Moneyball: How Budget Deckbuilders Game the System
Money isn't always power in Commander.
Budget Magic — when a playgroup agrees to a cost limit for their decks — creates an interesting deckbuilding limitation that keeps people from breaking the bank to compete.
The film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt (not Edgar, King of Figaro, despite any similarities in appearance), dramatized the story behind the book by the same name where a baseball team on a shoestring budget outperformed an entire league of teams that spent millions of dollars more to acquire their players. Its core message is deceptively simple; tracking the right stats is more important than having the biggest budget. This same principle applies to buying Magic singles on a budget.
Don't look for the "best in class" cards like Black Market Connections, Icetill Explorer, or Rhystic Study.
Don't look deep in the common and uncommon bulk bins from recent sets.
Instead, look at what's being reprinted in Commander precons to find the best bang for your Magic budget buck.
Rampaging Baloths is one of the best landfall payoff cards ever printed. It's slightly over-costed at 4GG, but it makes some of the biggest bodies for the simple cost of playing a land, which green has many cheap ways to do. Originally a mythic rare from Zendikar, it was reprinted in many precon products: Commander 2013, Commander 2014, Commander 2018, Commander 2019, Zendikar Rising, Commander 2021, Modern Horizons 3 Commander, Bloomburrow, and Edge of Eternities. With such a massive supply, it's an excellent budget pick-up at around $0.70 at time of writing.
Idol of Oblivion pairs well with the previous pick, but works with any commander or deck archetype that makes tokens every turn cycle. This card draw workhorse is well worth its tiny price tag of around $0.90.
Alongside Path to Exile, Swords to Plowshares is premium removal that sees a reprint several times a year — four times in 2025 alone. A copy costs around $1.25. Cards with an unlimited budget will still run one or both of these staples, so why not run one in your budget list?
A spellslinger staple that quickly refills your hand, Archmage Emeritus is a little more expensive at $1.75 currently. Originally printed in Strixhaven: School of Mages, it has since been reprinted in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, and Final Fantasy commander precons, and I expect it to see more reprints for any upcoming "spells matter" precons.
Grave Titan is a frequent reprint target, as is his evil good twin, Sun Titan. At any price there are few cards that compete with the value of creating two zombies as both an enters the battlefield trigger and an attack trigger. Whether you're in blink, reanimator, or just ramping him out, Grave Titan is bread-and-butter value for a budget deck. Both titans are under $0.50.
Gray Merchant of Asphodel (Gary for short) is a finisher in many zombie decks or mono-black decks regardless of budget. The most recent reprint is in the Duskmourn precon deck and you can currently find several versions for under $1.
Moraug, Fury of Akoum is another strong pick for landfall decks but can offer plenty of value even when you just play one land a turn. If you're in red and you want to win through combat damage, Moraug hands you extra combats to finish the job with. It just saw its first reprint in the Edge of Eternities precon product and is significantly cheaper than it was before, currently $2.70.
Korvold, Fae-Cursed King was once a competitive EDH (or cEDH) tier 1 deck. The greedy dragon is still a powerhouse and was recently reprinted in an Edge of Eternities precon. The precon reprint is selling for just $0.75. There's hardly a better commander in this price range. In fact, if you run Korvold as your commander, be careful not to make it too efficient as it can easily break into bracket 3 territory.
Money Isn't Power
A very common house rule among regular playgroups is limiting the budget of a deck. It's a great idea. Instead of engaging in a wallet-backed arms race, everyone limits their deck budget to a round number. A $100 limit is the most common variant I've seen.
On its face, it might seem like this limitation favors the newer, less-informed, or less-experienced deckbuilders, but that's simply not the case.
Cards are cheap due to simple supply and demand. The more a card gets printed, the cheaper it gets relative to the number of buyers. If you've ever listed bulk commons for sale online, you recognize that there are plenty of cards that will never find a buyer, and other cards that, when competitively priced, will sell in minutes.
To solve the cost of entry issue in Commander, Wizards has turned to reprinting some high-quality older cards into their preconstructed Commander decks (also called precons). While Universes Beyond precons have a higher MSRP — currently $70 — you can find certain decks online or at your local game store for around $40, such as the Revival Trance precon from Final Fantasy, a powerful reanimator deck that leaps ahead in power with just a few tweaks.
You can start with buying a precon, but you don't have to. What the budget game is really about is padding your deck's roster with powerful, cheap staples that you often find reprinted in Commander precon products.
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