MTG - Is it worth it to buy a Challenger Deck? A Magic: The Gathering Product Review

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Many Magic: The Gathering players ask the question, Is It Worth It To Buy a Challenger Deck?

Your local game store holds Magic: The Gathering events from Friday Night Magic to the Standard Showdown to other in store events throughout the week. For new and returning players, attending these events has often been difficult, as booster packs are designed with the draft format in mind and not constructed, thus buying tons of booster packs to crack in order to build a competitive Friday Night Magic standard deck has never been an easy, affordable or even successful strategy.

The only alternative, however, has been downloading decklists and buying singles to build a complete deck from scratch. An expensive option considering Standard decks usually run in the hundreds of dollars, if not more.

Challenger Decks seek to offer what has never before been done: a self-contained, preconstructed standard deck which can be bought at an affordable price and played effectively and competitively at Friday Night Magic or other in store events, right out of the box. At an MSRP of 29.99, these challenger decks would need to offer quite a lot to new and returning players interested in them. Do they rise to the challenge? Let’s take a look!

Now, For The Record, Wizards has attempted products like this before, most notably with the long running product line of Event Decks. But, as my own reviews cover if you are curious on the details, Event Decks were almost always terrible right out of the box, technically playable at FNM but not something that put up much of, if any of a fight. A new or returning player using an event deck would likely end up in last place, and many times did not even have a framework from which to build a competitive deck. Event Decks were jank, containing 1-2 copies of largely unplayed cards, never mythics and never value.

Now, one criticism many of my videos have had in the past is an over emphasis on the importance of financial value in products such as these. My answer to that is simple: when products of the past such as Event Decks were so terrible, so unplayable at an event, so failing in the very thing they were designed to do, then all there is left to look at is financial value.

In the case of challenger decks, everyone is talking about financial value because these contain mythics, and playsets and playsets of mythics, but for me, i don’t care. I do not care one bit about whether the sum total of the individual cards within these 29.99 decks are worth 60, 80 or even 10 dollars each. I will still look at financial value, but what matters here is the degree to which these are playable out of the box at Friday Night Magic.