Does Budget Change Your Strategy? | EDHRECast 263
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- čas přidán 11. 05. 2023
- Digging through new data to ask an old question: do budget restrictions have a substantial impact on the way a commander gets brewed? Let's investigate!
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Just wanna say Joey signed my mimeoplasm at magic con Minneapolis and he's super cool for doing it
We all knew he was super cool beforehand, but I'll take anymore reasons I can get 😊
I hope you challenged the stats before him too
I want a Mimeoplasm: upping the average. I literally just learned about it a few days ago!!
He signed mine too!
@edhrec will you be at Magicfest Anaheim?
I think the main thing is that budget decks need more card draw, and need to be extremely synergistic. You can’t put in staples, so drawing more gets your to your best cards, and synergies make your deck even better.
The biggest change in Magic in the past few years has been just how much redundancy each effect now. We’re now approaching the density of having basically 4 of each card.
I have been saying this for a while now. Commander is quickly becoming another Modern because there are so many cards that are just the same card.
I feel manabase can be the biggest money sink in a deck. And not running your socks, fetches, triomes, etc is very freeing. You get to put more of your budget into your nonlands and make whatever strategy all the more playable to whatever price point you have available.
Yep, socks! They are so expensive!
I've been looking into a 5c all basics deck, but can't think of a commander that really synergizes with it. But after making 5c changelings with a non-budget landbase I don't ever want to do that again lol
@@michaelcollins4534 while not budget, you could always run Prismatic Omen, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, and Pulse of Llanowar to enable an all-basics strategy. Personally I like to mix mana sources as much as possible for the sake of diversity, to not be particularly susceptible to any one kind of hate.
totally true! also more colors = more money because you need a better mana base.. i hope land staples will get cheaper at some point in Time
Simpler mana bases are also fine - people hugely overstate how important they are to decks, and I suspect it’s because a lot of $500 mana bases are covering for a lot of middling deckbuilding. If your deck is just slower with only basics that’s fine, but if your deck doesn’t work at all with just basics - excepting unusual cases like Hazezon - then it’s not the lands that are the problem.
Mana base might not affect strategy all that much, but strategy execution can get painful when you’re consistently a turn behind because your lands are all coming in tapped. That’s my experience trying to build budget bases for 3+ colors at least
Definitely agree. And when you look at it if you build with a lot of tapped lands, even your ramp/ mana rocks won't technically get you a turn ahead instead you're just playing catch up on your turn.
Best way to deal with this is to run big ramp effects that gets the lands in tapped anyways, but usually you can get two or three at a time so your next turn is explosive.
@@krimson459 *cries in grixis*
@@michaelcollins4534 Yeah lol definitely more tough to play budget mana in grixis
A lot of 4-5 colour decks are also just huge value piles that use big-money mana bases to cover for not being that well designed. If your deck never recovers from Blood Moon then the deck is half the problem.
The best restriction is to make a budget deck, that's how you learn to play better imo. Playing with budget will let you fly under the radar a lot and in multiplayer you will more than likely keep your stuff. Synergy is always better than playing a good stuff deck.
One thing I noticed a while back when I was looking through commanders was actually Svella, Ice Shaper.
The expensive version of the deck is decidedly "go big", with several means of getting lots of mana and bonus activations of Svella's second ability, and many large creatures like Eldrazi Titans, Apex Devastator, Nyxbloom Ancient, and other cards you want to flip off the top with that ability.
The budget deck, however, led me to ask, "....wait, where did all this LAND DESTRUCTION come from?" A lot of land destruction cards are cheap, since nobody plays them, and with Svella's ability to make her own mana rocks, she isn't set back as hard for losing lands. It helps that Red/Green is also the right combination for destroying your opponents' artifacts to even FURTHER break parity.
In my opinion overall strategies are less affected by budget…..what I think you should look into is how the spread of deck archetypes scale with budget?
I believe it operates on a “curve” so to speak where you will see less variance on both the low and high end and more variety in the mid-range of budget.
I literally started making a Chatterfang deck today.
Cheap Gang! I wanna make my squirrels 8/8s with trample and turn sideways!
For me, budget simply reduces efficiency and slows you down. My decks range from a budget of 100-200 to roughly 700 for my Ragavan Voltron deck [150~ being Ragavan himself.]
I upgraded the Strixhaven Golgari precon with Beledros for Elder Dragon and it's below 200 and works well. Fun and simple.
The one-two of Dolly Parton puns was well done
Hi EDHREC! I've been playing commander since ~2015 and always on a budget for all of my decks and the decks I helped friends build. I can say that there is a recent, drastic surge in the accessibility of synergistic and concise decks that don't need big costly haymakers and expensive lands. There definitely used to be that "there aren't enough gold budget cards for this archetype." but I haven't felt that in multiple years. This never makes me feel like I'm sacrificing deck power, in a big way proven by Commanders Quarters decks. I feel like tap lands are also largely underrated by the commander community especially on a budget. Not every deck has perfect tempo, and usually in lower power levels you don't need to have it anyway. there's a large echo chamber in mtg about forcing deck building optimization and I don't agree. I've played with very few cards in this video overall and I'm honestly okay with that. Obviously there's really fun cards here, but it's not necessary. I think more people can build decks on a budget and be happy about it, I know way too many people who are spending dangerous amounts of money to their well being on magic and it's not worth it.
Can I just say, I love that y’all have begun rotating weeks off more frequently. I love having all three there for conversations, but I love you all protecting your time and mental health more.
One of the interesting things about Miirym decks by budget is the colour weighting. I’m Budget decks there are A LOT of Green and Red with a little blue splashed in. But when you go expensive the deck switches and has A LOT more Blue, because of the strategy changing from lots of good creatures to creating lots of a few incredible creatures!
That feeling when you're tweaking Jodah and he comes up in Challenge the Stats section
You gotta lean heavy on green in a 5 color deck on a budget for as much ramp as possible. That UR Dragon precon was an example of the mana base many people DID NOT want and proved to be very lackluster.
I would say that it depends on the strategy of the deck. For the most part, though, I agree. I even refer to my Ur-Dragon deck as a green deck with 4 other colors.
I find my tribal decks to be the only ones where budget has to get thrown out the window. Its hard to play a really synergistic tribal deck if you're missing some of the more important pieces that tend to be higher in price. My landfall, reanimator and azorius tokens are all budget friendly while still retaining immense power
I have had the exact opposite experience with my tribal decks. Elf ball in particular doesn't require any expensive cards and can still compete with the best of 'em. I think it really depends on the tribe and how many staples you need to include. Obviously tribes like Dragons, Demons, and Angels will tend to require more expensive cards because most of them are big and splashy, but low to the ground tribes like goblins and zombies can be very efficient and effective without breaking the bank.
@@krimson459 I'd also argue for those tribes to be some of the more printed tribes too, so there's a deeper pool of cheaper, but efficient creatures
Edit: meaning the low to the ground tribes such as elves, zombies, etc.
@@Vrir16 Yeah 100%
I can confirm; Phyrexian Tribal under Atraxa Grand Unifier has been the most expensive Deck I have built to date. The Praetors, The Mana Base (Artifacts I’ve remained Budget On and I haven’t bought Duals). The wincons luckily, are budget; Realmbreaker and Kindred Summons.
Realmbreaker just needs you to get to it and have the Mana to resolve it. Kindred just requires you to control a good amount of creatures to shit out.
Either resolves and I usually win come next turn. Fuck I need a haste enabler xD
I've had so many positive experiences taking out a generic and expensive card from a deck to put in something more synergistic or on theme.
Half of my fun in this game is when a deck turns a quite bad card into a great one - the second most fun I had with Chishiro was realising just how hard Whip Silk, Crown of Flames and Bloodforged Axe go in that deck - and the most fun was realising just how degenerate a decent sized board can be when you draw Whip Silk with Defiler of Vigor in play.
I feel like high power decks tend to sandbag a bit more as well because they know how powerful their card can be in the right instance. Sometimes those instances never show for them tho so the card stays in hand..
I think if you're building a 3+ colour manabase today gates are the best way to go. There are spells, artifacts and a land win a wincon attatched the search them up, there are gates that can tap for all colours, a gate that turns them into abu duals, gates with selective fixing, a treasure generator and a gates version of cabal coffers. In 5c the entire manabase is under £10 over here.
Got to say, enjoying the beard that matt has going on
It's what I can "3 weeks of work being too stressful to shave" beard
One of my favorite genres of decks is playing really busted commanders/archetypes on a budget. I once did both with a Prosper storm deck for only $25 it was a very fun puzzle.
the evolution of my Locust God deck totally changed how the deck played, the more money I put into it. it started out as this cute locust tribal deck with wheels and beat face with locusts. the end result was a combo deck that went infinite to make infinite locusts with haste that killed everyone with "Firestorm". I have since evolved that deck into Temur pirates that doesn't play the locust god at all anymore, but the budget still went up a little.
ya'know
Having Jace and Vraska closing the episode is kinda sweet
My friends and I play a variant called 1DH (one dollar highlander). I would love if there was a "budget" where you could say what the top per dollar price is.
I do think that a total value cap can work better, since it rewards clever deckbuilding by letting you take some good stuff if you make heavy sacrifices. $100 US is the optimum I find, since it lets you have one or two mega-pricey centrepieces and then organically learn that spreading value around works better. And hell, if you actually manage to fit Eddie Markov into a Vampire deck by getting 99 cards for $15, you EARNED Eddie.
A note about ivy: a really fun way to play her is by throwing in the vows and impetus cards.
I have a deck that is mono red voltron and it runs sword of fire and ice and sword of forge and frontier. It leads to a couple awkward situations but mono red has limited ramp and card draw options so you take what you can get
Depends on the playgroup your with I’d say. While it may not be nessacary for EVERY game, the more you lose the more you may be motivated to go out and buy more expensive pieces to build up your Budget Deck.
45:37
"Having duels in your deck does not 'duel' a lot" 😂
Just the way you said do a whole lot sounded like 'duel' lol
Missed dad joke, so good at making them you do it by accident.
I am always willing to spend more money on staples. For $28, I can look at making use of a Teferi’s protection in most white decks I build, so I can get a lot of value from it… For $35, I cannot support buying a Kinsbaile Cavalier, which I will never use outside my Sidar Jibari deck.
Budget can definitely change strategy. A 50 dollar budget vs say a 500 dollar budget can have vast differences. Like a budget elf deck probably wont run Craterhoof or Finale of Devastation. Or a budget token deck wont be running Anointed Procession/ Parallel Lives/ Doubling Season. Where a person with a 500 dollar budget woulnt have any issue putting those in their deck, and the non budget token deck is going to potentially just be that much better then the budget version because of those cards.
For mana bases at least personally i agree that the og duels and the fetches arnt necessary in a casual format. But if you want at least a little consistency shock lands and things like battlebond lands are still very useful the problem is they arnt overly budget friendly ether. Yes you can play the fetchable tap lands but unless your playing against other players who are doing the same thing youll end up being at least a turn or two behind everyone else.
OG Dual lands dont... DU-ALot nowadays 😎
For me. Its the interaction. I generally play temur. Inlean gruul but interaction that is efficient between turn 3-9 are tough. I found i use more cantrips to xhurn through my deck to find answer's. That being said. My group allows up to 20 proxies. But we all use budget as a gadge as indicator of strength
Side note:
"Pimenta" means pepper in Portuguese.
Maybe in Spanish too, but I'm not sure.
A cheese joke? C’mon Matt, you can do cheddar than that.
There are no budget Doubling Seasons/Annointed Processions. Which massively change your strategy imo
Tbh if you have access to green then just focus on basics and cheap typed duals. You'll lose tempo in the beginning but ramping hard lets you shoot ahead later
Hmm... I miss Dana, wanted to hear about an adage about breakfast or other, haha. I understand your point, but I personally disagree regarding lands. Yes, ABU duals are not needed, but a 5 color mana base suffers without fetches, shocks, and triomes. It will be more inconsistent, slower, and will lose more. I do understand that these things aren't 100% needed, but they do affect the deck and should probably be the first thing one upgrades, since it transfers over to other decks well. Just my 2 cents, sorry if I misunderstood your point, I guess.
To an extent, it has to. It should at least steer you away from some decks - Thoracle or Exquisite Vito won’t happen and will still make you the archenemy of the table so you’ll lose. Some Landfall can be expensive so maybe you want to try Hazezon instead of Omnath since his key cards are in less demand and the combos are different. You definitely want to build synergy instead of combo, and that can be quite strong - my Chishiro deck is easily my strongest and is also the cheapest because there’s a huge array of cheap +1/+1 cards when you write off Primal Vigor, Doubling Season and Vorinclex, GR does fine with basics thanks to plentiful ramp, and the deck is actually extremely resilient since every piece works with every other piece. Those three cards together would triple that deck’s cost, and they sure as hell wouldn’t triple its power.
The big one is writing off the mana base. You can easily sink a thousand dollars into a manabase and still not be optimal, even in a cheap deck. People insist you need a full set of relevant shocklands and fetch lands and it’s just not true. These days there’s enough cheap mana to accomodate two colours easily and three tolerably, if you actually build your deck well. It may make decks a bit slower than the hyper-optimised one, but you can sweep an entire table of those fast decks with a single Blood Moon so ‘better’ is a relative term.
Matt, the beard looks fantastic
Lower budget tends to have fewer mass-draw spells. - I find when building a deck, a higher number of draw spells allows for a lower land count.
Lowering the budget means running more lands and fewer cards you might want to fit in.
Interesting I'm curious as to what examples you may be referring to. I find that card draw/ mass card draw in most colors is actually some of the more budget friendly aspects of deck building.
One thing to add is that when you can't afford good fetchlands, commanders with the words "land" and "graveyard" on them are much less appealing. As are landfall decks in general.
I really enjoy playing 5 color decks and 5 color mana bases can be hard to not spend lots of money on. My solution has been to just use all the gates, there's some decent ramp for gates specifically and there are some neat utility gates. The last time I checked getting all of the gates costed like $20 instead of paying $10+ on single lands.
my 5c deck have a gates landbase too. It is cheap and easily tutorable, so I always search for gond gate, them all the gates come untapedd and I don't lose speed
@@FelipeMannrich Yo, that's so sick actually, thanks for the idea
Corgi owners and enthusiasts, rise up!
Strange. It's almost as if the stats are saying "Restrictions breed creativity". Weird.
To the title... I'd say YES,
- Budget Zaxara has more focuse on the +1 counters, instead of the infinite mana + x spells
- Budget obeka tends to be a reanimator strat sorta,.vrs infinite turns...
and so On
*listens to Joey and Matt talking shit about Squirrel Sovereign not being in expensive Chatterfang decks*
*Looks at my expensive Chatterfang deck that totally has a retro frame foil Squirrel Sovereign in it*
But but but but…it’s a squirrel, and I love my squirrels.
Also worth noting I haven’t posted any of my decks to EDHrec
20th like. Long drive and a edhrec podcast?!?! 💜🥰🥰💜
I don’t even have a budget Ziatora deck and I still was waay more interested in flinging malignus at my opponents face. Treasures are lame
Miss having Dana on, he's my favourite!
It's funny that 90% of the time running a combo is cheaper than running good cards. My Sefris deck is budget and I would love to reanimate Toxrill and Elesh Norn and Eldrazis, but that just too expensive, screw that, Animate Dead + Abdel wins the game and costs 2 bucks.
My favorite thing about playing budget edh is kicking people's asses with "bad" cards when they're running staple tribal. At my local card shop, I've developed a respect among the community there in which people hesitate to attack me when I have mana open, for fear of being blown out by some nonsense they've never seen before.
Ever since my regular group started allowing proxies, no. Love searching edhrec by 'all'
Budget definitely changes strategy.
Comment before watching: I feel like tutors are gonna factor into this. Like, the more expensive a deck is, the more likely it runs some tutors. I dunno, just spitballing.
People who complain about needing duals reprint are having an ego problem, not a competitive disadvantage.
Preach
After months from Dana stealing The Stats Segment, Joey finally decides to retaliate by stealing Dana's beard
Joey that beard is taking over the show and spreading. Now Matt not smooth shaving too. #bossbeard
The problem with going budget with decks of two or more colors is that you're potentially losing turns by playing tapped lands or simply missing the basics you need, good luck catching up with the rest of the players this way.
You're better going mono colored instead if you want a slight chance of doing something to be honest.
As a budget player that really is not the case, I have multicolor and monocolor decks and never had any problem with fixing, it's just so easy these days to get decent manafixing that honestly spending on better lands feels more and more worthless to me
@@azazelmorningstar5631 Unless you add green for ramping then it shouldn't be a problem, or prioritizing one color more than the other.
Don't care anymore about budget the store and community I play with became proxy friendly :-)
Yes.
(I haven't watched the video yet.)
Tiller Engine for those "enter the battlefield tapped" lands to help with smoothing.
Everyone should proxy their mana-base. All lands and rocks should be dirt cheep, and if not proxy them.
So true, i dont want my opponents to be always one turn behind just cause of $$
Wait, stop. There's a cheap filter. How am I only finding out about this now?!?!
The biggest thing budget affects, every time, is mana bases. Buying a $10 slow dual land is sometimes something I’m not prioritizing when I can buy 10-30% of a deck with $10 (before tax)
Challenge zendruu just zendruu. Does anyone use it
i guess my Miirym deck is a non budget deck that follows the budget philosophy since it has 29 creatures in it and most of them are dragons including scourge of valkas but also has ancient copper, ancient silver, old gnawbone etc.
I understand warning people about Druidic Vow, but I think you aren't being fair about it in context. If you cast it for X equals 5 you might just win the game on the possible pump that brings. More likely you're going to get a small bump and some ramp, but that (and the chance of pseudo cascading into it for negative value) is absolutely worth it for the times you high roll on it and that's just at X equals 5. Sometimes X equals 10 or more and you are almost certainly going to win that turn.
As a 5 color deck player : you absolutely need , all fetch all or most green triome and a couple of shock , I was mana curse all the time but since I've put fetch and triome I never miss a color literally
One of my favorite decks to play is Ramos, also 5 colors, and I don't run any fetch lands and only have the cheap 3 color lands that don't have the basic types. I have never felt behind in mana and almost never feel a need to mulligan.
I run more forests than other basics, but I run a few of each basic, and then a lot of land grabbing spells that get me more lands. My play group gradually gets faster and stronger, but the mana base isn't something I feel the need to upgrade here.
Just some insight from another five color player. (:
@@The_Kaichu Can you share your decklist?
@@soleo2783 I don't have my current list online anywhere. Sorry. I can share my deck-building theory, though.
If I remember right, I have 38 lands in the deck. I have command tower and all the cheap 3-color lands in it, but the more expensive ones are definitely better. In this deck, I don't run any dual lands, instead opting for basics, with an equal amount of each color except roughly 50% more green than the others.
Most of my sorcery spells in the deck are green land-searching spells, as this lets me get to my colors more quickly. Mana rocks are great, but I don't run colorless ones like Mind Stone. Arcane Signet, Commander's Sphere, Chromatic Lantern, etc, and only a few because they won't give Ramos counters if I stumble into them off a Cascade effect.
With that mana base and 8-10 mana ramp spells in the deck, I almost never have a hand I want to mulligan. Ramos costs 6 mana, and lots of my other spells are costly as well, so my first few land drops being tapped doesn't really bug me much in this deck. Once Ramos starts building up counters, you don't have to worry about colors any more because his effect provides plenty of mana each turn to cast whatever you'd like. (I've started tracking this mana using Pokemon energy cards, which makes my playgroup chuckle. :P)
The rest of the deck is just any good cards with Cascade, that give other things Cascade, or cards that deal with +1/+1 counters. Bright-Palm, the face card for the new Backup pre-con is actually a wonderful fit in Ramos decks.
I don't have a concrete deck list, because I change cards in the deck so often. It's an incredibly fun deck to tinker with, test out the changes in, and to try out new cards. Because it's five colors, it gives homes to really cool cards that, for me, otherwise wouldn't have one. If you're interested in playing him at casual tables, I highly encourage just making sure the mana base is reasonably solid (which doesn't mean expensive, in this case), and then filling it with fun, splashy cards you wish you could play in other decks and see how you like it and what works. It doesn't have to be played with a Cascade focus like I do.
Have fun! (:
@Kaichu because the commander itself it all colorless anything with wubrg won't work
@@gabrielharvey956 You can spend any color of mana to pay for a generic cost, such as Ramos's mana cost.
24:28 I am actually going to disagree with Joey bc how often r going suito cascade into this. I agree that cascade generally don’t x spells however this does not mean no x spells & I think said spell is good enough to include.
I don't like my lands effectively having "summoning sickness."
Once you have more than 4-6 drgaons on the field scourge of valkas is objectively better than terror of the peaks
Cyclonic Rift is a game winner for me that overload is 🤌👌