Retrospective Reviews: Premium Deck Series

There's no time like the present to dig up the past: it's time for another Retrospective Review! In this leg of the journey, I'm examining defunct products to determine what went wrong, be it concept or execution. This entry is about the short-lived Premium Deck Series, an odd product if ever I heard one.

These products included a single 60-card deck, a unique spindown, and a little packet talking about the deck and how to play the game (I can't imagine starting Magic with this product, but I'm sure someone did!). The truly unique feature of this product was being 100% foil. All 60 cards (and even the box!) were foil, and the product did not have a non-foil equivalent.

For the sake of transparency, I had only just gotten into Magic: the Gathering when the final Premium Deck Series was getting released, but hadn't any awareness of the broader product ecosystem, so I missed it completely. To actually get an idea of certain player reactions, I did some digging through the old MTGSalvation forums. It was a fun time capsule to dig up, but I'll talk about that later.

So, what was the impetus here, and why did it sputter out so quickly? Let's dig in and find out!

The Decks

Premium Deck Series: Slivers came out in November 2009. As the name suggests, this was a deck all about the Sliver creature type. It provided the first time some of its included cards could be acquired in foil, a useful feature for general foil collectors.

The deck had 30 Sliver creature cards, 20 of which were singleton. It doubled up on Gemhide Sliver as a way to make up for the deck's mediocre mana base (we'll get there), as well as Muscle Sliver, Spectral Sliver, Virulent Sliver and... Metallic Sliver. That last one hurts.

The deck as a whole contained 26 one-ofs, mostly in the spells category. This five-color mana base looks like a struggle. Two copies of Ancient Ziggurat is sweet, but only one easily untapped dual land in Rootbound Crag is harsh.

Notable cards included in the deck were Sliver Overlord, Coat of Arms, and Ancient Ziggurat. I'm not going in-depth on financial values due to the weird nature of the product. You could pick up the list of cards about $120 today, and a sealed copy is now worth $300.

Player reaction was mixed for pretty obvious reasons. Everyone knows that Slivers can get scary fast. In some games, the player might line up mana lucky enough to steamroll the opponent immediately. However, if they tripped up there, it would be all over, glass-cannon-style. More to the point, though, is that a Sliver theme is fairly narrow. They were divisive then and now: you love them or hate them!

That being said, a few people seemed to pick them up because the mostly singleton nature meant you could pay $35 for about half of a Sliver-themed Commander deck, already foiled out! Not a bad deal even by today's standards, and at least they had a reason for not including Sliver Hive!

...Ahem.

Next deck!

Premium Deck Series: Fire & Lightning brought a fully foiled burn deck to shelves in November 2010. This deck also included new art for two of its cards, Jackal Pup and Chain Lightning.

This mono-red aggro deck only had 23 one-ofs, down from Slivers at 26! The two-ofs included Jackal Pup, Keldon Marauders, Mogg Fanatic, Mogg Flunkies, and Spark Elemental.

This is the only deck to have a full playset: Lightning Bolt; a few players recommended picking this up for that alone.

The decklist inside is technically purchasable for $17, as burn tends to run cheap. The whole kit-and-kaboodle is available online for... $50. After over a decade, this product hasn't even appreciated by half. Woof.

I do think it's neat that 2010 players could pick up a foil copy of Jaya Ballard, Task Mage that easily.

The final round would be Premium Deck Series: Graveborn, which focused on a very cool archetype: reanimator! This mono-black deck had new arts for Animate Dead, Cabal Therapy, and Crosis, the Purger. Being a reanimator deck, this does have the unique, fun quirk of several spells that the deck literally cannot hard-cast (including the aforementioned Crosis).

This one would be built the best overall. It only had 16 one-ofs, 8 of which were different big creatures to be reanimated. This versatility in reanimator targets allowed the player some level of choice and flexibility in responding to the board state.

This is the only deck to have any three-ofs, and it had three: Animate Dead, Duress, and Exhume. Notable two-ofs in the deck included Buried Alive and Diabolic Servitude.

The core decklist is currently worth $67, with the sealed copy running for $139. This was a genuinely good decklist for starting basic Eternal-legal play; a few players ran it and managed to win matches back in 2011. Cheating in a big, dumb 8-drop on turn 3 just wins games. I don't know enough about Legacy or, Serra forbid, Vintage to be able to judge its modern efficacy or how well it really would have done in tournaments back then.

This was a cool deck, and the one most well-received on release. How could a deck with Reanimate not do well?

Unfortunately, it was the first in the series that flew off the shelves, and the product as a whole had been deemed a failure and killed by then. Let's talk about why.

What Were Some Flaws in the Product?

Here's a quick outline of the product as it existed:

• 100% foil
• Legacy-based
• Mostly one-ofs and two-ofs, almost no playsets
• One 60-card deck released per year

This product's core concept is its biggest strength, but also its biggest weakness. If people don't like foils, they will not buy it. If they only like part of the decklist and know that it would take another $100 to get the proper decklist fully foiled out, they may very well not spring for it in the first place. The deck would essentially be viewed as a "locked-in" product that had a much bigger hurdle towards upgrading. Everyone loves playing the game, but part of that is about customizing the deck over time.

At the time the product was conceived, Commander was still called EDH and its rise was still on the dim horizon. The main ways to play were Vintage, Legacy, Modern, and Standard. These decks were made for eternal formats, and the Reserved List is a thing, so Legacy it is! Look, there's no way around it: making a deck that can actually be Legacy-playable is a hard task. I get hives looking at decklist prices. Casual Legacy is a thing, and the secret most popular "format" is kitchen table, but are they looking to pick these up?

My third negative plays into the previous two: the decks were not composed of playsets. The first two had very few two-ofs, meaning that a person would have to buy more than two copies of the deck to try to get a full playset! This fed into the first problem about it being fully foil: upgrading it is hard without just buying another copy of the product, which isn't a thing people like to do. As for its attempt at Legacy playability, well, it was a difficult proposition made harder by overall lack of consistency. And because one of them had Metallic Sliver. What in Heliod's name was up with that?

Finally, here's the real problem with the product: Wizards of the Coast only released one deck per year. The first year was Slivers, and the second year was burn. Slivers sold okay, burn sat on shelves for over a year or more, according to various posts I saw. If you loved the idea of a fully foiled deck but hated the themes, would you still be willing to buy it?

Imagine if they had only released one Commander deck per year. If 2011 only saw the release of Heavenly Inferno, I have no doubt it would have sold well, but as well as all five decks? No way. Removing that much of the choice would drastically cut interest in the product. My point is that by only releasing one theme per year, people who liked the product never got the opportunity to buy a deck that they actually wanted. Had they actually produced three to five premium decks per year, there's a better chance that the product sold well overall.

What Happened?

The sad fact is that Premium Deck Series: Graveborn was the first smash hit, flying off the shelves immediately, but it was too late. Long-term, Premium Deck Series: Slivers would go on to pick up steam and become a very desirable product as more Slivers were printed, but not until after the product's sales metrics would have stopped being measured. Fire & Lightning never had any real interest.

Two straight years of muddled to no interest led Wizards of the Coast to lose faith in the product and cut the line before it could properly take off with Graveborn. Imagine the world where those three decks were all printed in 2009!

I still believe the product could have found an audience, but maybe a smaller one than WotC wanted. Some speculated that the decks themselves would devalue foils, and so the product was cut for other reasons. Mark Rosewater has directly said that it was due to lack of interest.

If the product's first showing had been able to reach a wider audience, it might have become something more successful, like Duel Decks or From the Vault. The product was honestly a cross of the two, but really demonstrated the faults of both. The Duel Decks handed you a complete deck but didn't have any real format in mind for you to grow the deck into long-term, while From the Vault just handed over an interesting collector piece that didn't really have much play value. Ultimately, Premium Deck Series gave players a weird little set of pretty cards that may not have even been tournament-legal (depending on the humidity of your particular area).

Is the product gone entirely? More or less. Some nagging notion of it came back when the Warhammer 40,000 decks came in both regular and surge foil, but the upcoming Doctor Who release is going to come in non-foil only. Players will have to piece together their premium Commander decks from collector boosters this time! We'll have to see if they do any more all-foil decks, but the likelihood seems dim.

Even the Secret Lair line has done away with offering foil-only Lairs. (At least, I think so? I don't keep up with them that well!) They still offer the option of buying a Lair in foil, but non-foil is almost always an option. While foil cards will always have their fans, I think WotC has decided that it's not large enough to put all their eggs in that curled basket.

One final, amusing piece I found in my research was someone hoping to see Force of Will in an upcoming PDS, arguing that it was only $50 due to scarcity. A single reprint, they argued, would crater it.

Ah, 2011. What a different time.

Anyways, who out there wants the triumphant return of Premium Deck Series? Did any of you buy the Slivers product to convert into a Commander deck? Who actually bought Fire & Lightning? If there's another wacky defunct product out there you want dug up, let me know about it!