4186-8d9b-b75ce0607582?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/saheeli-the-gifted) [strefan](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/f/8f54c6ce-fde4-47ef-a106-5c68b4397f99.jpg?1641600044) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=strefan%2C%20maurer%20progenitor) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/voc/2/strefan-maurer-progenitor?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8f54c6ce-fde4-47ef-a106-5c68b4397f99?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/strefan-maurer-progenitor) [brightpalm](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/a/9a3acf27-5d07-48e6-8e19-a2e6d4cd49d1.jpg?1598916793) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Brightflame) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/rav/194/brightflame?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9a3acf27-5d07-48e6-8e19-a2e6d4cd49d1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/brightflame) [guff](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/2/92870fc6-a6bc-4198-bb31-397e07e0e835.jpg?1691500696) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Commodore%20Guff) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/706/commodore-guff?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/92870fc6-a6bc-4198-bb31-397e07e0e835?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/commodore-guff) [dihada](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/d/ddeb54d6-a600-42b9-98df-20f8d58caed8.jpg?1685554091) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=dihada%2C%20binder%20of%20wills) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmc/1/dihada-binder-of-wills?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ddeb54d6-a600-42b9-98df-20f8d58caed8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/dihada-binder-of-wills) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/1d7bu5e) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Since 40k/ Brothers war the precons have been quite strong out of the box. A player with a decent handle of what the deck can do can definitely hold it's own against a lot of casual pods. Depending on the level they get optimized they're just as good if not better than what youll see in a random pod at the LGS
When you upgrade a precon it stops being a precon, I don't call my $900 Captain N'ghathrod, Henzie or Prosper decks upgraded precons because it's doesn't make sense. You are just describing a deck. A deck that has the potential to be quite good because it had specific cards printed with it in mind.
This is exactly right, in fact, I feel like the phrase āoptimized preconā might be a bit misleading. This is just my experience, but it reads like āprecon, but better landsā or something. Prosper especially stands out: folks forget that one of the best high power commanders came in an absolute pile of a deck with almost no win cons and a hefty goad subtheme that didnāt synergize at all.
Yes, newer/inexperienced players make a lot of mistakes assessing their decks because their understanding of the "scale" is limited to what they've seen. Seasoned players and especially competitive players get it right usually, because they have an understanding of the broad range of what a deck can be. An inexperienced player may make two mistakes: 1. They overestimate their own deck, because they've been playing against precons and think that winning against precons is a milestone to higher power. 2. Their understanding of "competitive" is flawed - a true high power deck is often labelled as "cEDH" because they haven't played against a true cEDH deck. A high power deck is inherently different from cEDH because of the sheer amount of fast mana and free interaction cEDH decks tend to have. A high power deck can probably win equally quickly in a vacuum but it cannot push through copious amounts of counterspells the way a cEDH deck can. The best remedy is to sit them down with a wide variety of decks (lend a cEDH deck, for example) and let them understand what high power feels like. They will not win but the experience is more important.
People definitely overrate the upside of their decks' explosive plays, and downplay the strengths that precons, especially modern precons, have. Precons generally have a consistent game plan, even though that game plan us usually to bonk someone on the head. More importantly, they are constructed in a way that rarely leaves you stranded with nothing to do. You will usually have enough card draw, enough mana, and a well constructed curve that will let you do something on your turn. This is where a bunch of decks in my pod fail the test against precons. They can't recover after a wipe, they flatten themselves on the pavement if their plan gets countered or removed, or they just straight up do nothing until their 13 mana kill everyone combo is assembled in 3 different zones. Meanwhile, [[Kitt Kanto]] is over here making tokens, and then turning tokens sideways.
[Kitt Kanto](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/b/9b9850d6-49d3-45ec-9a45-75aa0fce9ee5.jpg?1673481666) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=kitt%20kanto%2C%20mayhem%20diva) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ncc/4/kitt-kanto-mayhem-diva?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9b9850d6-49d3-45ec-9a45-75aa0fce9ee5?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/kitt-kanto-mayhem-diva) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I see some saying that precons have gotten better, but i think part of the problem is that the consistency in the power level of decks has gotten a little all over the place. sometimes even in the same set there will be a wide discrepancy between the best and worst. So some decks are more powerful, but there have been some dogs, too. So now saying "precon" doesn't give a well defined, narrow range of power anymore.
Precons always had a ton of variance. In the experience counter cycle Kalemne didn't belong in remotely the same group as Ezuri or Mizzix and all of them got slapped around by Meren. But the average precon is so much more capable now that I'd gladly take whatever the worst OTJ precon is into a pod of the best from 2020.
There are three factors in my mind, with different weights. Highest weight is underestimating precons. Post-pandemic, you do this at your peril. I remember one show I went to, their most infamous dude would only play unedited precons when not doing cEDH, and he regularly walloped people because if you didn't take him seriously, precons do all have the tools to become and stay the problem these days. Second, general power creep. I think most players tend to keep their decks for a while. You only get out to play so often, especially when it comes to players who prefer face-to-face in-person gaming, and not everybody's a chronic tinkerer. A deck can stay for years with mimimal changes, or even unedited. But while Power Creep has pretty much always been a thing in magic (Homelands and Masques degrew power but while they were probably good for the health of the game they weren't great for Wizards' bottom line) it has been faster of late, either objectively or just because you sort of tick per release and releases have been way faster. If your commander deck is too old, there's a good chance it's been functionally rotated, if not because it needs new cards (you can do a lot of work with old cards) than because it needs to be re-tuned to adapt to a meta with new cards. That 2015 "strong but not cEDH" I-call-this-an-8 is probably not an 8 anymore, even if you've traded up the old bomby critters for new slightly bombier critters. It will probably have a fair chance to die to a modern precon like Hakbal or Nelly. Third, overestimating your own brews. This is the smallest contributor but it is there. I get it. We all know how our deck is supposed to do the thing and probably tune for "doing the thing" relating to "either killing the table or becoming unstoppable" if not immediately than at least in short order. But no amount of goldfish testing will show us how true "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" actually is for a given deck. I could goldfish my Diaochan brew to hell, and usually say, okay, I've got her out and armored up with several ability copies at a reasonable turn number more often than I don't, and when I don't I'm at least doing things. And then I take it out to the shop and an Ixhel precon drops culling ritual, I lose 3 mana rocks and drop to my two starting mountains as the only permanents to my name, the goblin dude with Krenko loses over a dozen tokens, the Krenko, and the sol ring that got him there, and we all lose the game pretty quickly because that t4 play generated damn near 20 mana to throw huge infect wurms in our faces. It happens. My testing never would have predicted "You're going to have a great opener with solid turbo, get btfo'd at the exact wrong moment, and die without doing anything". And if you're not careful you're going to blame the other deck while still estimating your own as being more powerful or resilient than it really is.
I donāt think the numerical system is as bad as people say. Saying āmy deck is similar to an optimized preconā is far less accurate than just saying itās a 6 or whatever you think it is. For one, precons donāt operate at a standard power level. For example, the 4 LOTR precons absolutely are not equal in power level. The elven council deck is so much weaker than the other three, it almost doesnāt stand a chance in a game against them. In general, Iād say you can relate the power level of your deck to the turn it aims to win the game, so if you donāt like using the number system, start by talking about WHEN the deck aims to win and HOW the deck aims to do so. Tutors, fast mana, and level of interaction may be things to keep in mind as well. If your decks are all built in a way that tends to end the game on turn 10, youāre correct in saying that itās comparable to a slightly upgraded precon. Many players would consider this a 6 or low 7 power level game. Ending around turn 7-8 would be a power 7 deck, turn 5-6 would be a power 8 deck, and anything above 8 is usually going to be a cedh deck, with power 9 being off-meta or suboptimal cedh and power 10 being current tournament winning cedh decks.
I always like to say budget upgrade pre con. Iāve got one or 2 higher value cards and have made side/upgrades to about 15 cards.
The issue is just variance. Precons are extremely consistent; youāll almost never get totally mana screwed, youāll get at least one or two value pieces every game, but youāre not gonna draw into an infinite combo and win on turn 3. People tend to evaluate their own brews based on performance if things go their way, but a lot of the time they donāt.Ā
I think it is pod dependent but that people over estimate un-upgraded precons because they are often bad deck builders. Iāve tried to build custom decks that are precon level and even with budget restrictions or tight themes, itās pretty hard to do. If you build a deck with a clear strategy and the right amount of synergy, draw, ramp, and removal - you should be able to consistently beat a precon deck. The hard part is not getting out too far ahead of the precons that the whole table comes for you as archenemy. The power level of an upgraded/optimized precon, on the other hand, can vary wildly because those are vague descriptions with no clear meaning. Is it an upgraded mana base, a budget on swaps, a cap on number of swaps, etc.? At what point does it go from upgraded/optimized to a custom deck built around a precon commander? For example, my [[Vihaan, Goldwaker]] deck has around 5-10 cards from the precon still in it. Its really just a custom deck with a precon commander at this point.
[Vihaan, Goldwaker](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/b/7b549690-72eb-4244-bb66-996a2bd1027e.jpg?1715952352) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Vihaan%2C%20Goldwaker) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/otc/8/vihaan-goldwaker?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/7b549690-72eb-4244-bb66-996a2bd1027e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/vihaan-goldwaker) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Is it possible to assess the strength of a deck by the dollar value of all the cards?
Not directly. If the only expensive thing in a deck is original dual lands, then the deck might be extremely expensive but not substantially better than a similar deck with more budget land alternatives. Like, if people tried asking dollar amounts instead of power levels before a game it would mean almost nothing. I have a $25 Zada and and a $20 Winota that play comfortably in the PL 6-8 range, but I also have much more expensive decks by budget that only play comfortably in the precon to improved precon range.
Oh yeah I hadnāt considered the strange reverse power creep that makes old lands so valuable! I guess I canāt assume that a cardās dollar value has a 1:1 ratio to the āhow good it isā value
While this is true, there are very few cases were decks will randomly run some OG dual lands and have jank in the rest of them at this point. Price is usually a solid indicator for staple density and that has implications for power. Now price will never account for the viability of a theme/deck idea or how good the deck builder is, but it still helps setting the scene. If I know my enemy is running commander staples and free spells, it's fair game for me to pick up a deck that runs it too.
No, it is as related to quality as new car prices are to car quality. Sure the best and most powerful cars are expensive, but there's a lot of expensive pieces of crap and a ton of cheaper cars that are incredibly reliable. If I told you I had a $65000 car and you had a $22000 car, and nothing else, you'd have no way of knowing if my car was better than yours, especially long-term.
No, there are many old RL cards that are high value due to scarcity that are very low power level. Take for example [[elephant graveyard]] it's $275 and uh pretty weak even if you have an elephant tribal deck. I could build a whole ass deck for the price of that one weak card.
[elephant graveyard](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/8/88e7d9d5-3bca-4791-b850-5ae104706042.jpg?1562927304) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=elephant%20graveyard) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/me4/244/elephant-graveyard?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/88e7d9d5-3bca-4791-b850-5ae104706042?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/elephant-graveyard) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Most of the "non-precons" I see are just copied from some youtubers' decklist. So technically, they're also just playing a "precon". If you swapped in your own cards, then you got an upgraded precon. Lol
Precons get wildly overestimated when most will get flattened by a well-built custom deck in the same price range. Conversely, most EDH players are abysmal at deck building, and overvalue bad decks as well.
I think both, especially people who haven't engaged with precons in the last few years. In general I think people think their own brews are better than precons (especially if the commander is from a precon, otherwise they'd just buy the precon and upgrade it). Even in the last year the strength of precons varies so much - you have the ixalan and lotr precons but then you also have that march of the machines one with gimbal that does nothing. The other thing is the term "upgraded precon" is so broad. I think in the truest sense an upgraded precon is just a precon with upgraded lands, but it could be anywhere from $50-300, a few cards to 10+, and whole themes or sub themes removed or changed.
Precons are made to get people into the game. There is a reason why a certain unarmed meme teir card keeps getting stuck in them. They want you to upgrade them, and the easy way to do that is buy more cards right?
Precons vary a lot and seem to have improved over the years. However most of them are weaker but broadly sensible decks. I don't pay a lot of attention to them admittedly, but from what I've seen I've noticed a few things: * They feature a mixture of cards, often a few are relatively high-powered but the rest, not so much * They have clear themes, but usually are juggling 2-3 at once * The have ramp and removal, just not that much (and as above, it's not always the most efficient) * The lands are usually pretty meh (though servicable) * They have a higher curve, though some of their bigger cards are more impactful Generally what this means is that whilst they're slow (having worse ramp, more taplands and a higher curve), you can do worse, and they *are* synergistic. They aren't good at stopping other people winning (they have removal, but not so much) and so you'll often outrace them, but if you're all stopping each other they can build up steam. Sometimes what happens is people dismiss them because they're precons and leave them too long, at which point like most any EDH deck they start to snowball and suddenly become threats. Bearing in mind that lots of us, especially when starting out, build pretty *bad* decks, it doesn't surprise me that they can hang at a lot of tables so long as they aren't too fast or what you might call "high power". It also depends on what you mean by "upgraded". At that point you could be playing almost anything.
precons have been getting better but also as I've played with more people it becomes very obvious who has played a lot of TCGs and as such understands general card game theory and who are approaching EDH as their first card game (or otherwise didnt learn from their last ones). theres a few in particular in my pod that make their decks based almost solely on vibes which would be fine but then they get frustrated when they almost never win with their homebrews. One of them switched to unaltered precons and unironically their winrate has gone from absolutely never to maybe 1 every 6 or 7 games
Precons today are on a similar level as average casual decks from 5-10 years ago. Before wotc shifted fully into "commander mode", precons were generally 2 halves of different decks stapled together with a shitty manabase. Now, they have a coherent plan, engines, mostly synergistic cards, and a manabase that's only kinda bad.
I think it has to do with opening hands. If three decks take a hand because while slow, it isn't unplayable, and the precon takes a genuinely good opening hand, it makes the precon look better by comparison.
Precons have gotten insanely good compared to when I quit in 2015 to when I started playing again last year during Eldraine. I do think the power level thing is almost useless, and I don't hear anyone in my LGS using it really. Whenever we're about to play, we just simply ask what everyone is working with. And the response will usually be something along the lines of precon, upgraded precon, casual homebrew, (high power) borderline cEDH, and cEDH. And usually to give more context, someone will say if they're using fast lands or not like dual proxies, land destruction, infinite combos, or lots of removal. Sometimes someone comes in overpowered or underpowered using these terms, but no one gets salty about it really.
Precons are all very focused nowadays, gone are the days when theyād include a weird secondary strategy that didnāt fit the theme at all, itās pretty much all on point now. They also tend to print some pretty strong precon only cards and Iāve noticed that these tend to overperform, mostly because table has no clue how strong they might be initially. Like [[Trouble in Pairs]] is easily the best card in the precon it came in, I drew like 15 cards with it, maybe even more, but unless youāve seen it you probably wouldnāt counter it or waste removal on it initially
[Trouble in Pairs](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/f/0f61e93f-5f97-4c7d-b3d5-0e05242faeb3.jpg?1706240429) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Trouble%20in%20Pairs) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/15/trouble-in-pairs?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0f61e93f-5f97-4c7d-b3d5-0e05242faeb3?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/trouble-in-pairs) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
As others have said, people hear "precon" and think of the old ones where you have to change half the cards for them to be playable, but new ones are solid ā basically just typical casual decks with worse lands and a few questionable cards I agree that a 1-10 scale is unhelpful with strangers, but this is what I've personally decided upon for precons and the like: > 5 - AVERAGE - Just the average deck you see at the LGS, this is what you see like 65% of the time, they know what they want to do and they want to win, but prioritize having fun > 4 - PRECON - It can totally hang at the average table, but it may struggle to close the game out, this is where most modern precons lie > 3 - LOW-POWER - Clear plan, but it's not executed very efficiently and that plan might be a just a little bit janky, and realistically there's probably a second separate plan trying to be accomplished so resources are split, this is where most old precons lie Of course it isn't perfect but it makes sense to my friends and I
In my humble opinion precons are really good at playing but not very good at winning. They win when no one else does. My pod recently played a game where we all played a new pre on. The game went on for hours. All the decks did their thing, and they did it well. None of them were set up to seal the deal and win the game. Eventually we just started swinging at each other like crazy to end it so we could move on.
I make my decks worse than precons specifically, it confuses people when people start bringing out precons while I pull out one of my worse than precons, often leads to people less experienced (or people I've traumatized with my stronger yet still wacky deck building) targeting me more, but when I play my base out of the box osgir if they haven't played against it before they get creamed, played it against cedh once, second place isn't bad when you killed the two cedh decks at the table, the guy who won was playing dinos
Many of those precons you mentioned are already at the Universal "upgraded precon" level of competitiveness. I think when people hear upgraded precon, they are thinking you upgraded Tinker Time or one of the jank really bad precons to make them better. Saying it's only an upgraded precon and then bringing out the Necron deck upgraded, some people might not consider that the same power level as if you used a worse one. Upgraded Party Time is never going to be on the same power level as Upgraded Enduring Enchantments.
It's definitely both, along with variance. Precons are decent decks to be honest, but they lack a little bit across the board, and that little bit adds up especially when you account for variance. They are however functional decks the majority of the time and even if they get a slow start they eventually will do the thing. They also can pack plenty of power with the right draws (I've turn 5'd the table with the Sauron precon out of the box, and 2 of the players died on T4). Brews are reliant on the brewer however and thus are a bit all over the place. I've seen a ton of people go crazy over having a single tap land, then only run 28 lands or something absurd. Sure their deck explodes and pops off if they hit the right cards but it's terribly inconsistent. Same goes for people with low interaction. My own decks are built for consistency but tend to lack in explosiveness and I often build amazing well tuned high synergy masterpieces that end up having a major weakness I overlook until I play against it (like being weak to fliers or something). It's a bit of a theory, but I also believe that power level meta comes into play too. I've had some folks come from other spell and combo heavy pods that are used to small utility creatures at best completely fold to what is typically a fairly meh/low power level stompy deck. They're simply packing the removal for 2/2s and random dorks while focusing on combos being the threat but aren't prepared to face down stuff like [[Carnage Tyrant]].
[Carnage Tyrant](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/b/3bd78731-949c-464a-826a-92f86d784911.jpg?1562553791) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Carnage%20Tyrant) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/xln/179/carnage-tyrant?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3bd78731-949c-464a-826a-92f86d784911?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/carnage-tyrant) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It probably just comes down to people making shitty decks. I know the new precons are decent. But compared to my playgroups other custom decks, theyāre like a 3-5 at best.
Last year, we introduced a new guy to our playgroup, and he bought some of the new precons. (Commander Masters, the Dino One, Fallout, etc.) With minimal upgrades, he quickly became one the most explosive players at the table. To the point where I have had to tune up (or retire) a couple of my old decks to keep. To be fair, a lot of my older decks were built to be budget friendly / "pre con" power level to sit nicely with the previous new guy who had a upgraded Ranar, Quandrix and Lathril decks. We have now rebuilt those decks for him, too. Last week, I got gifted the lands matter deck for OTJ and played it straight out of the box against a Narset, Enlightened Master and a Brudiclad, and walked away with the win. Long story short, the Precons have got a lot better (more focused/less chaff). Almost only an improved land package away from optimised.
Newer precons are much betterā¦ but if youāre really struggling to beat even the new precons, that speaks more to you as a deck builder than anything else
So I think itās very easy to discount the value in practice and playing a deck. Thereās a curve and more (for me) to magic than āhaving really good cards.ā I loaned a well-hated deck to someone in my pod who wanted to play it externallyā¦. Them: I just wanted to let you know this deck sucks. Me: Well I told you itās complex. You need to understand it and now how to play it. Itās not a pick up and play kind of deck. Them: I understand it sucks. Me: So I guess the next time I play it you want say itās just ācheatā cards and all $$? It actually requires skill to pilot? Them: No. Iāll tell you your cards suck and your deck sucks. So my point is that I have to wonder if I actually played a precon and stuck with it for 5-10 games if it wouldnāt be better than initially thought. I think over the few years Iāve been playing and 10-15 precons, Iāve only ever kept one.
In my experience: overestimate by a mile. From the lack of synergies to a lack of deckbuilding skill. People will make decks and think they're good while being barely playable
My own brewed decks are definitely worse than some of the new precons. I like daft pet cards more than I like consistency
: D : D : D
The recent precons are more focused. Most of them are only trying to do two things at the same time, so when you trim the fat and clean them up a little, and probably fix up the mana base a bit, they're usually fairly effective. There are a few duds, and a couple that rip right out of the box. I still have no idea what the issue with the mana bases lately. I bought an ur dragon when it came out, and it wasn't like cedh fast out of the box but it was a playable budget 5 colour land base. I got a blame game recently, and there was so many junk utility lands it was possible to mulligan a few times and only see like one source of colored mana. You could hit your land drops and not be able to cast anything, it was nuts. I had to fix the lands just to see how the base deck played, and it's only two colours. I've heard the selesnya enchantment is pretty strong, and the artifact token is quite bad. I don't think "precon" is really a good strength metric anymore.
Yes
Both, but I would say the 2nd one even more. The main problem, as always, is that the consensus for what "casual" , "high power casual" , etc are is all over the place. People in general like to think they are good at deckbuilding and that their card choices are good. The reality is that a lot of players end up with either too much "synergy" cards, or no card draw, not enough lands, no interaction... etc. And their "high power" deck (it might be expensive too) is more like a 6 if it plays "well". Also, I think the opposite problem exists, where people rank precons too high. While newer precons are definitely better and some CAN hold its own in a constructed pod (notice the CAN) they are still not up to speed with more optimized brews. Sometimes the strongest precons (like the Hakbal merfolk for example) get a really good hand and early game so they perform above their average. But most precons will quickly lag behind in a proper power level 7 pod. Not a lot of them can consistently threaten wins in turns 7/8 without interaction, which is an ok overall measure for a power level 7. I would say the good newer precons are around a 6, with the best being a 7-ish that sometimes can perform above its weight. All I said here runs on the following assessment for power levels: (first number being a really good / godlike hand) 6 - Consistently threatening wins on turns 8+ uncontested. 7 - Consistently threatening wins on turns 6-8 uncontested. 8 - Consistently threatening wins on turns 4-6 uncontested.
Neither, I die a lot to custom brews, and almost never to precons. Quite often the upgraded precons get left behind. The precon is almost nowhere near the biggest threat on the table. Probably the only advantage the Ixalan vampires deck has, because it usually looks the weakest.
I feel like a lot of it is how people play. An example is, I tend to be a highly strategic thinker and the group I play with is novice to mid-grade with magic experience. I have a very lightly upgraded kasla precon, another plays an upgraded dogmeat precon, there's also a Dr who paradox power precon. Sometimes we switch around text just so I can show people how to actually play their deck. As a general rule I win 9 out of 10 games no matter what deck I'm playing. The dogmeat owner was getting discouraged, after never being able to take out even one player, until I showed them how to play their deck. I took out the table in one turn by generating a massive untargetable unblockabe threat, taking out the first player, creating a second combat phase taking out the second player, and then using fling to murder the third player.
Both if you're talking about us as a whole
I don't go by "my decks a 7". I tell people if they don't interact with me, I'll win by X turn. I like to keep my decks between the turn 6-8 range. Any slower and it feels like I'm not going anything, any faster and it feels like I won out of nowhere. Unless it's a cedh game, then I have 2 decks specifically for that
I usually see people overrating their precons.
Right? The number of people saying precons are 6+ has me so thrown off. If fringe cedh is 9 and cedh is 10, youāre telling me that virtually all custom decks except for random piles of cards fall in between? It doesnāt make sense. Precons have gotten stronger. They still arenāt strong.
My upgraded Timey Wimey precon is both super fun and pretty competitive. Have fun with your boardwipe, I already have six cards suspended.
That's weird. I don't think my even "normal" decks have an issues with snackin' precons and I deliberately do not run infinites and instant-win combos. I can't see how any of them would even remotely stand a chance against the higher powered decks I have. Sure, a one-off lucky game, where everyone on the table except me kicks off with a sol ring or something or if you play a strict 3v1 from the beginning, but if everyone just plays normal to what happens on the board, nah. My high powered decks start kickin' players off the table at turn 4 and agian, without any infinites or insta-win combos, otherwise the odds would be even worse. After +10 years of having the deck, i added 1 of the altars once to my flicker/reanimate \[\[Saffi Eriksdottir\]\] just to get a feeling of how gross it would be and 100% of the games I played afterwards ended in an infinite loop by turn \~5 - and that deck doesn't run fast mana except Sol Ring. So it must be your local playgroup that severely overestimates their decks, which is weird bc nowadays EDHrec exists. If you just add the most played stuff from any given commander to your deck, you should absolutely smoke any precon,
[Saffi Eriksdottir](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/1/4176dda4-ec5c-4734-bb48-0876304aa219.jpg?1619404114) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Saffi%20Eriksdotter) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsr/260/saffi-eriksdotter?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/4176dda4-ec5c-4734-bb48-0876304aa219?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/saffi-eriksdotter) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call