PreCon battle!

[TheMightyQuinn]

Recently, I stumbled upon the boxes of old precon decks I had bought back in the day. They got me thinking: what if there was a tournament that only allowed preconstructed decks? What would I bring to such an event?

Some of my personal favorites were "Waking Nightmares" from Torment and "Replicator" from Nemesis. I especially love reading the deck descriptions on the back of the boxes:

The "Waking Nightmares" deck is the stuff of dreams. Really bad dreams. Use your Nightmare creatures to choke off your opponents resources, then turn out the lights. Let your foes rest in pieces.

Yeah. I think that settles it right there! If such an event existed, what precon would you take?

[Nonex]

Something tells me that the choice for many would be to examine all precons to see their stuff or just take the Kamigawa one with Umezawa's Jitte.

[Eldariel]

I've actually played some. I'm particularly fond of Dominator (Exodus), the only real Control Precon (I mean c'mon, 26 Islands, you know it'll be good!) and Nuts and Bolts (Fifth Dawn). Unfortunately Dominator got banned on Magic-League Precon Wars so I'm stuck with Nuts and Bolts. That deck is a riot though; while unfair, Skullclamp is heap-loads of fun.

[TheMightyQuinn]

Oh wow, there's a league dedicated to PreCon battles? Color me surprised, thats so cool!

I'd still probably go with Waking Nightmares. It served as a jumping off point for a deck I terrorized all my friends with for quite a while. "Aww, not the nightmare deck again!"

[Eldariel]

Oh wow, there's a league dedicated to PreCon battles? Color me surprised, thats so cool!

I'd still probably go with Waking Nightmares. It served as a jumping off point for a deck I terrorized all my friends with for quite a while. "Aww, not the nightmare deck again!"

No, no Precon Battle-only league, but Magic-League has single elimination tournaments in formats of judges' discretion leading to lots of tournaments outside the competitive DCI-sanctioned formats too; various casual formats including Precon Wars are played there. Though lately we haven't had any Precon Wars minis; I guess it's 'cause the format is kinda stale since there's no brewing involved so you have a set bunch of decks to work from.

[dahcmai]

Our local store actually has a free tournament to bring people in on Wednesday (a normally dead day) and it consists of playing all pre-cons instead of bring your own decks. It's a "grab a random deck out of a box" type thing. When you hit top 8, you end up playing with Championship decks (Gold bordered stuff) for the finals. It's actually pretty fun and we throw a loop in the mix occasionally by having what I call "Constant effects" in play like a perma Howling Mine or some such in play or flat out using Vanguard cards. You pick these at random also. I added cards like Furnace of Rath or others.

Anyway, the Mirrodin decks are typically the best as Skullclamp is a beating in them. There's one Urza's Saga deck that keeps up quite well. We added the Visions and other online ones too by just finding the cards and printing off the online deck sheets. The newer the deck is, the better it does overall. I've seen the worst of them come close to winning though. Making it random to pick them out made a huge difference and has the skill sets of each player put to the test when they get a crap one.

Lift off is by far the worst deck over all. We've had one guy get 2nd place with that crappy deck, but that's the best it's ever done of years of doing this. We were all hovering over the finals of that one hoping "Lift off" would finally win one. It's soooo bad.


The funny thing is it's actually a fairly popular tournament. It brings in enough people to get 6 rounds quite often. It's been close to the number for FNM's max record oddly enough.

[Aggro_zombies]

I've always had a soft spot for precons:

Replicator (Nemesis)
Trounce-o-matic (Odyssey)
The Plague (Urza's Saga)
The Spikes (Stronghold) (Hermit Druid was one of the rares!)
Izzet Gizmometry (Guildpact)

Something like this format would be fun, but it's kind of a bummer that you can't really use the Alara or Zendikar block precons because of the whole "40 card" thing. Also, there are a lot of older, wackier precons that aren't very good when stacked up against the newer ones, which is a pity because a lot of them were fun.

[dahcmai]

We actually use the Zendikar ones too. Number of cards in the deck didn't really matter too much. Surprisingly, the skill level of the players has more to do with things than the pre-cons ability to keep up. It's still usually the better players who go on to the later rounds.

[Peter_Rotten]

Vampire deck with lots of removal and that Vampire Abyss on Legs Legend. He pwns my son's face everytime.