keldeo said:
There is some things that TCG companies do. A known fixed product, like theme decks would cost less than something that is unknown, let's say, 7 booster packs, which is 63 cards. 7 boosters cost $28, and a theme deck costs $12, so knowing that 60ish fixed cards cost less than half the amount of 63 random cards.
Knowing that, if we replaced some of the boosters with 8 10 card packs that contain nothing but Pokemon from each type, so for example, one of the packs would contain 10 fighting pokemon only. The product would also contain 5 fixed trainer cards. The objective here, is to build a deck by combining 2 of these packs that only contain one type of pokemon, add 5 of each energy, all 5 trainer cards, and the remaining 5 would be cards pulled from packs, ideally. There, you have a 40 card deck, which is the legal deck size for limited play, as opposed to constructed.
In Magic, there's this think called booster battle packs, which is 20 fixed cards and a booster, and it is supposed to simulated sealed pack play. It would be nice if this had something like that packaged with this box in lieu of some of the boosters, but whatever. At least this a first step. As more iterations of these come out, the could improve on it, but so far, it is just Pokemon's version of MTG's fat pack. I bought a lot of fat packs, and there is one where the Player's guide tells players to play some sort of sealed deck, where it says, open up all 9 packs, and pick 2 colors and build a 40 card deck with those colors. I think that is what could happen with this product too, and I'm sure in the player's guide, it would give players step by step the ratios of Pokemon, Trainers, and Energy that are needed to build a simple deck. Perhaps it may teach players how to build 2 type half decks and mentioning that decks need to be 60 card decks if they want to build a real one.
There are products in MTG that are aimed to teach players how to build decks, and none of them are precon products. A precon such as a theme deck, or even a precon that mimics a competitive deck is a poor choice to teach deckbuilding to new players. I am a huge precon collector, and it sure didn't teach me to build decks. In fact, it taught me to buy even more precons, knowing that what they built for me actually works somewhat, and another bad thing about precons is that it forces the player to use the same theme as that precon. The best bet is to, as I said above, have a few semi-randomized incomplete decks, and they use the boosters included to "complete" them, thus, the theme of the deck is up to the player to decide, rather than whoever made the precons.
And to tell you what Pokemon TCG in Japan did, they sell the same thing as this, but I think the box might be bigger, but it contains nothing but 40 energy, at about 525 yen, or $6.38.
