What Should the Deck Budget be?
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on June 28, 2017, 1:28 a.m. by BlueMageBrandon
I've been watching MTGGoldfish's Commander Clash and Star City Games' Commander Vs for a while now, the whole time trying to convince my friends to do something similar. With school being out and us not being able to play in paper daily, I've finally convinced them too! We are going to play on untap.in since it's free and browser based but that in itself is an issue. We're fairly casual so none of us are going to be comboing off but I still think having a budget is a good idea. I'm not sure what Commander Vs uses but I'm pretty sure Commander Clash uses a 30 tix budget (but they're not very strict). Do you think 30 tix is a good idea, or should we raise or lower it? Thanks for the advice!
OriginalBlue says... #3
I'm not familiar with the tix, but the pre-constructed decks from Wizards of the Coast - http://magic.wizards.com/en/products/card-set-archive#commander - are a good starting point when it comes to construction, combos and pricing.
These decks, and variations can be found on TappedOut as well, with their respective tix value.
June 28, 2017 7:47 a.m.
I agree with Winterblast, screw budget. It doesn't matter if you're playing aggro, combo or whatever - you may as well have access to the best cards if there's no cost involved. Not only will it teach you about more optimised deckbuilding but it will improve your skilsl as a player more as you you can't just rely on thefact that 'all of our decks are slow so I canwaste a few turns and it doesn't matter".
And don't be fooled by the misconception - just becuase you start playing a higher level deck doesn't mean that the games will be any less fun. It'll be different than what you might be used to but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Plus rather than havign one long drawn out game where a player might get screwed for mana or get knocked out early, you can have a bunch of faster games which actually gives you more variety and is generally more inclusive.
June 28, 2017 9:21 p.m.
Gidgetimer says... #5
I'd personally stick to what you would be willing to buy in paper. It is a bit of a misconception that just because you are playing budget decks means that you can waste turns, or that it takes more skill to pilot a completely tuned deck. I have piloted everything in EDH from pre-cons to fully optimized decks and the requisite skill is more related to deck complexity than to deck price. That being said I see no reason for any budget less than about $500. That gives you an average card price of $5 and most people are willing to spend that.
Also Commander VS has no limit on deck-building. It is presented by SCG and they want you to buy the cards you see. As a result they often actually play expensive cards for no reason other than they are expensive. Stuff like shoving Eureka into Xenagos when it is a bad card for the deck. Most blatantly they will sometimes run P3K versions of cards over the same card with a different name Capture of Jingzhou with no Temporal Manipulation in the deck or Three Visits but no Nature's Lore.
June 28, 2017 10:27 p.m.
Jimmy_Chinchila says... #7
I think it's a group decision, but I do agree that if there's no actual "cost" then there's no need to do a budget. As long as it's an even playing field it really doesn't matter, either you're all using the best possible cards or you're all trying to decide what cards can be replaced with less expensive but also less efficient versions.
Winterblast says... #2
I think when it's online and free to play, everyone should play the optimised version of his or her desired deck. There's absolutely no need for a budget restriction if you don't actually have to pay for the cards.
June 28, 2017 5:13 a.m.