Magic the Gathering Starter Decks Aren't Cutting It 

Yeah i think one thing driving that is the power level floor has been rising on commander with the improvement of precons.

not really, buy an EDH precon, sit down with the boys, start playing for 40 bucks. I dont know where you got that "elitized" stuff from, MTG has never been more casual. Commander is the most played format, tournament magic is dying, crossover sets are getting popular etc etc

Lotus field starter deck was reasonably playable out of box for $35. Arc light Phoenix starter deck for around $40. Yeah, they need upgrades for league play, it they are good to go. There are also starter kits with two decks for $10. Not sure what this chap is talking about.

Thank you so much for the kind words. I dream of the day i can walk into a shop with mono white reanimator and get a couple games.

Thanks! I really appreciate the compliment. Yeah there was a weird encoding thing that i think i figured out. Should be good moving forward.

@@TheFirstJake I also watched your most recent video and a magic/yugioh hybrid format would be fun (if it allowed proxies)

I would love if they supported paper more. It’s such a cool format. I would only be worried of stuff getting rarity shifted down in meta shifting ways.

Oh that’s really interesting. I know literally nothing about the Digimon Card Game. Did the deck come out before the archetype or after? I’m curious if they released a deck that was meta or released a deck that shifted the meta.

@@TheFirstJake if you want to investigate, it's the "Advanced Deck Beelzemon [ST14]". The big payoff cards in the deck were released specifically with this product. In mtg terms, the strategy is " self-mill, graveyard size matters". Self mill is prominent, but this deck took it to 11. It had a pretty high representation %, sometimes making up 50% of any event. It definitely skewed the meta and pushed the power level of the format upwards.

Darn. That sounds pretty sweet. Unfortunately I’m trying not to buy into any new tcgs at the moment. I’ll definitely read up on it. I’m currently digging into lorcana as i like their “mana” system.

@@TheFirstJake oh yeah for sure. the good news is Digimon is incredibly cheap, but it's very much a Japanese combo soup. Lorcana is also a banger. It scratches that old school magic itch and it's inexpensive to get into.

That just means they need to print those cards in a starter deck. I guarantee it won't be $20 anymore.

i heavily disagree that commander is easier to learn. the onboarding process for a new player means you're going to have to learn what 70-80 different cards in your deck are supposed to do while trying to react to ~3 other people at the same time. 60 cards with a playset of 4 means there are just going to be fewer cards you need to learn, regardless of how competitive the format might be

For 60 card play, you're probably going to be better off picking up singles. If there's a challenger deck in the archetype you're looking for it can act as a good jumping off point, but they are designed for a specific format so it has some weird suboptimal choices. Also occasionally cardkingdom restocks their battle decks which are completely prebuilt kitchen table decks with a great strategy guide. Also if you already have a community that plays you might just ask around. Most people are drowning in bulk. It will be garbage, but it's a starting point.

I really like Card Kingdom's 3rd party decks. They are definitely my go-to for "what do to after starter kit" conversation. It's unfortunate that they haven't been stocking them lately.

Yeah it’s sad that this is good advice.

Well I will caveat my statement a little. There are excellent starter products for Commander which is the most popular casual format. There's a few at most LGS's that I've been to recently floating around $30-40 that can definitely hold their own at a random pick-up game.

Just buy a commander deck and find some people to play with. You dont need more than that. Its a casual format (not like yugioh) so everyone tries to get the same powerlevel decks which is kinda easy. Yugioh also lets you pay high amount of money, if you want some specific card which boost your winrate by a lot. I own both, yugioh and magic decks. Also as soon as you got your first commander precon... Simply proxy the shit out of MTG and get for 25euro every tier1 deck in commander and so on. Its a casual format so nobody cares. Comparison to YuGiOh, where you cant even use korean/japanese cards even if they are 90% cheaper. Thats just a scam. English tournament with spanish cards? No problem. English tournament with korean cards? Not possible.

i've been wanting to help one of my friends get into magic, but i haven't been able to make my own decks for that, and the intro decks are mindnumbingly boring to me. i feel like they could easily design simple, one or two color decks that can teach you some basic synergies and themes of the game while not throwing complexity at you, but instead the theme is always Recent Draft Chaff typal

I appreciate the feedback. I'll look into boosting the sound a bit. Thanks!

@@TheFirstJake Oh I'm also building an azorius bird/flying themes deck!... Great suggestions.

That's awesome! I'd love to see the list when you complete it.

Yeah i would love that. Honestly though I’d almost rather it not be tied to any competitive format. It feels like right now people have the dividing line at commander vs competitive and it really feels like comparing two separate axes.

Pioneer decks still had major issues like having a single rare shockland you would want to play, 1 or 2 copies of the card the deck is named after that is the whole reason it exists(looking at you Izzet Pheonix), outright unplayable cards because they had to fill the void left by removing expensive cards with something... It would be a major step up from having nothing at all but by god there were still lots of issues with it and there would be room to improve upon them.