Cheap Magic Card Lists

[Baron Opal]

I'm looking for some card lists for some capable but cheap decks.

This is another situation where a former player's spawn is getting interested in the game. My goal is to get a set of 5 two-color decks so that he can see the basic themes and interactions of the colors. These decks would be almost exclusively common and uncommon cards. That's the "cheap" part. After I get the list I'll head to me FLGS and pick up the cards. I would use my own, but I sold off my collection ages ago.

While these decks may not be able to hold their own against a deck built with the full complement of cards, I'm hoping that there are sufficient common and uncommon cards sitting on people's shelves that I can build a set of reasonable decks. Once my son gets the hang of the game, then we can start spending the allowance on packs and the big guns.

I will have to buy a couple of starter sets anyway just to see how the rules have changed.

 

[Asmor]

They actually just came out with a product called the Deck Builder's Toolkit. It's directly aimed at people who are new to the game, who may have bought a couple theme decks or something, and are looking for a way to expand their collection fruitfully.

The contents are semi-random, and are supposed to include lots of 'staples' (i.e. good, simple common cards that can fit in a lot of decks, like Doom Blade). It also includes some basic land.

Another option would be to purchase a set of Duel Decks, which contains two fairly well-built decks that are designed to be played against each other. The downside with them is that they're not really designed as introductory products, so the decks can be and sometimes are a bit complicated (e.g. the latest set, Elspeth vs. Tezzeret, features a white soldier deck which is fairly straight forward and a blue artifact deck which is actually fairly complicated to play well).

And of course, there's always pauper. Pauper, if you're not aware, is a format where decks can only have common cards, which makes it really cheap and easy to get into. For example, the latest set, which is having the prerelease this weekend and officially releases next weekend, on ebay has a buy-it-now auction for a playset of 4x of each common for $5.99. The nice thing about something like this is that you really get the full Magic experience of trying to build your own deck from a huge pool of cards, with literally every card in the format available to you.