Deciding on a Budget
Hi everyone, and welcome to my new series: the Budget Blueprint. In each part of this series, I want to examine some facet of budget deckbuilding, in hopes that it might help you to share in the love that I have for budget commander decks.
This week, I want to look at one of the most fundamental aspects of budget brewing: The budget itself. I’ve made a lot of budget decks in my years of playing Magic, and I think there are a lot of factors that go into building a budget deck that people might not think about.
The Three Budget Options
Okay, obviously there are more than three options when it comes to settling on how you want to build a budget deck. But in my experience, there are three main ways to go: using a hard budget, using your pre-existing collection with a small budget for add-ons, or going strictly based on vibes.
Budgeting for Real
The most common form of budget brewing – especially for new players – is what I’m calling the Hard Budget. This is a budget that is fixed. Unchangeable. Written in stone. A player has (or is only willing to spend) a certain amount of money, and the deck’s cost must come in at or below that threshold. If you’re in this camp, then I have good news: It is, in a lot of ways, the easiest way to build on a budget. You know what you have, and you don’t have to worry about what you could have if you just added 10 extra dollars to the budget because that one card is too cool to pass up.
But it does have its challenges. For one, you lose out on that previously-mentioned flexibility. You don’t have to think about expanding the budget anymore, but you also don’t get to, which can occasionally lead to dropping a deck idea because there are too many cool, expensive cards that you’re finding but can’t put into the deck. Similarly, you might need a narrow range of cards to make a deck work at all, and sometimes that can severely limit your ability to make that deck (See: $5 Rex, Cyber Hound combo, which started out by spending $1.60 on Pili-Pala alone).
Where a hard budget really shines, though, is in setting power level expectations. Not in the sense that all decks of a given budget will be the exact same power level. On the contrary, I’ve seen $10 decks take down $100 decks with ease enough times to know that the actual dollar amount doesn’t always translate into raw power.
But what a hard budget does do is change the perception of power. Everyone gets the same budget, and everyone (at least theoretically) has the same goals. So when someone puts together a deck that thoroughly wallops on the rest of the table, there’s less of those feelings that players can get sometimes that there was a mismatch. Nobody whipped out a turn 1 Chrome Mox. Nobody had a turn 3 protected Thassa’s Oracle. The things that happened in the game are, frequently, going to be within the expected bounds for the budget you’re playing at. And having solid expectations like that is helpful.
Bit by Bit
Another form of budgeting I’ve seen (and done myself) fairly often is budgeting just for cards you don’t have, or what I’ll call the Add-On Budget. This is pretty common, in my experience, for players who have decently-sized collections. Instead of building entirely from scratch, or entirely using cards that they already own, a player will set aside a certain amount of money to spend on a new deck while trying to mostly use what they already own.
The upsides here are pretty obvious: you get a new deck at a small cost while incrementally expanding your collection with each new deck you build. This method is especially good if you’re like me and want to build a bunch of decks without paying full-price for any individual deck. Spend $20 to build that new Niv-Mizzet, Visionary deck now, and you can transfer those cards plus $20 more when you decide to pivot to something like Kess, Dissident Mage at some point in the future.
The downside to this method depends on what exactly your add-on budget is, as well as how often you buy cards outside of building new decks. At $50 or more, you’ll be burning through money – at least if you build decks at the pace I do. At anything less, though, you might never acquire those more “big-ticket” cards, doomed forever to build decks only from cards that cost $10 or less. Personally, I would vary this based on how strong of a deck I thought I could build using my collection. For example, if I were going to build a new aristocrats deck, I would give myself a pretty low budget since I already have a lot of the aristocrat staples. But if I were building an Elves deck? I would definitely need a bit more money to compensate for my currently-pitiful Elf collection.
Good Vibes Only
The last version of the budget deck -- and in my opinion, the hardest to actually pull off – is the Vibes-Based Budget. What this looks like is a bit harder to define (due to being vibes-based) but basically goes something like this in my experience. First, choose roughly what you want the budget to be close to. For this example, let’s say $50. Then you look at your commander, realize it’s $15 on its own, so you decide “well I can ignore the commander’s price tag, that’s fine.” Your deck is now, effectively, a $65 deck. Then you start building. You do a decent job sticking to the budget for a while, but that $20 card you saw a couple scryfall pages ago keeps scratching at the back of your mind. You add it, just as an option, because maybe you can cut enough cheap cards to make it fit right?
Spoiler Alert: You aren’t going to be able to make those cuts. You now have an $85 deck.
And, well, if you’re already at $85, you might as well just make it a nice, round $100. And you get to squeeze in more of those $1-$5 cards!
This is the danger of vibes-based budgeting: Sometimes, it just doesn’t really do anything. Sure, you probably won’t end up with a deck that’s 10 times your starting budget, but double is doable easily. And if that’s okay with you, then go for it! For me personally, vibes-based budgeting just causes me to lose motivation when I realize I can no longer bring myself to cut things to get closer to my original goal.
Okay Cool. Now What?
So now you see (what I consider to be) the main types of budgeting, but what can you actually do with this information? Well, to state the obvious: Build a deck! The exact budgeting method will depend on why you’re building the deck, what your goals are with the deck, and – perhaps most importantly – who you are as a deckbuilder.
To help, I’ve compiled a small compendium below for what budgeting method I would use for each “why.”
Newbie!
So you’re new to the game and want to start building your own decks. Maybe you’ve bought a preconstructed deck (“precon”) or two to play, or you’ve borrowed decks from friends, but you want to have something you can call your own. If you don’t have any precons, I’d recommend starting out with a Hard Budget deck of around $40 or $50. Or just buy a precon! Then, once you have a starting point, go for the Add-Ons. For example, if you have the Quick Draw precon, maybe consider brewing a deck around the included Niv-Mizzet, Parun and giving yourself $20 for upgrades.
From there, maybe you upgrade by building around Kykar, Wind’s Fury, and then after that go for a full Spirits deck helmed by Millicent, Restless Revenant.
This is just one example of a path you can take, and obviously you can start with more precons or hard budget decks, but I would wager this is one of the easiest ways to slowly grow your collection while still getting to try a variety of decks.
The Frequent Brewer
So you can’t stop brewing decks? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I, and many others like you, struggle with the same problem. If you’ve found yourself in this position, you probably already have a reasonably-sized collection. And that makes you a perfect candidate for some Add-Ons. Personally, I like to rotate my decks for disassembly each time I build a new deck, with the deck I’m least-enamored with biting the figurative bullet. I then take those cards, give myself a modest budget for Add-Ons, and get to work stitching together something new.
Brewing Contest Champion
Do you tend to do brewing contests with your friends? If so, you’ve come to the right place. And if not? I really can’t recommend it enough. Pick a theme or offer up some strange twist (what if “Choose a Background” was actually “Choose a Class?”), and then get to work!
But wait! What if the people I’m brewing against have a different idea of what a power level 7 deck looks like?
Well, that’s where the budget comes in! In my experience, brewing on a theme lends itself very well to also brewing on a budget. It helps keep everyone on a similar page, and can stop certain people (definitely not me I would totally never do this) from agonizing over every little card choice. It can also stop people from having to cut their deck down from 200+ cards that they thought could maybe fit into the deck (again, just an example, I would never).
So set a $50 budget, and get to work on that Abdel Adrian // Ranger Class deck!
Wrapping Up
That’s all for this week’s Budget Blueprint! I hope you enjoyed it, and that you learned (or at least thought more about) what goes into building a deck on a budget. You can find me on Bluesky if you want to ask questions or talk about my budget brewing philosophy. Or follow me there or on Moxfield to see what I brew up in the future! Feel free to yell at me (politely) about anything you think I missed, or let me know what other brewing “why”s I should include! And stick around for more budget decks, and more thoughts on budget deckbuilding in the future!
