The MTGA Pre-Made Decks are Pretty Good

When you first boot up MTG Arena, you'll have a little tutorial teaching you the basics of the game, and then you get a little series of other tutorials focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the five colors - giving you decks to play with pre-determined card draws against a computer-controlled opponent, pitting each color against each of the other colors, and then a final challenge where they put you against another player (though you get credit for this one win or lose.)

This challenge will give you five mono-color decks. Then, over the course of a week, roughly, you'll get a new deck each day if you complete little quests where you're supposed to cast spells of certain color combinations. These are all themed on the Ravnica guilds, and are composed largely of Guilds of Ravnica-block cards, and lean into the mechanics of that block for each deck.

And I've got to say, some of these decks are pretty decent.

You get the allied color pairs first, rotating so there aren't any immediate repeats of colors - so you get Gruul (G/R) followed by Azorius (W/U) and then Rakdos (R/B) then Selesnya (W/G) and finally Dimir (U/B). Then, I had a quest that just gave me a mythic rare card (I believe a random one) and the next one gave me the other five guild decks.

This is actually a pretty generous infusion of cards (it also comes with one "shock land" for each color pair, which I remember being insanely expensive when the original Ravnica block came out.) But I'm also shocked at how well some of these decks actually play.

The Azorius one is a solid control deck - you get a bunch of flying creatures, life-gain, and lots of bounce, as well as Dovin's Acuity, which is an enchantment that grants you a card and some life when you play it and bounces back to your hand when you cast an instant during your main phase (there's a similar card for Dimir called Disinformation Campaign that makes the opponent discard instead of giving you life, and bounces back when you use the Dimir keyword called Surveil.)

I've also found the Izzet Deck to be pretty darn powerful as well - it's focused on sorceries and instants (as the Izzet have always been) but while the card-draw of blue and the direct damage of red are already pretty powerful, you also get a crazy enchantment called Thousand-Year Storm, which turns those low-cost, early game cards into absolute nukes.

The way Thousand-Year Storm works is that each time you cast a Sorcery or Instant, you copy it for every other sorcery or instant you've cast that turn. So while it's not going to do much for you early on (it also costs 6 mana, so it's not like you'll have it out there early anyway) if you can get off some cheap spells (Radical Idea, which costs 2 and just draws you a card, and has Jump-Start, is a great feeder for this) by the time you've cast two or three spells, a single Shock will do a massive amount of damage.

This is obviously combo material, but it's enough on its own to work pretty well even for a more generalized deck.

I don't think any of the decks are terrible - I will say I never seem to do that well with Gruul decks. And perhaps it's a sign of a healthy metagame that there's such diversity in the decks I face that I can get a win with any of these decks once in a while.