Magic is a hobby and at times it can be a very expensive hobby. We all have usually a preferred format and that is where our money goes. What happens when we want to try something new? We need to allocate a certain part of our budget to something new that we don't even know if we'll like it. Some of us work on a very constraint budget. Price tags like 500 tix can seem totally unaffordable. Yes, it is a lot of money. Not all the time do we need to start with a 500 tix deck.
Some formats are very difficult to enter if your collection or budget is limited. Many players do not want to even try Vintage out because they can't imagine being able to afford a Vintage deck. It requires a player to start with a certain pool of cards or they won't be able to play - notably the Power Nine cards and other restricted cards. While there are paper budget decks around, those decks still cost 500 tix on Magic Online (I omit Dredge being 250 tix deck). Vintage requires a big amount of dedication because the entry point budget-wise is high. People often feel similarly when it comes to 100 Card Singleton. That format is not that difficult to enter so in this article I'll provide several deck lists that are on different levels of 'affordability'.
The cheapest commonly played decks are Red Deck Wins and White Weenie. Both of these archetypes are widely represented in the metagame and it is not because they are just cheap, it is because they are also very efficient and keep the metagame balanced by keeping certain decks in check.
Mono colored decks, from budget point of view, have the advantage that they do not need mana fixing. This means that the price of these decks is hugely reduced. Multicolored decks want to run original dual lands, fetchlands, shocklands and other mana fixing that isn't cheap. Many decks want to play utility lands that are also pricey. For example both RDW and WW decks would like to play Rishadan Port and Wasteland which would make the deck 65 tix more expensive and that is why the cards are missing from the decklists below.
These decks are meant for those that do not have a collection full of other format's staples. If your collection is already large enough you can often put together a midrange deck or UW Control if your tendencies are oriented towards blue. That is exactly what I did when I discovered that the format still lives on in the form of the Chainsaw Massacre Player Run Event that takes place each Saturday 4pm EST.
Red Deck Wins (25 tix)
This is pretty much as cheap as a deck can get. There is still room for cutting cards. There are several cards that are over a tix (Magus of the Moon, Goblin Guide, Flame Rift, Fiery Confluence, Vexing Devil). If these cards will be cut the price of the deck will become 10 tix. Instead one can play a cheap hasty creature or another not so optimal burn spell.
White Weenie decks can range from very aggressive to more of a Death and Taxes approach. The purely aggressive builds are cheap and can be put together for roughly 30 tix. The more hatebears, mana denial and other prison element the deck runs the more expensive it gets. This deck is somewhere in between. It is one of the slower variants that can make the game harder for the opponent, especially if the player is on spell based deck. It has some potent cards to deal with control decks or slower midrange decks. Again, the biggest cuts from the deck are cards like Wasteland and Rishadan Port. Apart from these expensive lands, Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond are also cards that come handy if you can afford them. These would win a small percentage of games and can be cut from the deck without worrying that it would impact how it plays out.
Blue control decks in general are cheap because most of the countermagic with some exceptions (Force of Will) costs a fraction of tix. Mono blue control is certainly good enough to compete but sometimes it struggles with a certain permanent that sneaks into play so I'd suggest running a second color that can deal with permanents. The best color is white but since I already showed a white deck I decided to go for black. Red is also a possibility, but UR decks are more tricky to play and often are more tempo oriented. They are not a good decks for players that are new to the format.
Two-color decks are also affordable and here is a RG list that can run people over. Half of the price of this deck is made up by fetchlands that can still be cut to make the deck more budget (50tix). This deck is green based and doesn't need red early unlike other more aggressive RG decks. You will have time to draw a red source.
The most expensive cards to run if you get the tix for them are Blood Moon and Noble Hierarch. Deathrite Shaman is also a possibility when you get all the fetchlands and add Bayou and Badlands to the deck. Wasteland and Scalding Tarn is also missing from the deck because it is the most expensive fetchland.
Mono Green Ramp is also a deck that can be build cheaply but here I present a more expensive version of the deck worth 100 tix. There are few more expensive cards like Batterskull and Primeval Titan. If you wish you can cut them and replace them with cheaper threats like Pelakka Wurm or Myr Battlesphere saving 20 tix.
The cards that were cut to make this deck more budget were primarily lands. The land a green creature deck usually wants to play is Gaea's Cradle and it isn't cheap. Similarly, even if you are on a mono colored deck you want fetchlands to filter your library, shuffle it or to trigger landfall for example.
Take these decks as examples of what you can possibly play and what kind of power level you need to achieve in order to have a competitive deck. You do not need to copy these decks 1 to 1. You can import one of these lists and then tweak it. Your preferences, play style, collection and budget are all factors that can make the deck look totally different. Many cards can be replaced, you just need to keep in mind that the core of the deck cannot change. All the decks above are simple linear decks that give a lot of room for changes. You can play a Red Deck Wins that looks very different from mine, you can even play Goblins if you like. Goblins is a viable deck, just not that common. White Weenie/Death and Taxes can look very differently and if you keep a good ratio of 1-, 2-, 3-drops you will get a solid deck for cheap. I put together my Weenie list from cards I drafted in the past several years. It cost about 10 tix, was seemingly very bad but it worked because it could curve out well and had some tricks that allowed it to win the game when the game got to a stall (Brave the Elements, Secure the Wastes). It was the mana cost and power/toughness that was important.
Those are not the only cheap decks you can build. Counterburn or Izzet tempo in general can be also build on budget for example. The format is diverse and there are many possibilities of what you can do or what deck you can bring. After you will discover the format you will be able to build your own deck within your budget/collection. Don't be afraid to explore and brew. If you need help or wish to test your decks just contact anyone from the Chainsaw Massacre community through the client or Discord. If you want to learn more about the format you can also check out my previous articles (links at the beginning of this article).
Thank you for reading
S'Tsung (stsung on Magic Online, stsungjp on Twitter)
Lowman already replied instead of me but Creeping Tar Pit is actually one of the key cards in the deck. I call it the 'Jace killer' but well it is a card that you need to deal with mainly planeswalkers and also is often able to deal 3-6 damage to actually win the game with your finisher. In many games it's just Tar Pit that wins the games.
In all decks there are cards that have a certain kind of priority and I'd have to comment on each of them. Tar Pit has a very high priority though. For example I'd cut one of the win conditions first. I put more of them in the deck than it needs them. Mostly because if by a chance someone would want to play with it, they will have to figure out how the deck works and what it needs. It actually needs a very few win conditions and the player needs to figure out how to play the game well and how to deal with certain kind of permanents. Muddle the Mixture if for example a card that I'd put in next.
UB control is not that dependent on its colors as UW control for example. So you should be fine with less mana fixing. This deck can easily play Back to Basics. Anyway it comes down to what lowman said. You find a shell of a deck you want to play and improvise to achieve what you need. (which though requires a knowledge you already need to have or start playing a lot)
Really appreciate the article Stsung, I think it's always challenging to find varied archetypes beyond simple monochromatic aggro decks that tend to rely on very few chase cards; even more difficult to build multicolor builds in this format without the flexibility of possibly having the availability of all the fetchlands or duals. I think one of the best things a player can do is chose what deck or decks depending on their individual budget they think they'd enjoy and building the shell of it and slowly growing it from that point. Eventually each of these decks would want to have the full flexibility and consistency that fetchlands provide (even the aggro builds, for opening hand consistency)--for better or worse the format does play out at closer to an eternal pace, and inconsistent draws or poor early mana development can often just turn a game--take wasteland for instance given different context. At the end, I think the most important thing any player can invest in for this format or the game, is its lands, they are after all the economic system of the game (sure there's moxen a plenty but this format is more naturally aspirated in that regard).
Rob, I think that the U/B deck actually really needs that man land, she's built it with a few ways of dealing with early, resolved PWs, but not enough for the one time an opponent slips one through and you've got to wait until turn 5-6 to cast a fatty into the opposition's potential wall of fat and find a way to stop recursive value each turn. Plus deck's like U/B and this one in particular, have very few win cons. Creeping Tizzle is a shockingly faster clock than you'd expect and a few chips here and there can knock out a PW or take away 6 vital life to make a resolved threat a 2 turn clock over a 3 turn clock, etc.
Anyway, I'm still partial to WW as a good starting point, but I also began my 100c journey with that deck, and shaped it into more of a D&T build to suit different metas once I understood them and my collection had grown. Keep up the great writings.
Thank you lowman for the comment (hope people read them!).
As for WW. I look at this deck in a similar way the way I look at Delver being a good introductory deck in Vintage. While I understand your point of view with Delver not being well suited for this because it is way trickier to play and pilot well it gives the player all the means to win a game of magic in a fair way and teaches them how not to terribly die to a combo deck. If a player learns to board out Delver of Secrets they certainly learned a thing. WW while it is not the same kind of a deck allows for a similar experience because it can go from very aggressive to prison if one chooses to and it wins games even if you can't figure out the relation between tempo of the game and tempo of your deck.
It gives room for learning and improvement and it also shows the tendencies you have as a player. I tend to go control so from a Delver deck I'd move to a PW Control and from WW I'd go to D&T.
The reason why I put this article up is also because many players can't figure out what a shell of a deck is and what cards are important. This is certainly the way to go, but that requires the player to already have a good knowledge of some formats (the older ones. does not necessarily need to be Legacy or Vintage, but rather older Standard, Extended for example). And yes, the lands are the most important (for those reading my comment I suggest to browse my articles and read the Show and Tell series).
(I started with Naya Zoo which you can probably understand that wasn't 'good enough' for me^_^ I needed more flexibility which led me to 4c)
It's funny you mention shell or untuned decks...think it depends a lot on how each player as a person learns really...it's very difficult for me to remember not understanding the game how I do now, although I know at one point I was likely a 12 year old kid trying to put Island Fish Jasconious (and anyone can correct my horrible spelling) and Force of Natures in decks, but as long as I can remember, for me most of my building is theoretical or conceptual in nature...ie the general theme of how I want to win and what I'll need to beat tends to frame the strategic underpinnings of individual card choices and mana bases etc, etc. I think for some it might be different, and perhaps these shells allow a player to take a more empirical approach to building in this format or any format really. But I'd say at the end of the day if the player is truly interested in building, not just tuning (which is also valuable), a more theoretical and diligent process is required of them as a student of the game...it's not to say that players cannot be successful in the game otherwise by picking up best decks in any given format and learning them very well; but I think they'll always be a step behind once the meta stagnates and an equally skilled player but greater builder brings the statistically best deck in a given meta as opposed to the theoretically best deck.
I bring it up because in CSM 4.12, I brought what I considered to be the rawest deck (very low tuning and frankly sloppy building that required more than the 15 minutes I took to do it) that I've played in that tournament. Normally, I'm more diligent in my work, but I think what I did get right is that RG Ramp was the strategically most well positioned build given what I could expect to play against at the highest rate. So even if a deck is an untuned shell, given that a player has chosen it well given the nature of the meta, his known opponents, and his or her own play capability (and we have to be honest here with ourselves sometimes, we're not Jon Finkels here) it can certainly win.
Yeah, I can't really comment on how people learn. Obviously in many different ways because skills I have many players don't...and they don't even need them in order to be good.
I suppose it depends also on what we consider a shell of a deck (for me a same shell works cross formats...ok maybe not in Standard where the cards are starting to be way too different from Magic I know). I know that for me and you what we come up with will be equally solid and focused but for some people this is far from being clear (this doesn't mean the player themselves isn't a good one). That's the reason why some people have difficulties understanding what deck wants to run 4 Dig Through Times and which ones want to run 4 Treasure Cruise. For people that understand a shell of a deck and what they want to do with it won't have a problem deciding and that's what I'm talking about. Some people naturally know how to build a deck, some will learn it on the way and some won't ever want to think about that at all. We also have the knowledge of how metagame works and we experienced this over and over and know the tendencies. It is easy for us to put together a deck that can attack a certain metagame and we also will know when to switch. Those are things that some players still need to learn (if they want to learn something more) and I hope that CSM 4.12 taught that lesson. In the end it all comes down to context and I wish I would manage to somehow finish my article about power level. It's probably not going to happen though :-(
(I often came to LGS and produced a deck out of Vintage Cube. it would be a nice experiment to see what other players would come up with. I'd be interested in their creativity and understanding of the game as they see it. If you've never done that, try it one day^_^)
Random, side note, I'm not normally the guy to correct card choices or sharpshoot builds, but Flashfires is just bad (RDW sideboard)...I've tested that silly card exhaustively and against the decks you tend to want it against, it's essentially like casting TW for the opponent. The WW opponent will tend to always have more permanent sources of damage that are just as cheap as RDW's permanents but generally better...W will have and always has had the best little critter threats...first strike, flying and protection mechanics just win this matchup, not to mention that WW will have more good creatures than red does. That said, I've never once been impressed with Flashfires, I think Disorder is the better card here, unless you expect a mono-W control meta, an archetype that is not impossible to fathom, but likely also not as good as just playing to the colors strong suite of efficient aggro cards. That said Disorder is more narrow than Flashfires, but I think certainly moreso what this style of deck wants, because it's looking to win the lottery against WW or have the WW pilot punt on epic proportions. On the other side of this argument, when I'm playing WW or D&T, I will always side out the Geddons because you want to have board impact everyturn, not attempt to seal an opponent off of mana, when their deck likely has an average CMC of 1.9-2.15; think the same would hold just as true or more true for the RDW pilot.
In addition to Disorder, Anarchy can also be a very powerful option against white decks and is also good against non-aggro builds. It's very difficult for red to deal with protection from red creatures, usually you need to line up some shenanigans with Skullcrack but Anarchy bypasses that problem completely.
Agreed. I put the card there thinking of all the 'Big White' decks of the past. While Disorder is certainly better sideboard card (if you want to punish something white which this deck doesn't really need to do), Flashfires is a card I actually cast from time to time unlike Disorder that I cast exactly 0 times so far.
Those white control decks were driving me crazy years ago. Even though now, in EDH, Djeru is something that drives me totally insane!!!
12 Comments
For this winter only, the event starts at 3PM EST
For the price of C Tar Pits you can instead run River of Tears + Fetid Pools + Darkwater catacombs + Dismal backwater.
I think I'd also run Dimir Aqueducts and Bad River since it can fetch Grave/Hollow
Lowman already replied instead of me but Creeping Tar Pit is actually one of the key cards in the deck. I call it the 'Jace killer' but well it is a card that you need to deal with mainly planeswalkers and also is often able to deal 3-6 damage to actually win the game with your finisher. In many games it's just Tar Pit that wins the games.
In all decks there are cards that have a certain kind of priority and I'd have to comment on each of them. Tar Pit has a very high priority though. For example I'd cut one of the win conditions first. I put more of them in the deck than it needs them. Mostly because if by a chance someone would want to play with it, they will have to figure out how the deck works and what it needs. It actually needs a very few win conditions and the player needs to figure out how to play the game well and how to deal with certain kind of permanents. Muddle the Mixture if for example a card that I'd put in next.
UB control is not that dependent on its colors as UW control for example. So you should be fine with less mana fixing. This deck can easily play Back to Basics. Anyway it comes down to what lowman said. You find a shell of a deck you want to play and improvise to achieve what you need. (which though requires a knowledge you already need to have or start playing a lot)
Really appreciate the article Stsung, I think it's always challenging to find varied archetypes beyond simple monochromatic aggro decks that tend to rely on very few chase cards; even more difficult to build multicolor builds in this format without the flexibility of possibly having the availability of all the fetchlands or duals. I think one of the best things a player can do is chose what deck or decks depending on their individual budget they think they'd enjoy and building the shell of it and slowly growing it from that point. Eventually each of these decks would want to have the full flexibility and consistency that fetchlands provide (even the aggro builds, for opening hand consistency)--for better or worse the format does play out at closer to an eternal pace, and inconsistent draws or poor early mana development can often just turn a game--take wasteland for instance given different context. At the end, I think the most important thing any player can invest in for this format or the game, is its lands, they are after all the economic system of the game (sure there's moxen a plenty but this format is more naturally aspirated in that regard).
Rob, I think that the U/B deck actually really needs that man land, she's built it with a few ways of dealing with early, resolved PWs, but not enough for the one time an opponent slips one through and you've got to wait until turn 5-6 to cast a fatty into the opposition's potential wall of fat and find a way to stop recursive value each turn. Plus deck's like U/B and this one in particular, have very few win cons. Creeping Tizzle is a shockingly faster clock than you'd expect and a few chips here and there can knock out a PW or take away 6 vital life to make a resolved threat a 2 turn clock over a 3 turn clock, etc.
Anyway, I'm still partial to WW as a good starting point, but I also began my 100c journey with that deck, and shaped it into more of a D&T build to suit different metas once I understood them and my collection had grown. Keep up the great writings.
Thank you lowman for the comment (hope people read them!).
As for WW. I look at this deck in a similar way the way I look at Delver being a good introductory deck in Vintage. While I understand your point of view with Delver not being well suited for this because it is way trickier to play and pilot well it gives the player all the means to win a game of magic in a fair way and teaches them how not to terribly die to a combo deck. If a player learns to board out Delver of Secrets they certainly learned a thing. WW while it is not the same kind of a deck allows for a similar experience because it can go from very aggressive to prison if one chooses to and it wins games even if you can't figure out the relation between tempo of the game and tempo of your deck.
It gives room for learning and improvement and it also shows the tendencies you have as a player. I tend to go control so from a Delver deck I'd move to a PW Control and from WW I'd go to D&T.
The reason why I put this article up is also because many players can't figure out what a shell of a deck is and what cards are important. This is certainly the way to go, but that requires the player to already have a good knowledge of some formats (the older ones. does not necessarily need to be Legacy or Vintage, but rather older Standard, Extended for example). And yes, the lands are the most important (for those reading my comment I suggest to browse my articles and read the Show and Tell series).
(I started with Naya Zoo which you can probably understand that wasn't 'good enough' for me^_^ I needed more flexibility which led me to 4c)
It's funny you mention shell or untuned decks...think it depends a lot on how each player as a person learns really...it's very difficult for me to remember not understanding the game how I do now, although I know at one point I was likely a 12 year old kid trying to put Island Fish Jasconious (and anyone can correct my horrible spelling) and Force of Natures in decks, but as long as I can remember, for me most of my building is theoretical or conceptual in nature...ie the general theme of how I want to win and what I'll need to beat tends to frame the strategic underpinnings of individual card choices and mana bases etc, etc. I think for some it might be different, and perhaps these shells allow a player to take a more empirical approach to building in this format or any format really. But I'd say at the end of the day if the player is truly interested in building, not just tuning (which is also valuable), a more theoretical and diligent process is required of them as a student of the game...it's not to say that players cannot be successful in the game otherwise by picking up best decks in any given format and learning them very well; but I think they'll always be a step behind once the meta stagnates and an equally skilled player but greater builder brings the statistically best deck in a given meta as opposed to the theoretically best deck.
I bring it up because in CSM 4.12, I brought what I considered to be the rawest deck (very low tuning and frankly sloppy building that required more than the 15 minutes I took to do it) that I've played in that tournament. Normally, I'm more diligent in my work, but I think what I did get right is that RG Ramp was the strategically most well positioned build given what I could expect to play against at the highest rate. So even if a deck is an untuned shell, given that a player has chosen it well given the nature of the meta, his known opponents, and his or her own play capability (and we have to be honest here with ourselves sometimes, we're not Jon Finkels here) it can certainly win.
Yeah, I can't really comment on how people learn. Obviously in many different ways because skills I have many players don't...and they don't even need them in order to be good.
I suppose it depends also on what we consider a shell of a deck (for me a same shell works cross formats...ok maybe not in Standard where the cards are starting to be way too different from Magic I know). I know that for me and you what we come up with will be equally solid and focused but for some people this is far from being clear (this doesn't mean the player themselves isn't a good one). That's the reason why some people have difficulties understanding what deck wants to run 4 Dig Through Times and which ones want to run 4 Treasure Cruise. For people that understand a shell of a deck and what they want to do with it won't have a problem deciding and that's what I'm talking about. Some people naturally know how to build a deck, some will learn it on the way and some won't ever want to think about that at all. We also have the knowledge of how metagame works and we experienced this over and over and know the tendencies. It is easy for us to put together a deck that can attack a certain metagame and we also will know when to switch. Those are things that some players still need to learn (if they want to learn something more) and I hope that CSM 4.12 taught that lesson. In the end it all comes down to context and I wish I would manage to somehow finish my article about power level. It's probably not going to happen though :-(
(I often came to LGS and produced a deck out of Vintage Cube. it would be a nice experiment to see what other players would come up with. I'd be interested in their creativity and understanding of the game as they see it. If you've never done that, try it one day^_^)
Random, side note, I'm not normally the guy to correct card choices or sharpshoot builds, but Flashfires is just bad (RDW sideboard)...I've tested that silly card exhaustively and against the decks you tend to want it against, it's essentially like casting TW for the opponent. The WW opponent will tend to always have more permanent sources of damage that are just as cheap as RDW's permanents but generally better...W will have and always has had the best little critter threats...first strike, flying and protection mechanics just win this matchup, not to mention that WW will have more good creatures than red does. That said, I've never once been impressed with Flashfires, I think Disorder is the better card here, unless you expect a mono-W control meta, an archetype that is not impossible to fathom, but likely also not as good as just playing to the colors strong suite of efficient aggro cards. That said Disorder is more narrow than Flashfires, but I think certainly moreso what this style of deck wants, because it's looking to win the lottery against WW or have the WW pilot punt on epic proportions. On the other side of this argument, when I'm playing WW or D&T, I will always side out the Geddons because you want to have board impact everyturn, not attempt to seal an opponent off of mana, when their deck likely has an average CMC of 1.9-2.15; think the same would hold just as true or more true for the RDW pilot.
In addition to Disorder, Anarchy can also be a very powerful option against white decks and is also good against non-aggro builds. It's very difficult for red to deal with protection from red creatures, usually you need to line up some shenanigans with Skullcrack but Anarchy bypasses that problem completely.
Anarchy is in the decklist, so that is why we didn't talk about that. You are right about that.
Yeah, unless Big White comes back into our metagame (ie. probably never), I don't see much purpose for Flashfires.
It was a fun card back in the days though :)
Agreed. I put the card there thinking of all the 'Big White' decks of the past. While Disorder is certainly better sideboard card (if you want to punish something white which this deck doesn't really need to do), Flashfires is a card I actually cast from time to time unlike Disorder that I cast exactly 0 times so far.
Those white control decks were driving me crazy years ago. Even though now, in EDH, Djeru is something that drives me totally insane!!!