Here’s some of the types of things I do on a regular (or regularish) basis:
Review Compendiums
I consider these to be my bread and butter. I collect all the different reviews and other content that I can find about a particular preconstructed deck, and jam it all into a single post. The idea is to build up a bit of a resource where if someone decides to randomly google the Slither Theme Deck from Prophecy and stumble across my page for it… then they’ll be able to stumble across other people’s pages referencing it too.
I’ve started from Mirage (with the MTGO exclusive decks) and as of mid 2024 I’m just hitting Odyssey. I was originally doing this on reddit, and there are posts there which cover Mirrodin through to Shadowmoor.
Feel free to drop a comment if you’re aware of anything I’ve missed, or even if you just wanted to say a few things about one of the decks yourself. In fact, especially if you wanted to say a few things about a deck – that’d be incredible!
nuANCED reviews
The “ANCED” refers to the Advanced and Enhanced Theme Deck lists which were published from Tempest to Nemesis. These were the same thing, just renamed half way through. If you ignore the first three letters in Advanced and Enhanced… geddit? I am pretty clever.
While the focus is on the Advanced/Enhanced decklist I do, almost by necessity, take a bit of a look at the basic deck too; what you’d have got in the box.
My rating system is a very scientific “How much do I want to build this? list. At the time of writing I’m coming up to the halfway mark, and it’s going to take something pretty special to knock Exodus’ White Heat off the top spot.
deeP RECONnassaince
A new(er) thing that I’ve started from June 2024 where I’m aiming to collate the decklists and other details from limited time “Festival” events on Arena and MTGO. They often release a number of quite interesting decks, especially after a new set has released, and after a time frame ranging from two days up to a week or so: they’re gone. Which is a bit of a shame, I think.
These have interest simply as a historical thing, but also they can provide some good inspiration for casual deck builds. They can even be assembled as is if you were wanting a balanced Theme Deck “Battlebox” type experience from more recent sets. (Something I am actually doing myself with the Wilds “Story Decks“)
Just posting scans of stuff from the Duelist Magazine
This is largely pretty similar to the above, and clearly I need to organise this a little bit less organically into a proper series? It’s not just the Duelist, either, there’s decklists and reviews and other precon related stuff from any of these old print magazines I can find scans for.
Tome Brew
I realised while doing this that I probably needed a decent name to group various “mucking about with precon decklists or putting together new decks in a precon style” type stuff that I do. So: Tome Brew. I won’t break down that pun, as to do so is a bit of a faux pas I think. Consequently it would also be true to style for me, I guess?
There’s a few different things that fit under this banner, such as my “Tales Starter Project“. I modified the two Lord of the Rings Starter Kit decks to make them more flavourly appropriate, and then went on to design up others in the same style. Trying to conform to the rarity restrictions, power level, and general “vibe” as the official ones.
Something else that I will do every now and then is take one precon and smash it together with another precon. Usually an extra copy of the same deck – this was a pretty common strategy back in the day. I went to my first Friday Night Magic, for instance, with a deck which was largely put together out of two copies of the Zombies Unleashed Theme deck.
(p)Reconstructed
These posts are normally just photos of the 5 or 6 most recent decks I have put together. With some commentary. I typically save them up until I have enough to be worth posting.
Beats and Skies 
