Pack to Power: commander style!

[aliciaofthevast]

So, @3drinks and I were talking about the format yesterday and while he's more and more interested in "PreDH", it made me think about an old concept where you start with a single booster pack and trade your way to a piece of Power 9! I remember following someone's journey on a retail site and becoming obsessed, and it's kinda got me thinking.....what if one built a commander deck this way? Just sell everything you have that isn't professionally altered or foreign, and buy some number of packs, say, 6-8, so you can have a deck and then you can only add to the deck through trades.

I've never been good or lucky at trading so this would help me learn that aspect, and the idea of having what's essentially a league season deck to use and needing to maximize what you get I find oddly tantalizing. Is this something that's even possible when every good rare has four versions and, would you do such a thing? Would anyone be interested in following such a P2P journey if I blogged it?

[3drinks]

Guuurrrrllll, you is crazy, but I kinda love it. I don't think you'd need to sell anything, just start with a deck + a pack or three and keep those cards separate from the rest of the collection? If you want it, I just bought the Growing Threat deck and I still have the stock list. It's yours if you're really serious about this project.

[aliciaofthevast]

Thank youuuuuu drinks, but I think i found a good price on the deck for this! And I never play Temur so this should be a fun project! 💖

[duducrash]

Seems fun! There is a local here that have one deck where gets 1 pack of each release and only play with this cards, he is doing since since like around Kaladesh, his deck suuuuuucks! Its a great ideia for you to start with a precon!

[aliciaofthevast]

Seems fun! There is a local here that have one deck where gets 1 pack of each release and only play with this cards, he is doing since since like around Kaladesh, his deck suuuuuucks! Its a great ideia for you to start with a precon!

Thanks! I'm trying to plan my packs to yield the highest probability of playables but still have tradeables to fill a binder with, and it's been challenging to say the least. Deck, three packs to start, then one pack per event entry since I get $5 credit for my $5 entry, and then only trades. hmm, maybe I will start my own thread once I have my starting pool. How exciting!

[aliciaofthevast]

Well I started last night and.....I don't think this will work in the purest sense. A pack is $5usd and the contents are worthless for the most part. That combined with more players being dialed into exactly dollar for dollar trades means it's impossible to trade up and grow the project 😳

I'm gonna have to change it I guess to just be all trades from my collection, rather than building from pack to playable. I don't see another option in this age

[DirkGently]

Honestly trading sucks. Value aside, people will only trade if it's something they super need, and since there are a stupid number of cards printed it's rare that you'll have the thing they actually want. Otherwise they'll hold onto their cards like its the last life raft on the titanic. You can offer then 3x the value of the card in trade and they won't take it. If you were offering the reverse deal, ofc, they would laugh in your face. But everyone is so scared that they'll have trade regret that nobody wants to trade unless they're positive they'll be happy with the results.

So yeah I can't see this going anywhere really. For a trading card game, magic really isn't about trading.

[aliciaofthevast]

You're right. It doesn't help that I'm not a shark looking to take advantage of someone to make a buck either. I feel bad for a new player starting, how do they honestly build a collection from nothing in the current state of the game? I mean, if they didn't want to spend a bunch on singles.

[Dragonlover]

Drafting the traditional way of collection building as far as I know. You get three packs, an event, maybe some prizes.

Theres also the social side to consider. At my store there's several players that are happy to just give you cards, especially if right now they're useless in whatever formats that person plays. Hell there's people I've known long enough now that we just assume we owe the other one cards. I do however appreciate that as somebody with a consistent playgroup made of nice people I'm basically a Commander unicorn.

Dragonlover

[aliciaofthevast]

Is Gimbal, Gremlin Prodigy really the best choice for the commander of this deck? Or is the alternate Rashmi and Ragavan better?

[Rumpy5897]

I'd recommend against using Gimbal for this. That thing is balanced around the existence of Doubling Seasons and Spark Doubles, cards which are expensive yet still will not grant you particularly amazing performance.

Your best bet may be to try to go for something goodstuffy. The deluge of product has led to a lot of perfectly serviceable utility cards being pennies and not being highly sought after, making them more likely to be tradable off others. You should be able to put together something functional pretty easily, and can then try to up its oomph with time if desired. Temur is actually a pretty decent colour combination for this - one of the mainstay decks of our group is Temur goodstuff which doesn't play budget but actually has a lot of very cheap cards. Sunbird's Invocation, Shaman of the Great Hunt, Rampaging Baloths, Swarm Intelligence, Unexpected Results - none of this breaks the bank, but works in practice.

I have no experience with Rashmi/Ragavan, but the bits of ramp/card advantage looks more goodstuffy. You may want to drift more toward artifacts in the 99 to help fuel the free cast.

[duducrash]

You're right. It doesn't help that I'm not a shark looking to take advantage of someone to make a buck either. I feel bad for a new player starting, how do they honestly build a collection from nothing in the current state of the game? I mean, if they didn't want to spend a bunch on singles.

Fair question. I feel like binders are dying because how accessible it is to buy singles.

I feel like I get to my binder cards from promo packs and pre release only nowadays

[3drinks]

^Ya Lish, they're right in that fewer people trade because it's so much more common place for people to just buy from a LGS and even the LGS that don't sell singles just don't get the same business numbers. If you started this like a decade ago though, I bet you'd have a lot more fun in this Journey of Discovery than today's climate. And that's kinda sad.

TrAdInG cArD gAmE my ass.

[PrimevalCommander]

Several local guys that I played with a few times simply say "I don't trade". I was a bit confused at this, but both were single guys with no other hobbies that can just buy what they need with no desire to hassle with trading at all. Any several more just don't maintain any sort of trade stock, so when asked they simply don't have anything with them to look at. I don't have an LGS, so my meta/pool of trade potential is more like a puddle. So I don't get much trades in either.

My buddy wants to get a group together to play over video and do cool theme nights where you build a deck to a rigid theme, but I don't know how much time I would have for that anyway. It would be proxy friendly because I'm not putting the $$ into an off-the-wall theme deck I play 1 time. My decks usually have a 2-5 year run since I only get to play maybe 8x a year right now. So I'm usually in it for the long haul.

[aliciaofthevast]

I think I have to change my vision! I'll just make it "zero spent dollars" beyond the cost of the deck to start. So I guess I need to catalog my collection to keep myself honest if I'm going to chronicle my journey! 😎

[UnNamed1]

There was a group that went fairly deep into this in the MTG Marketplace Discord. The issues were as you saw, have to find people willing to "trade down" for you to make any progress.

I always wanted to build a Booster Box deck, where I start the deck from cards I received in a box. Every set release, I can only put what I would pull into the deck, however I don't buy boxes anymore so that kind of puts a hamper on this idea. I do want to get back into the game more, I had some relevant threads roughly 3 years ago i think.

[aliciaofthevast]

I moved all this over to its own thread in my signature! I'm still evaluating if Gimbal is better than Rashmi & Ragavan, which I think it is or at least has a higher ceiling!