The cost of the cards is part of the game's balance. If you could just pick any cards you wanted with no regard for rarity, then the game isn't Magic anymore.

I play online as well, using the official client, and you still pay for cards.

In my area, the amount of players and the language of the cards is another balancing factor

I'm surprised this deck ends up being fun and reliable with 21 lands. Even if I play a deck that curves out at 4, I still run at least 24.

My friends started getting me back into it, this is exactly how I felt. You should've seen the look on my face when I saw my first Desecration Demon. "Why is this even a card?" was said many, many times. (As well as in reaction to many other cards.)

It's true, but all of the people who grew up with MtG as kids now have jobs/parents and enough money. When I started getting back into things, my friends made me play one of their decks in a standard qualifier tournament. Damned if I didn't play four of seven rounds against nearly the same blue/white deck. Money cards: Detention Sphere, Sphinx's Revelation, Supreme Verdict, Elspeth, Jace, Mutavault, Hallowed Fountain (and now Temples of Enlightment, too). So many people running around with minor variations of a roughly $400 deck. Throw four Archangel of Thune in the sideboard, too and you can push $500. I mean, I'm frustrated because that day was so stupid, but in competitive play that balance becomes pay-to-be-remotely-competitive.

Standard back in days of Kamigawa and Ravnica, 18-22 lands were common. Guess I never really changed pace since then.

Just played against a deck in a best our of 3 that completely dominated both times, even with cards that counter it. Asked him for a rematch with two completely different decks that should have stomped it, he went 6-0. Was absolutely hilarious to me, so I just had to build it and try it. Have not lost a game with it and it's stupid simple to use, not to mention a stupid simple deck list.

Lands
15x Mountain
4x Blood Crypt
4x Stomping Ground
1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

Blood Crypt and Stomping Ground for all of your multicolored needs. Nykthos because you will have a lot of red.

Permanents
4x Rakdos Cackler
4x Burning Tree Emissary
4x Ash Zealot
4x Frostburn Weird
4x Boros Reckoner
4x Hammer of Purphoros
4x Purphoros, God of the Forge
4x Mogis, God of Slaughter
4x Xenagos, God of Revels

Completely straightforward, everything here is mostly payable with red and what isn't, is easily obtained. Cackler, Zealot, Frostburn Weird, and Boros Reckoner are your primary sources of damage.

The real surprise for me at first was that this deck contains all of the gods that share red devotion. The moment you play any of them, chances are, they are turning on the moment they hit the battlefield. That was how it is inherently designed, to pump out devotion. The only non-god cards that don't give devotion equal to their cost is Hammer of Purphoros and Awaken the Ancient. However, Hammer is an enchantment and it gives everything haste, along with an extremely useful ability towards the stalemate stages of the game.

An ideal hand would allow you play Rakdos Cackler turn 1, Ash Zealot turn 2, Hammer of Purphoros turn 3, Mogis, God of Slaughter on turn four. If for some reason they do not get any of that off the board or block any of it, you will unless they sacrifice a creature next turn. Even if you don't get that ideal situation off, the deck still plows through the entire game with pretty much zero fucks.

The dream is to have Shrine of Nykthos out during that same scenario and drop an additional creature or Xenagos, then you win on turn four. When I was asked why I didn't have more than a single Nykthos, because getting more than one in your hand early game would make me hate the card in this deck.

Sideboard
3x Domri Rade
3x Street Spasm
3x Mizzium Mortars
3x Pithing Needle
3x Chandra's Phoenix

Sideboard that is meant to deal with problems specific decks pose, Domri Rade is for opposing creature decks that ignore you or allow you to ignore them. Between Burning-Tree Emissary and Stomping Ground, I haven't had a problem getting him onto the board. Great with Boros Reckoner, Ash Zealot, Awaken the Ancient, and the Gods. Mizzium Mortars and Street Spasm are purely for creature destruction, they bring the most of it that red can muster. Pithing Needle is for countering actives, mostly Planeswalkers. Chandra's Phoenix is for troublesome decks that use a lot of flying

I certainly see a lot more high-end decks now than I did back in the day, but I still see quite a lot of decks that could probably qualify for Pauper too. There's a bit of a hierarchy created by the amounts of time and money people have to invest. Additionally, even if you have $500 to spend on a deck, you will only have that one deck, and must choose exactly what you're going to buy and play even more carefully. If there was a system where you can play with any cards at any time regardless of rarity or cost, that means you have every possible deck all the time.

I find that the official MTG Online is very well-done in this regard. It costs $10 for lifetime access to MTGO, which actually includes over $10 in digital goods, such as a starter deck and several dollars for buying new cards. Trading/buying/selling is streamlined and can be done incredibly quickly (there's even sites specifically setup for this). Digital cards are, in general, somewhat cheaper than their physical counterparts (most likely due to the increased availability from the significantly improved ease of trading), but they still have comparable costs, so people have to pick which cards they're going to own and which ones they aren't.

When you combine all this with another massive improvement, which is how insanely easy it is to organize cards and create/store/switch decks on the fly (especially decks which share the same cards), the Magic experience is not only intact, but greatly enhanced.

As far as physical Magic goes, there is still rarity/cost affecting people with $400-500 decks from creating their ultimate deck. There will always be cards that most people can't afford or otherwise acquire, cards which would objectively improve their deck in some way. There's a deck I run on MTGO which I tried to make in real life, since it's my main deck online. I got the first 56 cards added together, it would have cost about $400. I figured "That's alright to be able to play my favorite deck in real life". Until I got to the last card, which I needed 4 copies of, and that card would have cost $350 per copy.

Suddenly my $400 deck would cost $1800, which needless to say was not within my acceptable Magic budget. The deck can't function efficiently without this artifact, since it has an extremely unique and ridiculously powerful effect which can't otherwise be replicated. Even really worn out copies I looked up cost $250 each, because it's a critical component of some other high-end deck that sees a lot of tournament play (the card was Candelabra of Tawnos, by the way). I doubt the price has gone down since then, since the card is on the Reserved List (an official list of cards which are guaranteed to never be reprinted, in order to protect their value).

They did make a green creature variant of it at some point, also with the word "Candelabra" in its name to pay homage to the original. The critical flaws with using that should be obvious though; it wouldn't work because of summoning sickness, not to mention the need for green mana, the increased mana cost, and the million ways to kill/control/counter creatures which everyone puts into their decks.

Perhaps someday I'll manage to justify a two thousand dollar deck to myself, or the price of the card drops because they ban some of the other cards in that popular high-end tournament deck. Until then, I'll be playing MTGO almost exclusively, and using some less powerful physical decks whenever I do take my physical cards out

@Loveless: Very interesting build, I'm going to have to try it. It seems like it shouldn't work, but IMO there is some room for tweaking. I think it may also be able to work around the green gods, Nylea/Xenagos/Karametra (well, Karametra kinda stinks, but whatever) especially since you have some ramp in Elvish Mystic and Sylvan Caryatid (with that sweet hexproof and all-important mana fixing for the other gods, too) that adds devotion. Then you can still use Burning-Tree Emissary and there's a whole slew of great double green creatures, such as Polukranos, and even a playable triple green in Arbor Colossus.

Such a system exists, and is called Cockatrice. No one should be dropping this kind of money on anything they haven't extensively playtested. (Which can be done on Cockatrice, for free. Or just proxy on paper junk commons, obviously that can't go to any tournaments but we have friends, right?.) Then again, for the average mook playing a netdeck, the deck made Top 8 (and possibly won) at enough pro-tours that it's already been extensively playtested for them - they just need to make sure that they can figure out how to play it well.

Indeed, if they're not playing Standard. I admit I am not terribly qualified to comment on Modern, Legacy, or Vintage. What I can say, however, is that there are no $350 cards in Standard. The most expensive Standard cards at the moment are Mutavault and Brimaz, each of which is currently under $35. For older formats, I don't blame you for going with MTGO at all, for exactly the reasons you described.

Haha, I like how you put that. I don't get how playing netdecks could be enjoyable for anyone. You couldn't (or at least shouldn't) even feel good about winning.


Oh yeah, I never construct decks for Standard, in physical or online Magic. The card choices are just too limiting and the metagame is far too limited. I considered it when they reprinted Door to Nothingness, but I wanted to do too many things that required cards outside the set. The closest I could get to Standard while still enjoying the experience was Extended (now Modern).

All the decks I play now are Legacy, as I've found it to be the best balance between card options, metagame diversity, and actual game balance. Even though the decks are Legacy (which used to be "Classic-Restricted"), I usually play them as normal Classic, just because there's always new games ready to start there (partially because Classic games are more prone to being insanely short lol).

It really puts Legacy decks to the test when there's so many decks in Classic designed to win by the third turn