Welcome to PreCon Playground!

Hello there! My name is Leo and to get straight to the point, I love playing MtG, I love making janky commander brews, and I love using pre-constructed decks (precons.) In a world where every major MtG website has a million different articles going live, none of them cover the one thing which I always wanted to read.

What do you do with your commander precon after the first month of its release?

If you search YouTube for a particular precon commander, you'd expect to find a wealth of information on it. You would look for one of the latest videos to see what people have been doing with that commander with the latest releases. What you end up finding is only a bunch of videos that were almost all released within a 2 month window. All of the analysis on the commander, how to brew for it, and what upgrades to purchase are all released in just that 2 - 3 month window from when the deck list spoiled to a month after release.

And I’d like to change that!

Who am I and when did I start?

I’m Leo! The TLDR of how I got into playing magic is that I was teaching a marching band camp and the director as well as another of the instructors were playing Magic. I thought it looked cool and the rest is history!

That was sometime in 2013 - 2014 but I never actually owned my own cards until my buddies dragged me to an FNM in 2015 to play standard with the [Path of Blight] intro deck. That FNM is when I started what I think was one of the weirdest relationships with Magic. I was a superfan. No other way to put it. I watched coverage of the tournaments, followed a bunch of different content creators, learned the lore, and all around became obsessed with the game. What made it a weird relationship with the game is that I never bought another Magic card since that FNM until the Summer of 2022!

A good friend took me to his LGS in Philadelphia and he pushed me to purchase my

first Commander Precon [Bedecked Brokers], a deck box, and some sleeves. I always loved precons and all the brewing ideas and tools they can inspire.

I would always watch (and still watch being completely honest) every precon upgrade video from my favorite content creators. I always got excited when a new batch of them came out so now I could finally apply what I learned to the pile of 100 cards in front of me!

There was just one problem which I realized when looking up upgrade info about the deck. Everyone seemed to care about what to upgrade and how to make the deck better ONLY UNTIL THE NEXT SET OF PRECONS CAME OUT! Looking at the upload dates of videos, almost all of the discourse about the Bedecked Brokers Deck, the SNC Precons, and the SNC set as a whole had started in the 1 month of hype and ended in the one month of play after. My deck was the new cool thing for exactly 2 months. Because I was a fan of Magic the Gathering and knew I would continue to be, the thought of "What do I do with this pile of 100 cards now" never sunk in for me. But for new players who just dropped $30 - $50 on a precon, I'm sure this thought along with the drought of content on their deck could lead to someone not wanting to play after a month or two.

What am I going to do about it?

With each set, there are more and more options and tools to upgrade your precons. And with them comes a whole new suite of precons that need reviewing. So from the content creator perspective, I completely understand that staying relevant and getting views means talking about the coolest and latest things as they come out instead of dwelling on one product that is no longer in the limelight. In my case that meant no one was talking about Streets of New Capenna for more than a month because Battle for Baldurs’ Gate was in spoiler season at the same time. That unfortunately means that no one will ever mention your precon or what it could benefit from with the new releases as they will just be talking about the new release and how to upgrade that new release.

That’s where I come in! I want this page, these articles, and the channel/streams that will subsequently be started to be more of a longtime-progression-upgrade of a handful of decks. I’ll talk about the commander precons as they come out and if one of them has a main or backup commander that seems really cool, I’ll put it into the rotation and give it at least a year of upgrades under a reasonable budget. This will hopefully give readers and followers a chance to see the progression of a deck upgrade over its lifecycle while Magic the Gathering continues to evolve too.

The other part that always seems to be left out is actual gameplay! You’ll usually see one or two videos pitting the precons that came out against each other and just like the upgrade & analysis videos, you’ll never see gameplay with them again unless it just happens to be someone’s pet deck. I’d like to take these decks and not just upgrade them, but actually play with them! That way if you’re following along you can see what these changes actually materialize into. The game is meant to be seen, talked about, but most importantly played. So I want to put these change blogs and deck-tech articles to actually turn into gameplay!

The ultimate goal would be to get a discord server going where folks can run their precon deck variants against each other! I love both the game and the community and I think the best thing that could come from this page is getting more people interested in both with a solid pile of cards to have fun with too.

How?

This is a breakdown of the workflow I’d like to have with these longtime upgrade decks.

1. Pick 4 precons from different sets that look really cool and seem really fun to play. Preferably with different play styles. Also I’ll make sure they cover all five colors and varying playstyles to not leave cards out in set reviews.

2. Play & review some games with the 4 decks against each other to get a baseline of how they handle

3. Give them all a 1 month budget M1 (See “Important Note on Budget” Below)

4. Play & Review some games after M1

5. Keep repeating steps 3 & 4 each month to see how good we can get these decks

6. With each major set release I’ll write a longer article that goes over what cards could be super useful to add to the next month's upgrade.

7. Occasionally take these decks to other pods and groups to see how well they handle in the wild.

8. After maybe a year I’ll retire these decks and work on a new batch of 4 to go through the process again.

When & Where?

When: As often as I can lol. I have a full time job, a wife, a family, and am enrolled in a full time computer science degree program. Writing articles, getting games in, updating this website, and filming videos may not come as often as I’d love for them to, but this format of long time progression updates on a handful of decks may actually lend itself better to longer release windows.

Where: I’ll be active on my personal social accounts as well as some that I’ll create for PreConPlayground. I’ll make sure to announce what my next project is and take questions for what I’m doing along the way.

Important Note on Budget

One of the big sensitive topics I want to keep in mind while doing this is budget. We are playing a luxury cardboard game and most players don’t have money to throw at $40+ cards that in commander you may not ever get to play with and see in action! The plan is to set a budget of 20 - 30 dollars for a deck monthly.

And if there is one costly card that I’d like to throw in, I’ll save the budget I didn’t use to save up for that card. So if I really think a deck needs [Doubling Season] (Heads up I think almost no deck needs a Doubling Season) I’ll save the monthly budget for 4 months before purchasing it as it is consistently hovering around 90 - 110 dollars a copy. I really believe setting a reasonable budget is extremely important because it is really easy to sink into the two problematic extremes of money management with Magic. Extreme number one is taking on debt to buy (what I can’t stress enough) what is just luxury cardboard. Extreme number two, is being perpetually upset, mad, or jealous that others are playing better and winning more because they have more expensive cards. Now while I am doing relatively well at my fulltime job and can afford to buy a lot of cards or expensive ones, I don’t think it is necessary at all to have fun doing so. That is exactly what I’m here to defend with this budget model of upgrading decks and buying a precon to start with anyways.

Conclusion

I’m really excited to get this off the ground and get some more Magic games in so for now enjoy clicking around the website, make sure you sign up for notifications (they won’t get spammy I swear!) and I hope you have fun in the PreCon PlayGround!!

Play Nice & No Shoving.