Tips: What Makes a Prebuilt Product Good?

Although it may be obvious to most of you more experienced budget players, there are a few younger or less experienced players who don't know what they should be looking for with prebuilt decks or products, whether it be from Bushiroad, secondary dealers, or other players. Should you get it? Is it worth the money? Well, I wanted to make a quick, little guide(maybe not as quick and little) about prebuilt products.

Decisions Decisions...

There are three main places that you can find prebuilt decks for various TCGs:
-Official prebuilt decks, like Trial Decks for Bushiroad TCGs and Structure Decks for YGO.
-Online buying and selling sites, like eBay, and reselling sites, like Card Kingdom for Magic.
-From other players, whether it be online or at your locals.

All of these methods of buying prebuilt decks are great and as long as you look out for the good prebuilt products you won't regret it.

Now there are a couple of things that you want to ask yourself when deciding to buy a prebuilt deck:
-What staples are included?
-Is the value fair?
-Are there any new or hard to find cards in the bundle?
-What is the target demographic?

I'll be going over all of these, but the walls of text might just be too thick. I get it. Some people are busy. So I kindly put TL;DRs under every section! So whether you want to read the topic in-depth or just get the gist of it, you can do however you like.

Staples:

The one staple we'll
never afford...

A Trial Deck's value increases substantially the more staples are included, and how many copies per staple card are included. In the case of most G-Trial Decks, they come with 2 Perfect Guards, 2 Strides, and 2 of the main boss unit, so generally they have pretty great value.

Staples aren't as much a thing in Vanguard as in other games, like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Buddyfight, and Pokémon. In Yu-Gi-Oh, you MUST run Twin Twisters, or at least Mystical Space Typhoon for budget, in every deck that fears backrow. In Buddyfight, nullifies are mandatory in nearly every deck, if not all of them. And in Pokémon, there's cards like Prof. Sycamore, Vs Seeker, Wally, and the such that often see play at multiple copies in many decks.

TL;DR Multiple Copies of Staples, Value of Product Increases

Value:

Focus on that value

It's quite simple. You don't want to lose money buying a prebuilt deck. Should you be able to
purchase the deck or individual cards you want in the deck for cheaper than they are selling it, then it's not a good buy.

Take, for example, a prebuilt Dragonic Overlord deck that I found online. It wasn't too interesting, as decks go, but I'll point out the key things here:

4x Perdition Dragon, Dragonic Neoflame $12 ea
4x Perdition Emperor Dragon, Dragonic Overlord the Great $15 ea
4x Supreme Heavenly Emperor Dragon, Dragonic Overlord the Ace $10 ea
4x Lava Flow Dragon $5
4x Protect Orb Dragon $20

In total, that entire value adds up to be close to $250. And do you know how much the seller was selling it for? $150.

$150! $100 off of the total value! And that's just the key stuff! There was an entire trigger lineup, including 4 Gattling Claw Dragon, 4 Burnouts, the list goes on. If I had the spare money to get it, I would have. Sadly, I did not have the funds to get it, but hopefully you will if you find a bargain deal like that.

Now, even if the total value of the deck were a bit lower than what you are paying, you have to keep in mind that the seller has gone through the effort of collecting those cards and compiling it into a fully built deck, so a little extra money could be nice. Think of it like tipping your waiter for their hard work if you spend a little extra. When I mean little, I mean less than $15-20. If it's more than that, I say no dice.

In general, Bushiroad's Trial Decks nowadays are worth the value, but there are always some exceptions to this.

TL;DR Make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck when buying decks.

New or Hard to Find Cards:

Where's Waldo
Stride Fodders?

All Vanguard players know that there are a bunch of hard to find cards, and new cards are always on the horizon for every card game. Tsukuyomi, Luquier, MLB, DotE, hell even Stride Fodders at this point are hard to find, and new cards can be almost just has hard to get your hands on. If you can find someone, anyone that can get you these new or hard to find cards in a bundle for relatively cheap, do so.

Again, Bushi's Trial Decks generally release new cards to the public and sometimes reprint hard to find/get cards, and again, there are always some exceptions.

TL;DR Look for the new release cards and the hard to get cards in prebuilt products you have your eye on.

Target Demographic:
Now this is something that some people don't think about. For what player group is a prebuilt deck directed to? This pretty much applies only to official products, but may apply to a small group of eBay sellers.

There are two types of players in TCGs to which Target Demographic applies: Novice and Experienced, with the latter being subcategorized further into Casual and Competitive.

I'll be using Yu-Gi-Oh! as the example in this one, albeit I hate the route that Konami is taking right now with the game.

There are two main prebuilt products for Yu-Gi-Oh! players: Starter Decks and Structure Decks.
Starter Decks, obviously, are targeted to Novice players who are starting to learn the game. While the thought put into these is completely half-assed, Starter Decks let new players learn the mechanics of the game and more often than not come with at least 1 copy of Mystical Space Typhoon or other staple, usually at least 3-5.

Now for Structure Decks. They apply to both Casual and Competitive players alike, but depending on the specific Structure Deck it may vary.

I'll be using a few recent ones, namely the upcoming Seto Kaiba deck and Rise of the True Dragon Lords. The Seto Kaiba Structure Deck directly leads into the new, upcoming ABC-Dragon Buster deck that's been topping in Japan and on it's release will without a doubt make the same impact here on the TCG side of the game. Rise of the True Dragon Lords, while being interesting and the cards themselves pretty good, aren't doing anything in the competitive scene. They're just a cool, fun deck that can do well, but aren't powerful enough as is to compete at a high level of play. They just can't. But they make a perfect casual deck to play with your friends or at your locals. And there's nothing wrong with that.

TL;DR Make sure to buy a deck that's proper for you, depending on the type of player you are: Novice, Casual, or Competitive.

Now let's take what we know and review a few products.



CFV G-TD06: Rallying Call of the Interspectral Dragon is a very good deck. It sells at official local shops for about $13-15 USD. The key cards in the deck are History Maker, which is $10 at the moment, Chronojet, and Metallica, all of which are staple in Time Leap decks. So you get HUGE value for a Trial deck, no less than about $25-30, in one $13 package and get a bunch of staples for a deck that is top tier right now. It's a competitive Trial Deck that has great value, loads of staples, and has hard to find TD exclusives that are good. It's just flatout great and will always be a good buy when Gear Chronicle is meta.



Let's look at G-TD01, TD06's worse little brother. The value of the deck is terrible, with not a single
card in the deck being higher than $1 outside of Hot Stamps. The only staples of the deck are Chronojet and Amber, to some extent. And look, it gives you the most inconsistent, heavycosted card in the entire game as your main gambit. No value, few staples, and no hard to get cards. I wouldn't even recommend this to beginners. But if you're some casual who wants to play some kinda Mystery-flare deck, go ahead boo.

Now onto better things and other games.

Buddyfight's D-SD03: Hollow Black Dragon's not too shabby. While the deck itself doesn't have as much value, it's just perfect in all other aspects. It comes with multiple copies of a majority of staple monsters in Abygale decks, as well as the staple Black Dragon Shield, Abyss Symphony, and Sickle Avenger, all of which are powerful cards that see abundant play in Darkness Dragon World decks of all kinds. And the interesting thing is that this deck is a great by Novice and Experienced players alike, as well as both Casual and Competitive players. And it's cheap too. $10 at official vendors.

I hoped that this article helped out a few of you, give some more some insight on purchasing decks, and help you out on the thinking process on deciding whether or not to buy a prebuilt deck.

Anyhow, see you in the next one!

-Robot