Magic The Gathering: Theros Fat Pack Review
The lore, legends and Myth of Greek mythology have been borrowed from heavily to form a grand new theme for Magic The Gathering. Finding its way into Theros, the latest block, this theme will no-doubt be a welcome addition to the wider universe.
Theros captures the feel of Greek mythology without stooping to wholesale ripping it off. Although you’ll find such beasts as the Hydra, which has found its way into a brilliant challenge deck, and an overriding theme of reluctant hero vs. gargantuan mythic beast.
The Theros Fat Pack is the easiest way for new players to get a running start into the epic struggles of Man vs God vs Beast. True to its name, it packs an impressive array of goodies that help set up both beginner and expert players with all the tools they need to build Theros decks and start playing. New players and Christmas-present-hunters will need to act fast, though, because this collectable pack will be snapped up quickly by more involved MTG fans.
Inside the box are 9 Theros booster packs, an 80-card basic land pack, a special-edition spindown life-counter, two deck boxes and a beautiful players-guide with a complete visual encyclopaedia of the Theros cards.
The box itself, once removed from its packaging and with the cardboard inserts removed, becomes a handy portable card box that should keep at least part of your deck-building pool in check, and can fit far more than just the cards it comes with.
The nine booster packs each contain 15 cards. These are broken down into 10 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare/mythic and 1 basic land. This means you’ll get an extra 9 land cards, 90 commons, 27 uncommons and 9 rares for a total of 135 cards. While you might expect to find at least one Mythic Rare in a Fat Pack, there’s absolutely no guarantee that this is the case. And there wasn’t a single one in mine. I did, however, find an [mtg_card]Elspeth, Sun’s Champion[/mtg_card] Planeswalker card.
The 135 cards have a reasonable chance of giving you a good spread of the 229 common and uncommon, non-basic-land cards from the Theros block, so it’s still a great place to get started and the 80 basic lands will ensure you always have enough of any given type available for your deck builds.
I found a more or less equal amount of each card colour, a handful of artefacts/artefact creatures and a few mixed colour cards. I found very few duplicate cards, and certainly not enough of anything to create a finished deck. But the point of a Fat Pack is, I think, to give you a head start, not skip you straight to the finish line.
The small amount of rares, however, means you will at most get only 9 unique rare cards from the 53 available in Theros. For a decent deck-building pool, you’re still going to want to buy booster packs regularly, so if you’re a not-so-new player who has some .
The Theros Fat Pack is an excellent gift for a Magic The Gathering player. It’s highly collectable and wont stay in production for long.
This means that avid collectors and fans of the artwork or encyclopaedia will want to grab this one fast. The adaption of Greek mythology into the Magic universe is no-doubt an exciting milestone, and there will be plenty of people who have been waiting to snap this up.
If you’re buying for yourself and aren’t an avid collector, don’t bother. If you don’t care about the Spindown Life Counter, deck boxes, printed encyclopaedia and card box, and have basic land cards up to your ears, it’s probably a marginally better proposition to spend the money on 10 booster packs.