I never saw a control deck for sale without SMB until the Player's Guide version came out. It's news to me that they sold such a thing for $10 less simultaneously.

Almost everyone I knew had the SMB version, including me. The one kid I knew of that time that didn't had the Deluxe Set. He was also the first person I ever knew who had a Nintendo, and his parents kind of spoiled him and bought him a lot of the black box games along with the system. Oddly, his copy of SMB was cart only, since they were sold out and so they had to settle for the display copy (see it's not a Gamestop invented thing )

Later on I knew lots of people with the Mario/Duck Hunt set, sure, but in those early days the Mario set was definitely the norm.