The moving goalposts of staying within budget

[gilrad]

Alternate title: X card is worth how much these days? Now it kind of feels out of place in this deck...

Anybody else get frustrated by card price spikes? Not strictly from a "now I have to spend more money for it" standpoint, but more from a "this deck has inflated way out of its original intended budget range since I last played it" perspective.

I should probably clarify: when I am talking about card value, I am referring to the cheapest printing of a card that people can get. I have no more issue with a full fetch-shock manabase that is made of Expeditions than I am of one made of HP and damaged cards.

I always feel a little uncomfortable when my deck's budget is too disparate from the rest of the table; if people are playing slightly modified precons, I tend to avoid deck's that contain too many $20+ cards, and if people are playing mid-budget deck's, I choose to not bring out the decks containing $200+ cards (well I keep those cards in the vault anyway, I always feel uncomfortable carrying too much value in cardboard to game days).

So I take a six-month or year+ break from EDH, then come back to find all my wonky fun decks that I used to bust out for low-power tables are conspicuously out of place. Maybe I just want to vent a little. Maybe I just want to hear people have the same frustrations.

[DirkGently]

Personally I never worry about budget, power level is the only thing that matters to me. The deck I've been playing most recently is worth a ton - it's a 4-color deck with 6 duals, cradle, tabernacle, bazaar, etc - but it's a 98-land gimmick deck, so I don't see any problem playing against relatively budget decks. No one's complained. I imagine they would if I reconfigured my collection into a cEDH deck instead. And if they didn't complain, I'd still feel badly on my own.

Also I do like carrying a precon around just in case. Sometimes with new decks I underestimate the power level and it ends up being too OP for the table. So then a precon works as a nice palate cleanser that everyone knows won't be terribly powerful. Or I'll borrow a deck on the same principle.

[Yatsufusa]

Unfortunately, that's just how the market works in the game (or in general, actually). If you want to "future-proof" budget decks, then you need to take the moving goalposts into account. A card which is cheap(er) because it got reprinted in a Standard set is almost definitely a price spike target in a year or so when it leaves print-runs, likewise for new cards with non-rotating applications.

Bluntly put, playing with price restrictions is akin to playing in a rotating format, because markets don't stay stagnant and move all the time. Which is why I don't bother with maintaining a overall-budget-limit for my decks (I still budget spending, of course) - the point of a non-rotating format for me is to have a deck that I can play at anytime, so why nullify that with a restriction dependent on something that never sleeps?

When newer players express envy for some of my "costlier" cards (especially since I go out for foils), I point out that I often buy the cards at their general lowest point (citing when and what price I got it to prove the point and with a margin of error) and they can do the same too, starting with the ones that are in that state right now. Granted, I can do that for a whole bunch of cards because I've been operating like that for over a decade already, so a lot of emphasis is on patience and willingness to pay some attention to the market even when you're not active in the game, but if you don't get started, you can't magically get into my state-size (short of just splurging money at one go, of course) in a decade anyway.

[Toshi]

I can't tell for my other decks by heart, but Zada, Hedron Grinder - which has been my Budget suggestion since forever - certainly got more expensive lately.

12,00€ Chandra, Torch of Defiance
8,00€ Dreadhorde Arcanist (very recent addition, bought for 1,50€)
15,00€ Mizzix's Mastery (bought for 3,50€)
20,00€ Purphoros, God of the Forge (bought for 8,00€)
10,00€ Strip Mine (bought for 4,00€)
10,00€ Tempt with Vengeance (bought for 2,50€)

---

75,00€ total

That's for just 6 cards in the deck and i can recall a time, when you could pick up the whole deck without cutting cards for significantly less than that...

Overall the amount of so called Staples - hate that term - that went up in price is aweful. Cyclonic Rift, Toxic Deluge, Strip Mine, ...
The times of building a close to perfect deck for less than 250,00€ are more or less over unless you find something that's so unique it utilizes bulk cards in an original way. And i think that's a shame and could be compensated by better Precons. If the card quality (≠value) in them would be better budget minded players could pick them up, optimize them and compete reasonably.

As far as power vs money considerations go, i think it isn't a failproof reasoning. Yes, most top dog decks can cost quite some money, but there's still stuff like Edric, Spymaster of Trest. On the other hand, if you don't care about price at all you might build an awefully weak deck that can cost you at least 4 digits without problems.
As long as all decks at the table are on par within the power scale players shouldn't worry about the cost of those decks.

[Mookie]

Treating a deck that has risen in value as more powerful than it was previously sounds weird to me - if you haven't changed any of the cards, then even if the value of your deck doubles in price, it's not like your deck has become any more powerful.

On the flip side, if you play a deck that was $200 a year ago before it doubled in price against a deck that costs $200 that has been continuously updated for the past year (but still within that budget limit), I would expect the continuously updated deck to be stronger despite the price difference. Power creep is a thing, if only because the card pool naturally grows over time. (I'll point to Smothering Tithe as one card that opened up a lot of options by itself, but there are a lot of examples in the commander precons that are specifically targeted to solve problems / boost strategies in the format)

I suppose that the way rising costs should be treated also depends on what motivation you have for sticking to a budget - if you're explicitly using it as a heuristic for power level, then cutting good/expensive cards can make sense, but it also means you'll tend to focus on cards that are particularly impactful for their price. If you're using a budget as a restriction on deckbuilding, then updating decks can be inconvenient. If you're using a budget to limit your spending, then cards rising in value is usually a good thing.

As a side note, I'll point out that price isn't even a particularly good heuristic for power level - there is definitely a correlation, but it is quite possible to have a powerful budget deck or a weak expensive deck (especially if you're optimizing for such - I'll point to Mind's Desire and All Hallow's Eve as two extremes).

[folding_music]

yeah you can either keep them updated or end up with a bunch of micro-formats - got several decks myself where every card in the deck was under a dollar in 2015, and they stay together because they were my idea of budget at the time, even if collectors have convinced themselves that Bearscape is worth money or that Revised needs to be hoarded or whatever. You might end up noticing that your idea of budget won't jive with someone else's and any imagined overstepping of the line will be noticed by precisely zero other people!

[Rumpy5897]

I remember building a Tromokratis for a pittance in 2014. That deck had a nontrivial amount of decent staples in it - Rhystic Study, Cyclonic Rift, Strip Mine, Mana Vault, all that stuff qualified by my "cards must be under two euro each" metric that I used for the list, and they're 20 bucks and up now. The joys of some cards being better than others and a format taking off. Every now and then I pricegun my primers, and after the 2018 buyouts I created budget sections in each. Please reprint everything into the dirt, WotC?

Funnily enough, my main decks are actually inversely powerful to their monetary costs.

[xeroxedfool]

This is an interesting topic. I purchased and traded for many expensive magic cards years ago. 10 years later they are much more expensive and I do get comments about the budget of my decks. Magic can be pay to win, but the price doesn't always equal the power.

Take for instance Solemn Simulacrum. This card is fair and its power in the format has actually gone down in the last few years. I think we have better cards. Solemn is in 21% of EDHREC decks and its about 6 US$. According to MTGSTOCKs the card has bout doubled in price in the last 6 years.

This is all my opinion obviously, but I would never consider Solemn to be a high budget or high power card. By comparison Sol Ring is arguably the most powerful card in the format and its cheaper than Solemn unless you want a fancy copy.

Anyway, I wouldn't feel bad about it if I were you (the OP). It is not as if you intended to build outside of the original budget restrictions and if you still like playing the deck, why stop now?

[3drinks]

This is why I keep a white border deck on me, be it Kaalia or Alesha, because price is not a static condition, it is always changing. Can't build to that with the idea of keeping a deck in a certain level because it's always changing. Rather, I find sticking to a predefined area (such as white border or InVasion block, ONS-MRD standard or whatever), you'll have far less overhead, less time spent checking against a price list that's always going to rise, and overall will have a better time achieving your goal.

And, as an added benefit, if you're into nostalgia then the idea of white border is a pretty cool throwback to some of the more powerful non-creature spells of the game's history. Plus it can be a neat case study of just how far the game has come. It's surprisingly capable of holding itself together in a game, through smart play and good resource management.

[Dunharrow]

The only time I experience this is when I notice expensive cards in jank decks, and I just think to myself: "Maybe I should just sell that card and replace it with more jank".

[Rumpy5897]

As a counterpoint to this, we're at a time where Wizards is aggressively supporting the format, dumping new cards designed for it with each set. As such, you should be able to piece something sensible on a budget that may not be quite up to the standards of yesteryear staples, but still be operational. The Intet in my group runs stuff like Bounty of the Luxa that's pennies and does stuff.

Also, it's annoying how each time a new legend of any relevance gets spoiled choice cards for it get bought up. Note the two separate spikes in quick succession on Monastery Mentor, correlating with Feather and Kykar being spoiled.

[Myllior]

Also, it's annoying how each time a new legend of any relevance gets spoiled choice cards for it get bought up. Note the two separate spikes in quick succession on Monastery Mentor, correlating with Feather and Kykar being spoiled.

This gets me as well. There's too much scarcity and price memory abounding that leads to ridiculous prices for cards that are not worth the price tag. (Sword of Fire and Ice|DST anyone?). The 5C Sliver legends prior to The First Sliver are particularly egregious examples of this behaviour you describe Rumpy. None of this is helped by the fact that there are people attempting to make money off this, driving up scarcity and prices even further. I mean come on, it's a game.

Anyway, the point is that any well built deck, even one built with budget considerations, is going to have a handful of cards that will balloon in cost over the next few years; the effect of this ballooning will be more noticable the higher your initial budget was. Unless WOTC shifts gears towards aggressive reprinting, this seems to be an unfortunate truth of the game.

[3drinks]

Thanks, r/mtgfinance. It's all collectors and sharks gaming the system.

[TheTuna]

The simple fact is that Wizards is not reprinting Commander-focused cards enough to keep up with the insane increase in the format's popularity over the last few years. The prices for Cyclonic Rift, Teferi's Protection, and Expropriate alone, all played only in Commander, speak volumes on this subject. I'm not sure where they can do these reprints, as any card worth more than $20 is probably too expensive to reprint in a Commander product, but there's a palpable need for far more aggressive reprints if they want Commander to retain its appeal as a relatively accessible format for new players. If most splashy, powerful wincon cards begin to accelerate to $30-60+, that'll form a pretty vicious barrier to entry.

Even re-instituting the Commander's Arsenal as a once-yearly FtV/Spellbook style product where they print a bunch of powerful staple cards would go a really long way.

[3drinks]

The simple fact is that Wizards is not reprinting Commander-focused cards enough to keep up with the insane increase in the format's popularity over the last few years. The prices for Cyclonic Rift, Teferi's Protection, and Expropriate alone, all played only in Commander, speak volumes on this subject. I'm not sure where they can do these reprints, as any card worth more than $20 is probably too expensive to reprint in a Commander product, but there's a palpable need for far more aggressive reprints if they want Commander to retain its appeal as a relatively accessible format for new players. If most splashy, powerful wincon cards begin to accelerate to $30-60+, that'll form a pretty vicious barrier to entry.

Even re-instituting the Commander's Arsenal as a once-yearly FtV/Spellbook style product where they print a bunch of powerful staple cards would go a really long way.

Short of going full konami (and you never go full konami...) this wont help. It wont help until r/mtgfinance stops playing magical stocks.

[bobthefunny]

So I built a $50 elfball Riku of Two Reflections deck back in the day.

Yeah... it included a little-know $1 card called Craterhoof Behemoth.

My how times have changed...

---

At first I thought this thread was going to be about how budget considerations ease over time as you add and grow your collection, but I'm happy to see that it's exactly the opposite discussion.

As someone who is guilty of alternatingly simply adding my one copy of ABUR duals into every available deck (via proxy), to just building with what I find off a table (which ends up being a weird mix of missing and mismatched shocks and fetches)... I can say that building budget decks has always intrigued me, but the difficulty of building one, and then the difficulty of maintaining it has been a large deterrent for me.

[TheTuna]

Short of going full konami (and you never go full konami...) this wont help. It wont help until r/mtgfinance stops playing magical stocks.

People speculating on Magic rubs me the wrong way as well, but I very much doubt that they're primarily responsible for the massive spikes behind cards like Expropriate, Rift, or Teferi's Protection. Those cards are just so fantastic in Commander (and, in the case of Teferi's and Expropriate, from relatively limited print runs) that anybody playing that color probably wants one in their deck, and Commander is the most popular format in Magic. Demand from the masses is huge, and the supply isn't there.

[toctheyounger]

It's very much something I try to take into consideration, purely because none of my decks will ever be as optimised as they could be - I'll never have a deck with a premium land base, let's put it that way. The goalposts do creep, I've spent more on my recent builds than I ever would've intended to a couple years ago - and I try to make sure it's on things that will hold their value. So the Leyline of Anticipation I grabbed for $35NZD a few months ago was a dead duck, but mostly I do alright, and to be fair I wouldn't complain about having access to more Leylines now that they're a little less premium.

I definitely share the frustrations around price spiking, it's pretty harsh. There are times it plays in my favour for pieces that have sat in my collection doing nothing, but a lot of the time it means getting gouged to build even close to the 75-80% level I'd usually like to aim for.

[Sinis]

For the most part, I don't usually care how much my decks are worth (though, I don't really feel comfortable carrying a full set of revised dual lands out of the house anymore). I most frequently get the budget feel-bads from Reserved List over a hundred dollars or so.

Usually, it's newer players probably will never get the same joy out of them that I do, and if I had to purchase them now, I probably wouldn't. I never used to feel bad about playing expensive cards, but a few months ago, I was playing against a really young random (like, maybe early-mid teens) at my LGS, and tabled The Abyss, and I think he had never seen one played in a game before. All at once he kind of lit up (because check out this Ancient Magic Card That Does %$#%), but then deflated and said "You know that's like a thousand dollar card, right?"

I'm not sure what part about it feels bad; it wasn't the gameplay, it didn't have a huge impact that game. But, just, kind of this thing that would maybe be out of reach for this kid, possibly for a very long time.

[boer0829]

Back in the day we used to play casual with P9 cards... some friends had all the duals 4 times, just for fun. Those cards didn't cost that much then. Something like Tropical Island was like 20 Euros. Someting like Gilded Drake wasn't worth much more then 2 Euros. Things like Moat and Tabernacle weren't very rare to see.
Nowadays you need a mortgage to play with this stuff

[Nimbaway]

I think a lot of budget considerations come when you are putting a deck together, like how much you are willing or able to invest into buying cards make it a functional deck. Or in some other cases how much you are willing to spend on cards in a given month. Generally when you already have a card it's not going to affect your budget anymore.

[Rumpy5897]

I think a lot of budget considerations come when you are putting a deck together, like how much you are willing or able to invest into buying cards make it a functional deck. Or in some other cases how much you are willing to spend on cards in a given month. Generally when you already have a card it's not going to affect your budget anymore.

Word. Budget is not a means to an end, but rather a conscious monetary restriction on a hobby. At least that's how it used to be for me back before I slid away. It was not about consciously trying to make a deck that would cost a particular money amount, watching over its prices and rotating out cards to maintain the price tag. It was simply about not wanting to splurge too much on cardboard.