I have a confession to make. I’m not great at building decks. Although I learned how to play Magic: The Gathering back in the ‘90s, my ADHD always got in the way of me seeing the cards in a way that intrinsically understood card interactions and combos. Under the right conditions, I can eventually do something but typically my brain just gets overwhelmed looking through cards. I struggle to remember other cards that I’ve looked at. As such, my deck building skills have always lacked finesse. My decks are typically a conglomeration of cards I thought looked cool or did cool things without much thought offered to how it may work in tandem with other cards. Oftentimes, my deck would be 80, 90, even 100 cards because I couldn’t decide what cool things I wanted to keep or take out.
Fortunately for players like me who struggle with the overwhelm of building a deck, there are pre-constructed decks that take those things into account. Yes, some people look down on pre-con players, but they are an important part of Magic: The Gathering for many people. While they aren’t going to be as good as a deck built with $1000 worth of cards, they have a theme, they understand card interactions, and they’re a great option for someone who is new to Magic or who struggles with deck building. They can also be a great stepping stone for learning how to build a deck. Instead of starting from scratch, it’s possible to edit a pre-con so that it works better but uses the framework of the deck. For many players, that can be a great way to learn card interactions and eventually move on to solo deck building.
An inability to adequately build a deck is only one facet of the decision to get a pre-con. The other part to consider when thinking about a pre-con is the exposure to other color identities and play styles. I feel comfortable playing Blue/Green but playing pre-cons gives me the chance to play a more aggressive color set like Red/Black or mono Red. It also exposed me to more planewalkers with decks like Planeswalkers Party featuring Commodore Guff.
War of the Spark was a fun planeswalker-centric set but it came and went and I still wasn’t really a planeswalker player. I wanted to be but I just didn’t see the bigger picture when I looked at one planeswalker and then another and another. Not being able to make those connections kept me from being a planeswalker player until I had the Commodore Guff pre-con from 2023’s Commander Masters in my hands.
Wizards of the Coast also puts out Magic pre-cons in collaborations with other IPs. These collaborations, called Universes Beyond, take popular IPs like Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, or Doctor Who and puts their characters into Magic: The Gathering. As an avowed Whovian, I had to have the Doctor Who Commander pre-cons. Are they the most powerful decks in Commander? Of course not. They can be edited to be more powerful but that’s not why I wanted them. The biggest draw to buying a Universes Beyond pre-con is for the IP. There is something very special about seeing The Twelfth Doctor standing on a tank or a copy of Farewell featuring David Tenant’s Tenth Doctor.
Sometimes buying a pre-con ends up being a very good investment. There are times when a card inside of a pre-con ends up becoming rather valuable. Perhaps even more valuable than the pre-con was initially sold for. A great example of this is Edgar Markov from the Vampiric Bloodlust Commander pre-con that was released in 2017. Being an early adopter when the deck was selling for $35 was like winning the MTG lottery. Today, that pre-con can cost you nearly $200 and Edgar Markov costs about $65 by itself. That level of appreciation on Magic cards means that you can get some cards that are in demand for much lower than they will eventually cost.
Despite my ADHD and the overwhelm I experience building decks. I certainly have gotten better at building decks. In fact, I recently started work on a Commander deck based on Grolnok, The Omnivore that I lovingly call Commander Froggy.
It’s turning out to be much more cohesive than many of my previous efforts. I know that I have to be able to build decks to be successful at more than just kitchen table Magic so I’m working on it. In the meantime, I will continue to learn and have fun with pre-constructed Magic: The Gathering decks. There is no shame in playing a pre-con.
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