Old Theme Decks

[ketchupgun]

I want to put a box togther of all the old theme decks .. i think it will be pretty solid for travel and such with the family.

Just a question: Are all the old theme decks relatively the same level of power/success? IE: will any theme deck vs any theme deck bring out a pretty even challenged game?

I do realize that may be hard to answer, but I just think how equally bad some of them are constructed (ie: 1 off cards, no 4 offs, super high casting costs at times).

[andrewpate]

By "theme decks," do you mean the preconstructed decks released 4 at a time with each Expert-level set for a long while?  If so, then no, they are not all balanced.  They are reasonably balanced within each individual set, but even there it varies.  "Bait and Bludgeon" (Affinity, from Mirrodin) jumps to mind.  But between sets the variance is even higher; we used to have a league going with only preconstructed decks back in college, and I distinctly recall the decks from Betrayers of Kamigawa, especially "Dark Devotion" (demons/ogres) and Rat's Nest (black aggro), being abnormally powerful, for example.

[ketchupgun]

thx. That's too bad, but not unexpected.
I'm coming back to MTG after a long boardgame stint, and finding te imbalance which is the core of MTG a little off putting these days. Maybe I'll look ito making a cube or something.
thx for your reply.

[Beralt]

A little bit slow on the reply - but I want to beg to differ on the theme decks - an excellent tool for playing with casual players and introducing newer players to the game.  I want to reccomend Ravnica's Theme decks if you can find them - all relatively balanced and fun with neat concept introduced in each - you can even go thru and sprinkle in the occasional card that might update/upgrade the deck.

Andrewpate was correct though in his assessment of theme decks - the Kamigawa's decks suffered from some painful mechanics that the theme decks were playing up.  And then the Rat's nest deck had a Jitte to overpower all the other decks.  Mirrodin decks contained affinity elements that while reasonably balanced were overpowered in some respects (Mirrodin Block format had several bannings within it).

I guess mostly though that the theme decks were balanced within their respective blocks, play theme decks against other theme decks in the same block and you will have more fun.

[Matt]

I remember the precon with Psychatog being noticeably strong...

[Nefarias]

I just found out yesterday that a friend of mine has almost every precon so we battled with them for a few hours yesterday, and it was a blast. I highly recommend collecting a bunch of them and playing them against each other.

That said, it's true that some are pretty broken. The stand-outs for us were the following:

Red Tempest: A ton of removal, the red commons in the set were just dumb anyway. Kindle (4X), Rolling Thunder, Fireslinger, and Mogg Fanatic are all common.
Blue Exodus: A really fun control deck, though a really fast weenie could probably beat it. Includes Legacy's Allure, Equilibrium, Capsize, and plenty of counters.
Invasion Domain: As long as the mana didn't crap out on your (which, with plenty of Fertile Grounds and Harrow, was usually okay), it was really fun and full of great cards.
Judgment Phantoms: This deck would probably lose easily to a control deck with a lot of non-damage removal (aka blue and black), but anything else would be tough. Not many things beat a Phantom Centaur with an Elephant Guide on it.

We happened to play the Psychatog one too. It was pretty good, but only because it had two Psychatogs in it. The majority of the cards in it are terrible (The rares are False Memories and the Cephalid with shred counters). It seemed to play out like this: You play a Psychatog, nobody does anything for a million turns, your opponent gets a flyer or a way to deal with Psychatog, and you lose.

[Beralt]

Again the theme decks are good for reinforcing concepts for more casual players - when I play Magic with my wife we will commonly use the Ravnica block decks or the Lorwyn block decks and she will say "I want to play with the Elf deck (Elvish Predation) or that deck that uses Convoke (Selesnya)."  And then she will add she doesn't want me playing either of the Mill decks in those formats - Dimir and Merfolk decks respectively.  So the battles will be Orzhov vs Selesnya or Elves vs Elementals.  Fun, Fun, Fun.