Magic: The Gathering – How To Build A Budget Deck

You don’t need to sell a kidney to make a Magic: The Gathering deck.

Let's face it, hobbies can be expensive, especially collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering. Competitive Vintage decks can cost up to $20,000, and even Standard, the format used for most major official events, is only somewhat more forgiving, but even then top-tier decks can cost up to $500.

Fortunately, it's possible to build on a budget and still hold your own in your local game store's Friday Night Magic and Standard Showdown events, as long as you know a few tricks and keep an eye on certain archetypes.

Tips For Budget Brewing

When building on a budget, there are a few things you can do to reduce costs, but you need to remember why you're budgeting in the first place. There's a big difference between building a deck when money is tight and building a deck for your local game store's $50 Standard Night.

Look For Similar Effects

More often than not, several cards have been printed with the same or similar effect, and you can often substitute one for another. Consider Malakir Rebirth and Undying Malice: Both return a creature to play tapped when it dies for one black mana, but Malakir Rebirth costs 15 times as much as Undying Malice.

Try typing the effect you need into the advanced search feature at Scryfall, and sort by price. Often you'll find a good substitute for far less.

Buy Lower Condition Cards

Most websites where you can buy cards have multiple options for buying cards at different levels of wear. A near-mint card right out of a package will always cost more than a lightly- or moderately-played copy of the same card. Some prints can also have vastly different prices, so check for the cheapest one! Don't buy a $50 foil Fifth Dawn Night's Whisper when there are prints available for less than a dollar.

Ask About Proxies

It's common practice to test decks with proxies before you invest in the actual cards. After all, it stinks to drop a hundred dollars on a deck only to realize that it doesn't play well or it's no fun. Proxies for casual play are also growing in popularity, allowing Magic players to assemble competitive decks for a fraction of the normal cost.

Proxies are not allowed in sanctioned tournaments, and some players don't want to play with proxies. If you're playing for fun with your friends, ask! You might get to build your dream deck for pennies.

Most players and local game stores are okay with proxies if you have the real card but cannot play it due to damage or being sealed in a grading case. You may have to carry it with you, but you can often get damaged cards for next to nothing.

Ask Your Friends

Before you go out and buy all of your cards, ask your friends and regulars at your local game store if they have some of the cards you need. Often they'll be willing to part with commons, uncommons, and some low-value rares for free or in exchange for some of your own cards. Even if they charge, you won't have to pay for shipping.

The Best Budget Archetypes

Some deck archetypes are reliably cheap and strong for their price point. If you learn some of those archetypes you can build to take advantage of their strategies in almost any format.

Izzet Artifacts

Izzet (blue/red) is a powerful color combination for sorcery-heavy spellslinger decks, but also works remarkably well with artifacts. This is because both colors interact with artifacts in unique ways which, when combined, make a legitimate threat. Blue tends to create artifacts, and red tends to destroy them, yielding powerful effects when they enter and leave the battlefield.

This sample deck works by using artifact synergies and generators in the Izzet colors, which also give you access to some burn effects and the powerful Gleaming Geardrake. Artifact tokens such as Map, Clue, and Blood tokens are less important for their built-in effects than for their ability to be animated into some of the deck's largest creatures or to be used to pay for other effects.

Gleaming Geardrake, a 2/2 flying artifact Drake, is going to be one of your hardest hitters. It creates a Clue token when it comes into play, and whenever you sacrifice an artifact for any reason, it gains a +1/+1 counter. This makes cards like Voltage Surge and Sokenzan Smelter more useful by empowering your Drakes while you pay their costs.

Geardrake isn't your only option, though. Unctus's Retrofitter and Zoetic Glyph can both turn your artifacts into large creatures that you can swing with, turning seemingly worthless tokens into hulks.

White Weenie

One of the core principals of white mana is that there's strength in community, which is well represented by white weenie decks. These decks feature a lot of small creatures or creature token generators, along with multiple ways to buff them, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This deck is creature-heavy, containing only two noncreature spells, which serve as both removal and buff. Every spell costs three mana or less, which means that after a few turns you'll likely have no hand and a full battlefield. Recruitment Officer helps a lot with this, allowing you to find a creature card from the top four of your library at instant speed for four mana.

Adeline, Resplendent Cathar is the most expensive card in the deck by far, but is well worth the cost: her attack is equal to the number of creatures in your army, and each time she attacks you'll get another 1/1 Human token to attack with and make her even stronger.

This deck contains no sideboard, because the strategy is all-in, with little room for deviation between games. The archetype always follows the creature-heavy, buff-focused pattern, but individual cards vary based on which sets are legal at the time.

Gruul Aggro

Gruul (red/green) is a color pair that's really complimentary to an aggressive playstyle, combining burn, buffs, and beasts to make a threatening deck that can quickly outgrow your opponent's ability to react. These decks usually eschew the land fetching and huge creatures of green, using it more as a supplement to empower the strategy embodies by Red Deck Wins.

This sample deck fills the battlefield with creatures and modifies them through inexpensive enchantments and counters. This synergizes with your two big threats, Thundering Raiju and Remnant of the Rising Star, which flips from Jugan Defends the Temple.

Thundering Raiju will buff your creatures, while dealing direct damage to your opponent based on the number of modified creatures you control. Meanwhile, Remnant of the Rising Star starts off as a 2/2 flyer, but turns into a 7/7 flyer with trample once you control five modified creatures, which is a cinch.

The sideboard for this deck primarily revolves around stopping interaction. Thrun, Breaker of Silence is a 5/5 with trample which is indestructable during your turn, and cannot be countered or even targeted by any spell that isn't green.

Meanwhile, Royal Treatment makes a creature hexproof for a turn, stopping most removal, and gives them ward to make them harder to target later. Finally, Scythclaw Raptor punishes your opponent for playing spells on your turn by making them pay in blood (or at least life).

Blue Tempo

Tempo decks are a bit like aggro decks, but they trade burns for control, setting the pace of the game and preventing their opponent from getting any real threats into play. Generally, these decks are either mono-blue or blue and one other color, but sticking to the idea that single-color decks tend to be a little less expensive, we'll stick to blue.

This sample tempo deck contains three threats. Delver of Secrets can be played on turn one, and with a little luck it'll be a 3/2 with flying on turn two. Haughty Djinn is slightly more expensive, costing three mana, but has flying and power equal to the number of instants and sorceries in your graveyard.

Since you'll be playing instants to protect him, he'll just keep getting stronger. He also makes all of your instants and sorceries less expensive to cast. Tolarian Terror is just a big stompy creature which will get cheaper the more cards you have in your graveyard.

You can swap Delver of Secrets for Picklock Prankster to put more cards in your graveyard to get Tolarian Terror out faster, find another usefal small creature, or drop it entierly in favor of more draw and control spells.

Most of your spells are instants, so keep mana free when you can. Even if you don't have any counters in your hand, let your opponent assume that you do. If they don't play any threats, you'll have mana free to cast draw spells like Thirst for Discovery at the end of their turn.

Red Deck Wins

Red Deck Wins is a classic Magic archetype that's been around for decades. While it waxes and wanes with set rotations, it's consistently among the top-performing budget deck archetypes. Red Deck Wins (or RDW) is the epitome of the red mana philosophy: Go fast, go hard, and don't stop until you win.

Red Deck Wins plays aggressively, with inexpensive creatures to whittle down your opponent's life before they can really get started, and finishing them off with burn spells which can also be used to remove threats and blockers. It aims to win around turn five, and without significant card draw that's about the time you'll find yourself out of options.

The entire deck is below five mana, and mostly runs around two mana. So, after your second turn you should play as many spells as possible each turn, maximizing your damage with the intent of beating your opponent before they can respond. If the going gets tough, Thundering Raiju can be your ace, dealing direct damage to our opponent as soon as it comes into play just from having +1/+1 counters and Wicked roles on your other creatures.