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Long story short: I want to build a decent, fun to play deck. I don't want to spend $300+ dollars like my friends have. I don't need a deck that wins %99.9999 of the time, but i don't want to waste money on a deck that will lose %99.9999 of the time.
How do I get started...listening to my friends talk about magic...its like a hidden language...wtf..
Is there a popular site where I can choose "themes" and build accordingly? How do I get started? I know the rules, I just need help making a deck. They told me not to buy the intro decks...
If it helps:
-I'm willing to spend about $40 - $50
-I want to have a "fun" deck...since i don't know the different types of decks, i have no idea whats fun lol
-I like "burst damage" and "reactive" play...so for example my favorite hero is Nomad. Has burst damage, and his ult is "reactive", so like it will activate due to an enemies action/specific action. Is there anything like this in Magic?
Ask me questions if it will help, thanks in advance~
Uhh, what format do you want to play? The format is what cards are legal to play.
Well I don't ever plan on going to tournaments, its mostly so I can play with buddies/school club maybe.Originally Posted by Beanybag
I think you mean like the whole "standard" thing? I'm not an expert at that stuff..but I guess I don't want to use like 10yr cards that are super cheap, just like...recent, acceptable, strong cards, but don't have to be standard. Hope I answered your question lol
Well, in general a decent deck relies on you having full sets of cards (3-4 of each), because you want to be able to reliably draw the cards you need. This in turn means that buying cards is definitely your ebtter option.
What you can do/ask your friends to do is to play peasant magic, where you only use commons with ~10 uncommons (not completely sure on the rules). Reduces the amount of money necessary by a lot.
You could also try to play drafts, that is a lot of fun since everyone will always play a different type of deck by nature of the format, but everytime you play it costs you for the number of booster packs you have to purchase (but the cost is split between everyone playing so it shouldn't be too bad, since you only need a hanful of booster packs).
Other than that, buying a pair of the right intro packs should also give you a decent set of cards, but not all of those are good.
Other than that, black control decks are in general rather cheap yet effective with cards like Duress (Thoughtseize as the more expensive option), lots of common to uncommon removal (most Decrees, Terror-ish cards). You usually rely on a set of 4-6 more expensive "finisher" creatures, but since you only need a few it's not that bad. Tombstalker is one of the better options here.
You can also look onto http://forums.mtgsalvation.com and look for some budget decks, I'm sure they have some list somewhere
Last edited by Skyve; 08-13-2012 at 02:49 PM.
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Thanks for the reply and the website. I'll check it out for sure.Well, in general a decent deck relies on you having full sets of cards (3-4 of each), because you want to be able to reliably draw the cards you need. This in turn means that buying cards is definitely your ebtter option.
What you can do/ask your friends to do is to play peasant magic, where you only use commons with ~10 uncommons (not completely sure on the rules). Reduces the amount of money necessary by a lot.
You could also try to play drafts, that is a lot of fun since everyone will always play a different type of deck by nature of the format, but everytime you play it costs you for the number of booster packs you have to purchase (but the cost is split between everyone playing so it shouldn't be too bad, since you only need a hanful of booster packs).
Other than that, buying a pair of the right intro packs should also give you a decent set of cards, but not all of those are good.
Other than that, black control decks are in general rather cheap yet effective with cards like Duress (Thoughtseize as the more expensive option), lots of common to uncommon removal (most Decrees, Terror-ish cards).
You can also look onto http://forums.mtgsalvation.com and look for some budget decks, I'm sure they have some list somewhere
Also budget decks aren't like...totally bad right?
Well, a deck under $50 is almost exclusively pauper or bad decks. Pauper would be common only decks and they're not bad but most people play the less common formats online instead of IRL. If you want to play standard, you're actually looking at like $200-300 a deck, which is why I tend to stay away from constructed formats like that. Speaking of which, there's two different styles of play - contructed versus limited. In limited, you get your card pool from a certain number of booster packs. There's draft and sealed as the most common limited formats. Here's a list of the formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_...hering_formats
Standard uses cards that are all new and have come out within the last 2 years. It's also the most played format, so the cards can be in high demand and expensive. The other problem is when the cards rotate out as new sets come out, they drop in value very rapidly, so you can lose a lot of your investment by playing standard and it ends up being a pretty big money sink. If you want to play with your friends, most magic players have extra cards.. just borrow your friends cards and maybe do a few sealed/draft things to get some booster packs and start up a collection. Once you get the hang of magic, you should check out EDH/Commander. It's the most popular casual multiplayer format and it's pretty fun. I have about 4-5 commander decks so when I get with friends, I even have some decks to loan out, I'm sure if your friends play they do too.
Budget decks often choose cheaper and weaker alternatives. They aren't always BAD but they aren't competitive. As for 'burst damage' and 'reactive play', that's a little hard to translate to magic. In general, there's three different types of decks: aggro (burst nukers?), control (hard carries), and combo (Nymphora+Pebbles?). Aggro decks want to bring the opponents life to 0 ASAP. Control decks want to control the game, stalling it until they can drop their big threats. Combo decks want to use a certain combination of cards to kill the opponent, or rely on card synergy to win (example: Kikki-Jikki + Deciever Exarch = infinite dudes). There are agro-control decks, which would be a combination of burst + reactive cards, but the best control cards are proactive (counter spells) or get 'card advantage', like board sweepers. Card advantage is just whenever your cards get you effectively more than a card's worth of value, so if your one kill spell kills two of their creatures, you've gotten two cards for your one. This is getting ahead on resources, which is generally what magic is about.. you want to get ahead on resources such as life, mana, or cards. A good agro-control deck would be legacy merfolk (aka fish), and it's not TOO expensive either. Can be a bit much with Wastelands and Force of Wills though.
My victory deck were always Slivers...
Ah well, I actually played a game of magic the gathering last saturday. I have such bad decks, it's incredible...
That aggro control theme sounds really appealing to me actually, I think thats the style I like. Is it pretty overused or..?
Also, given your response I assume that its better to have like a dual colored deck instead of mono? My friends play with both...but i don't want to spend the money to make both lol I think I'd like dual....
I have SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many cards but noone to play with
Used to use the magic workstation to play online some time ago though.
Last person I played with physical cards bit me in the shoulder because I won.
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Agro-Control decks are both the hardest decks to build and play as well as being the most powerful - except when there's a combo-control deck, but Wizards likes to keep degenerate combos in check with bannings. Merfolk isn't actually that great in Legacy right now, but it is putting up good showings in Modern. In terms of openness (number of legal cards), it goes Vintage (hardly any banned cards), Legacy (fairly big ban list), Modern (everything before a certain date is banned + fairly big ban list), Extended (no one plays this), and Standard (Cards printed in about the last 2 years, includes up to 2 full blocks). If you want your cards to hold value, the eternal formats are usually best.. Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. Vintage is infamously expensive with staples like Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall, but Legacy and Modern aren't far behind. Honestly, to start, you should try to borrow decks and play limited formats. I also recommend a start deck. Starter decks aren't great value a lot of the time, but most of them have a few good cards and they are fantastic for learning - they are also standard legal I think. Pick one that looks fun to you and try it out. You get to learn why a card is good and why it's bad, and by getting booster packs, you can put new cards in and try them out by taking out worse cards. You can learn about mana curve, consistency (in plan and mana), sequencing, resource management, etc. Lots of depth in this game. Hope you like it.
The other advantage of getting a starter deck (or playing in limited formats) is it gives you a base for trade fodder; if you don't want to straight up buy your decks, you can slowly trade for the cards you need.
Here are a few mono green decks that come out cheaply.
16 Forest
4 Inkmoth Nexus
20 lands
4 Glistener Elf
4 Ichorclaw Myr
4 Necropede
4 Plague Myr
16 creatures
4 Ancient Stirrings
4 Giant Growth
4 Groundswell
4 Mutagenic Growth
1 Prey's Vengeance
3 Throne of Geth
4 Vines of Vastwood
24 other spells
Sideboard
3 Creeping Corrosion
1 Dryad's Favor
4 Livewire Lash
4 Nature's Claim
3 Torpor Orb
A bit more expensive of a deck, but a very competitive deck
Creatures
1 Acidic Slime
1 Bellowing Tanglewurm
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Dungrove Elder
3 Phyrexian Metamorph
4 Strangleroot Geist
1 Thrun, the Last Troll
Spells
2 Garruk Relentless
2 Garruk, Primal Hunter
4 Green Sun's Zenith
2 Gut Shot
4 Sword of War and Peace
Lands
24 Forest
Last edited by Bloodaxe; 08-13-2012 at 03:51 PM.
Thanks Vahn
That list is a little outdated BloodAxe, Zendikar set has rotated out of standard. And Scars of Mirrordin rotates out in about 1-2 months.
If you're new to the game my advice is to attend some Drafts, some Prereleases, and just have fun getting used to the game and building up a collection of Standard cards. Half the fun of the game is lost if you just pay for a deck online and only play with that one deck with your friends. If you have a big pile of random cards you can make all sorts of fun decks to use and surprise your friends, and you'll be able to have multiple decks that you can loan or practice against yourself with, which can be useful.
Once you've played a while and got a feel for deckbuilding, THEN go buy your pro deck online. If your whole circle of friends has perfect decks off of some website then they are lame.
Playing drafts at a local shop is a great way of getting to know everyone in the area who plays too. You can meet some awesome people there occasionally.
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If you want a decent, cheap standard deck, just go mono-green or red-green aggro. Stuff like Young Wolf and Strangleroot Geist are very cheap despite being rare quality cards. I think you could build one with just 40$, but don't expect to beat someone else's 200$ deck.
The only FNM in my area is in a city that's about an hour drive away, so I unfortunately can't play very much... =(
I'll never forget what I felt that day...
I, want to be a Hero of Justice!
ah... magic. stopped playing the actually cards when urza was released.
im really out of touch these days with all these mythics and weird stats.
honestly id be intimidated to play some nerd that spent hundreds on his deck, some of those cards just dont look fun to play against lol.
id say play around until you find a style that you enjoy.
i recommend DOTP 2013 to play off and on too.
the decks are a lot better than 2012's nuclear arms race.
itll show you different deck styles and how cards can really synergize together (infinite timewarp? lulz)
you cant fully customize a deck but they give you a sideboard of i think 30-40 cards which really is a lot of customizing. i think it teaches you on how to optimize a deck.
i havent tried MTGO yet but from what i understand, people give away a lot of the cards they win from drafts or trade bundles for really cheap since a lot of people tend to not to play constructed, that is really where deck building practice comes into play.
ya they arent the actual card game, but its good for the times where you are at home and feel like playing.
The real question is if you are a johnny timmy or spike.
Test http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazin...m/daily/mr220a
Johnny/timmy can still have a lot of fun playing magic with cheap decks spike is a bit harder to do on a budget.
Also +1 for sliver decks being cheap and fun to play for new people with a lot of power. (I am also partial to mono green creatureless decks but thats the johnny in me)
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Sliver decks aren't actually fun to play against, imo. Also feels pretty bad to play, as you either absolutely wreck or get wrecked.
They're pretty much a combo deck. You either do nothing or win.
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