Budget Decks: Real Lists That Cost Less Than a Booster Box

"Budget deck" gets thrown around loosely. Sometimes it means a real deck that happens to be cheap, and sometimes it means a pile of leftovers from a box opening with a name taped on it. We mean the first one, and we hold our own lists to that. Here's what actually counts as a budget deck, how the lists on this site stay priced against live market data, and how to upgrade one without throwing money away.

What counts as a budget deck

A budget deck is a real, legal deck first and a cheap one second. It follows the same rules as any other constructed deck: at least 60 cards, no more than 4 copies of any one card, and cards from at most two inks. The difference is that every slot is filled by an inexpensive single that's there on purpose, because it does a job the deck needs done. You're still building a real deck, you're just doing it under a price ceiling.

That's also what separates a budget deck from a starter deck. A starter is the cheapest playable thing you can buy: it comes ready to play out of the box and it exists to teach you the game. A budget deck assumes the rules have already clicked and you want to start winning games without spending much. If you're brand new, start with a starter. Once you know how you like to play, a budget list is the next step up, and it's a real step, not a compromise.

How our budget lists stay honest

Most budget lists on the internet were cheap the day they were published and quietly stopped being cheap afterward. Ours can't drift like that because the prices aren't written into the page. We keep two budget brews stocked on the Start Here page at all times: 60 cards, two inks, built entirely from the current Core sets, with live market pricing on every list.

The methodology is simple. Each deck total sums the latest TCGplayer market price for every card in the list, using the regular (non-foil) printing. Prices sync from TCGplayer market data once a day, so the total you see comes from the most recent daily snapshot instead of a number someone typed months ago.

The edge cases stay honest too. Some cards have no current market price for their regular printing, so we flag those and leave them out of the total instead of counting them as free, and the deck tells you to treat its total as a floor. Foil and Enchanted prices never touch the total either. We track them separately on each card's page, since a foil plays identically to the regular printing and the deck only counts the version you'd actually buy.

Reading a budget list

Open one of the budget decks and read it in two passes. The first pass is the rules frame: at least 60 cards, no more than 4 copies of any one card, at most two inks. There's no maximum deck size, but almost every competitive deck plays exactly 60 and our budget lists do too. Copy counts carry information. When a list runs 4 copies of a card, that card is the plan. A single copy is a tool the deck hopes to find eventually.

The second pass is the ink pairing, which is the fastest read on the whole deck. Every card belongs to one or two of the six inks, and a deck commits to at most two of them, so the pairing is the strategy in miniature. It tells you how the deck plans to reach 20 lore before you've read a single card name, and it tells you which future cards can ever go in it. When you upgrade later, you're almost always upgrading inside that pairing.

Each deck page gives you the full list, card-by-card pricing, and a one-click TCGplayer cart, so you can see exactly where the cost sits before you spend anything. That matters more than it looks, because the expensive slots are the ones an upgrade will come back to.

Upgrading without wasting money

The wasteful way to upgrade is buying whatever's new and shiny and hoping it fits. The efficient way is to treat a budget deck as an approximation of an archetype. The cheap cards in it are stand-ins doing most of the job of more expensive staples, so upgrading means swapping those stand-ins for the cards the archetype actually plays, one purchase at a time. The deck stays playable the whole way through and nothing you buy gets orphaned by the next purchase.

This is the same thinking behind the starter picks on the Start Here page. Each one links a proven upgrade path: play the starter as-is, then swap toward the linked list piece by piece as your budget allows. A budget brew just starts you further down the same road.

Two references make the shopping list concrete. Our meta staples guide covers the cards that keep showing up across competitive decks, which is exactly the pool an upgrade should draw from. And the decks browser has full deck lists with the same daily pricing, so you can compare your list against what the archetype looks like fully built.

One rule saves more money than any other: never pay for finish. Foil and Enchanted versions play identically to the regular printing. The finish only changes the price, never what the card does in a game, so regular printings stretch an upgrade budget as far as it can go.

Where to start today

If you're new, start here: it's the whole route on one page, with a learn-to-play video taught by the game's co-designer, starter picks with upgrade paths, and the two live-priced budget decks this article is about. If you'd rather learn across a real table, our guide to playing in person covers the local game store route, from casual nights to the cheap singles bin to the players who will hand a new player free upgrades just to keep them in the game.

Either way the bar doesn't move. A budget deck is a real deck, priced honestly against the market every day, and it costs less than a booster box.