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

Looking to have the best Magic The Gathering Commander gameplay? Try building Sydri, Galvanic Genius Esper Commander Deck here:    • MTG - A Guide to Sydri, Galvanic Genius Es...   Be sure to check out the awesome YouTube channel of MTG Young Mage!    / @mtgyoungmage   Magic The Gathering Lessons for New Players: Learn How to Draft Better! | Drafting for N00bs    • Magic The Gathering Lessons for New Player...   Is it worth it to buy a Kaladesh Gift Box:    • MTG - Is it worth it to buy a Kaladesh Gif...   Super Kuldotha Bros. $50.00 Budget Pauper:    • MTG - Super Kuldotha Bros. $50.00 Budget P...   Tolarian Community College is brought to you by Card Kingdom! You can support The Professor just by checking out their store through this link: http://www.cardkingdom.com/TCC An evaluation sample was provided by Wizards of the Coast for this video. Evaluation samples are for the purposes of review only and do not influence grade, nor does a lack of evaluation samples. How To Keep You Foils From Curling:    • MTG - How To Keep Your Foil Cards From Cur...   Advanced Modern Studies: How To Improve Your Magic: The Gathering Gameplay With A Deck Library    • MTG - Advanced Modern Studies: How To Impr...   How To Netdeck And Why:    • MTG - How To Netdeck: Using The Internet T...   TCC Shirts! Playmats! - http://www.tolariancommunitycollege.com/ Or you can support me directly over at Patreon -  / tolariancommunitycollege   Previous Review of the Pirate Lab Trays:    • MTG - Deck Boxes 13 - Pirate Lab 3 Row Tra...   Twitter:   / tolariancollege   FaceBook:   / tolariancommunitycollege   Come hang out and play Magic with me on Twitch:   / tolariancommunitycollege   Music Courtesy Of: "Vintage Education" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Airport Lounge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Deliberate Thought" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... 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.