Strefan, Maurer Progenitor was truly a trash deck.

So, I've been playing Magic for about a year and a half now and [[Strefan, Maurer Progenitor]] is my first run in with a truly terrible precon deck design. It's not that the deck is filled with weak cards that need to be replaced, the very design of the commander is an active failure.

The one good thing that came out of Strefan is it helped me learn about the two different types of tribal deck design. The first is going wide, you play a number of token generators and lord effects to make a very large somewhat strong force to overwhelm your enemies defenses. The second is going tall, you play a number of cost reducers so you can play 5-8 drops that all have powerful abilities attached to them.

This is where Strefan failed. Vampires is a go wide strategy and they tried to play it as go tall. Being able to cheat out 5-8 drop vampires is cool in theory, but all the them have mediocre stats attached to an X ability that reads "X is the number of vampires you control". That's not very handy when the number of vampires you control is 3.

Another problem is his colors. There are bunch of cards that generate vampire tokens and all of them are either white, Orzhov, or Mardu. You are basically given a dead deck that can't even be upgraded properly.

I'm writing this rant because I bought the Strefan deck, having bought the [[Wilhelt]] deck before it. The Wilhelt deck showed that WotC understood how certain tribes have ideal strategies, and the fact that they then tried to fit a square peg in a round hole with Strefan kinda throws me for a loop.