Building a Magic deck on a budget: how to shop smart

A Magic deck can cost 300 kr or 30,000. The difference rarely lies in the number of cards, but in a handful of expensive ones — and in how smartly you buy the rest. Here is the approach that gets you the most deck for the money.

1. Start with a preconstructed box if you can

A Commander preconstructed deck gives you 100 cards for around 500–700 kr, under 7 kr per card. No singles purchase comes close. Buy the box, play it a few evenings, and let it show you which cards you actually miss before you spend money on upgrades.

2. Separate the expensive cards from the rest

In a typical list, 80 % of the price sits in 10 % of the cards. Sort the list by price before you order — then you quickly see which cards are worth thinking about, and which can just go in the cart.

The most common price drivers are the mana base (fetchlands and dual lands), fast mana artifacts like Mana Crypt, and universal staples like Rhystic Study and Cyclonic Rift.

3. Swap the most expensive card for something that nearly does the same

• Fetchlands can be swapped for dual lands that enter tapped. You lose a little tempo, and often save a thousand kroner.
• Expensive tutors like Vampiric Tutor can be replaced by cheaper card selection such as Sylvan Library or plain card draw.
• Foil and collector editions play exactly like the ordinary printing. Pick the cheapest version unless you collect.
• Sleeves hide condition. Buy GD or EX instead of NM on the expensive cards — see the guide to card condition.

4. Buy the whole list in one operation

This is where people lose the most money without noticing. Buy card by card, as you think of them, and you pay postage every time — 50–100 kr per order.

The list search takes the whole decklist at once. It understands plain text lists (4x Lightning Bolt), MTGA and MTGO exports, and CSVs from Moxfield, ManaBox, Deckbox and Archidekt. It then looks each card up at every store and works out the split that gives the lowest sum including postage — it will happily move five cheap cards to one store that is marginally more expensive per card, because that saves two shipments.

5. Order before the tournament, not the night before

Stock swings from day to day, and the cheapest copies of a popular card go first. If you have a list you know you are going to build, ordering in good time pays off — both because the selection is larger, and because you have time to gather the order instead of panic-buying the last cards wherever they happen to be.

What a deck costs, roughly

The prices are for Commander, the most played format in Norway. Competitive formats such as Modern and Legacy sit higher, mainly because of the mana base.