Magic Deck Prices

I play Magic: the Gathering. It has a lot of good aspects, but one of its worst aspects is its high prices. There are two major ways to play Magic: Limited and Constructed. In Limited, one opens a couple new packs of randomly assorted cards, makes a deck out of them, and plays a tournament with the result. As far as prices go, this is fairly reasonable.

The problem lies in Constructed. In Constructed, one brings a pre-constructed deck of their choosing to the tournament, and plays it. Due to the variance in power level and availibility of the various cards, the best decks can be quite expensive.

For example, in the most commonly played format, Standard, decks average about $300. Even worse, a given card is only legal in Standard for two years, and so a given deck typically only sticks together for a year. It's slightly better online, where the same decks only cost $200, but it's not much better.

Suppose you want your deck to stay legal for longer. The most commonly played eternal format is Modern, where a paper deck will run anywhere from $500 to $1800, with an average deck around $1000. The most expensive individual card in that format is Tarmogoyf, costing about $200 each. If every card in a deck was that expensive, the deck would cost $12,000.

While that amount seems unimaginable, but in one still popular format, Vintage, the decks average $15,000, and one individual card, Black Lotus, costs $4000.

There is a solution to this problem, however. The solution is Pauper. In Pauper, only the most common cards are legal, and once a card is legal, it stays legal forever. An average deck costs $10 to $50, but if you really push it, you can make an entire deck for under $1, like this one I made today: Golgari Persist, for 78 cents.

I've really enjoyed playing Pauper and Limited, and I think I'll continue in that system.