 | Building Tournament Decks on a Budget (Standard) by: Paul F 2/26/2002 3:53:58 PM |
How many times have you heard this, I don’t have the money to compete. Well guess what, you don’t have to be Kai Budde or Bill Gates to be able to build a tournament wining deck. All you need is a good idea and some quality common and uncommon cards. In this series of articles I’ll attempt to build a good tournament deck in every environment.
The rules are simple you can use only common or uncommon cards. No card in the deck can be over $5. Example of an expensive uncommon card would be Mana Drain from Legends. This card is an uncommon, but good luck finding them for under 5 bucks.
I’ll start off by building a Standard deck, since it’s the most popular tournament format. If you can’t come up with any original ideas a good way to do this is to take a dominant deck from the current environment. Almost everybody will agree that the deck to beat these days is the Psychatog.dec. This decks relies on cantrips to fill the graveyard, bounce/removal for opponent’s creatures, and counterspells to stop anything else. The deck wins by chipping away with the Psychatog or sending a massive smiling tog in for the kill.
Some of you might have noticed that there was actually only one change that was made form the original built. I removed 3 Undermine for 3 Circular Logic. Not only did I remove the most expensive card from the deck, but I replaced it possibly with a better card for this deck. The casting cost has only 1 blue mana in it, and the card also has a Madness cost of 1 blue, which is great food for the Psychatog. Some other cards that can go in the deck if you don’t have the ones on the list are: Innocent Blood, Chainer’s Edict, Obsessive Search, Nightscape Familiar, Repel works great with Predict, Compulsion, and Breakthrough. So you can see a good Tier 1 deck can be made on a small budget.
Let’s now look at a different type of a deck. For this example I will not copy a tournament winning deck and try to build 1 on my own. I was always a big fan of Red/Green decks dating back to my Type I days and playing Kird Ape/Giant Growth decks. I also tried to build decks on a budget back then.
This deck comes out swinging from your first turn and does not stop. I included 12 Madness cards and only 1 way to discard them to Wild Mongrel. These cards are good even without being played with the madness ability, but these cards are great if you discard them to the Mongrel. Some other cards that could be great for this deck include: Werebear, Shock, Ember Beast, Flame Burst, Volcanic Hammer, and Blaze.
Well I hope you got some ideas and will try to construct one of these decks or your own creation. Next week I will examine Odyssey Block constructed on a limited budget.
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