Hey there! I’m new to paper MTG and play Commander with my playgroup. We’ve been having a debate about whether the total value of a deck really indicates how strong it is. One of my friends argues that value doesn’t equal strength, but I can’t help but wonder when I keep losing to a deck with a higher price tag than mine.
I’ve been playing 1v1 games with my friend for a few months now, so I know their deck almost as well as mine. It can be frustrating when I can predict their moves but still can’t win with my basic deck. I understand the point that a couple of expensive cards in a deck won’t guarantee a win, but when a deck is upgraded with so many pricey cards, it feels like a whole different ball game.
For reference, we both started with precons, and both upgraded. I spent $20, they spent $120+. Inputing my deck list in a deck value calculator returns $103, which is lower than their upgrade alone lol
I don’t mind losing when the match is good. I hate losing when I’m always on the backfoot and can’t do much besides hoping to survive another turn
What are your thoughts on this? I’d love to hear different perspectives on the relationship between deck value and strength in the game.
edit: I received more responses than I expected, so I’ll need some time to go through them all and respond. Thank you in advance!
Here are a few different resources:
They’re all loosely similar and contain the same info. Understand what they’re trying to explain and you’ll be able to better evaluate your decks.
Money alone is a bad measure because it misses what the money is spent on. I have a precon that’s 3 or 4x base cost because I have some expensive basic lands in the deck. I could spend a ton of money and put a bunch of cash expensive Eldrazi in a deck but still get stomped before I can build a decent board state because everything is so mana expensive. It’s where the money goes that matters.
Additionally, you should really consider whether or not a 1v1 is a fair test of your deck. I have some solid upgraded precons that work really well in a pod and shit the bed in a duel. Precons are often geared toward at least 3 player play so if you’re improving the deck, you might be leaning into that. Some decks I play against do much better in duels than pod play. Some are great in both. And sometimes you just don’t have the heart of the cards no matter your deck.
I really appreciate your response!
Money alone is a bad measure because it misses what the money is spent on.
It seems like you all have the same concern regarding my “price = power” statement, and that’s my fault since I haven’t specified it. Yes, spending a lot on better lands, foils, and full-arts doesn’t necessarily translate to more combat power in the game. In my case, I invested a bit in upgrading my lands to improve mana fixing, while my friend didn’t feel the need to do the same since their deck already had multiple ways to fix and ramp mana!
We both have decks that are heavy on creatures, so both upgrades went in that direction with some sorceries and instants thrown in to enhance the precons. Neither of us spent to min-max mana.
I used that power level calculator tool, which rated both precons as a 5. Surprisingly, my upgraded deck scored higher at 6, while theirs dropped to a 4. It makes me wonder if there are some limitations to how the tool scores decks, especially since our matches used to be more balanced before the upgrades, and now I find myself constantly getting crushed consistently lol
Additionally, you should really consider whether or not a 1v1 is a fair test of your deck
I think you might be onto something there! Keeping up with their deck is definitely a tough challenge, and I mostly find myself reacting to their moves instead of making my own. It did seem to go smoother when there were three of us playing, so perhaps you’re right!
I’m looking forward to checking out the other links you shared! It took me a bit longer than I thought to go through the deck lists and apply the upgrades manually, but thank you!
Re: deck lists: there are some really good tools to scan your cards and build the lists from scans. I use ManaBox at the paid tier. I have read that Delver Lens is great on Android. Reading threads, I would stick to these two. If you’re on iOS, ManaBox will be solid. The only thing you need to pay for is more digital boxes to organize things in; I like that because I have a ton of decks, a few binders, a giant dump collection, and I like to track new boxes/bundles/preleases separately as I scan.
No matter the app you choose, you should look for quick scanning and import/export capabilities. It makes stuff like that power level calculator trivial and simplifies sharing and comparing.
Wow, that’s really helpful! I probably should have looked into something like that sooner, haha. Luckily, I’m not totally clueless - I saved my deck in a text file that I can easily customize and bring with me wherever I go. Thanks!
Price doesn’t always equal power, but some big pieces are expensive.
First of all, you should look at the cheapest value/printing for a card to really see what the “value” of your deck is. Spending on an older foil card can be vastly more expensive than the reprinted, non-foil version.
Second, it kinda depends on what the money is being spent on. I dropped over $100 the other month just adding a fetchland and a few shocks into a 3-color deck. Spending money on a manabase, or on the staples that hold a deck together, isn’t the same as spending on the big combo pieces that do uniquely powerful things.
As a rule of thumb, I know the price of my deck, but I don’t use it as a thermometer for how high-powered it is. I do use it as an indication of how invested I am in it, since the more I want it to perform, the more money I’ll throw into it.
If price point is an issue with your pod, consider having your powerful pet decks and whatnot, but also setting up a budget deck where the total value of the deck (once again, using cheapest printings) must be below a price point. I’ve seen interesting budget formats where each card must be sub-$1, or Pauper EDH, or where the total value of the deck must be below $25, or $50, or $100. Discussion is the best thing about playing Commander, a social format. Figure out what makes everyone have a good time and roll with that.
You’re totally right about foils and full-arts costing more without necessarily giving a deck an extra edge in combat compared to the regular versions.
Both of our decks rely on dealing creature damage to win, and while I did get some lands (just under $2 for some duals that are better than the bounce lands I had before), they didn’t feel the need to invest in faster lands since their deck has plenty of other ways to fix and ramp mana. So, we both made focused upgrades to our decks, mainly adding creatures, along with some sorceries and instants that complement our commanders.
I checked on Scryfall and calculated the cost of the cards I added to my deck (TCGplayer), and it came out to about $26 for 15 cards. Although one of the cards seems to have gone up in price (+$3) since I bought it, the rest are pretty close in value.
I did the same price check for their upgrades (just the 15 cards I can remember, they might have added a couple more), and it’s sitting at $75. The price difference isn’t as drastic as I thought, so they probably spent more on fancy full-art cards and such.
But hey, I do remember back when we were both playing with stock decks, I used to have a fighting chance and even won more often - maybe not quite half the time, but more than I do now after the upgrades. Today I’ve lost all four matches we’ve played, and only in one I got mana screwed lol Guess I need to step up my game! lol
consider having your powerful pet decks and whatnot, but also setting up a budget deck
I’ll try mentioning this idea, but I have a feeling it might not be well-received. My playgroup is just three of us, after all, and the person I’ve been discussing has two precons - the one we’ve been talking about, and another one that hasn’t been played much (maybe twice in the past six months) because they really loved the precon they upgraded, even stock.
The third person in our group has more decks and they span a wider range of power levels, but we don’t want to leave the other person out…
Myabe I could suggest we play one match using our fully upgraded decks, and then another using more stock ones? I won’t be able to use my favorite deck (the one in this thread), but it could give me a better experience if I’m not constantly getting stomped lol
Thanks for the reply!
Synergy is always going to be more important than how good individual cards are, but the individual cards are expensive because they are popular and are popular because they are good…
Oh, I totally agree! My deck is definitely not as synergistic as theirs, especially after all the upgrades lol
You can absolutely build an insanely pricey deck that sucks.
If you want to beat an expensive deck with a cheap deck, you won’t do it by netdecking. Competitive players know which cards are essential in netdecks. “Oh, they’re on esper control, but they don’t have x and y cards? Good, this will be easy.”
My solution to this is to play a deck that no one is expecting. Surprise them. Make them think you’re playing a certain deck for the first 2 turns, then throw out something they’re not expecting.
Now, you can make a crappy deck this way, if you aren’t careful. So playtest and drop the things that don’t work.
59 Black Lotus
1 Relentless RatsRule of 4 bruh
I just said Relentless Rats
1v1 is a different kettle of fish, and rewards aggro strategies that generally won’t get there in 4 way EDH.
Mana bases matter more in 1v1 as well and good lands are not cheap.
However, powerful cards are also rarely cheap cards. It’s not 1-1, but a higher price tag tends towards more powerful in a vacuum.
Willingness to spend more might also correlate with greater investment/familiarity with TCGs, and thus better heuristics in how to play too, though.
I would say that pure monetary value does effect power but with highly diminishing returns and even at the lowest cost the synergy and construction of the deck is more important.
The most expensive card I own is Sheoldred, The Apocalypse - and I always take her out of my decks because she just doesn’t synergise with them. Yeah it’s powerful, yeah it doesn’t weaken my infect deck (for example), but a dirt cheap Blightbelly Rat is far more valuable to me in that deck if I want to do the things my deck is supposed to do, have fun, and have a good chance of winning.
I haven’t played in a very long time, but daaaamn Sheoldred would work soooo well in my old casual Memory Jar/Megrim discard deck.
You’re right, and my bad for not mentioning this earlier, but even though we’re new to paper MTG, we’ve had some experience playing on Arena. So, we didn’t end up wasting money on useless cards. We both decided to upgrade our decks with cards that align with the precon theme, making sure to replace weaker or unfitting cards that originally came in the deck!
As others have said, price can be a bit deceptive. My most expensive deck is an angel tribal deck. Angels are generally expensive on their own and I have some rarer printings of a few of them. My most metrics the deck isn’t actually good though. I can manage well enough in my play group, but it is by no means competitive. A few expensive cards does not a good deck make.
You know, I totally see where you’re coming from! It’s true that strength doesn’t necessarily increase in a straight line with the amount of money spent on upgrades. It’s just hard for me to imagine how their deck consistently beating mine after we both made improvements has nothing to do with the value of the upgrade!
Before we upgraded, our basic decks were pretty evenly matched, with me losing more often but still putting up a good fight and even snagging some wins here and there. But now, after we both made upgrades, I only managed to eke out a victory once when they had some seriously bad luck with mana and couldn’t play any of their cards
Some of my best commander decks are my cheapest. It’s almost all about synergy.
However
There is a saying, that the most powerful card in Magic is the credit card. I mean, look at something like Counterspell vs Mana Drain. Same mana cost, except one is cheap ($$) and the other is super expensive, and Mana Drain is insanely good.
Your friend could just have a deck that naturally counters yours, but I think having a precon deck with $120 in upgrades over $20 in upgrades will definitely give them a leg up. The only real way to compete is try to optimize synergies, which often involves upping the value of the deck.
You can stop reading here if you want, as the rest is anecdotal.
After a few years of playing, my group eventually slowly increased the power of our decks with good pulls from packs, or buying high synergy singles. You can really get lost in the weeds of optimizing your deck, and it turned into a financial arms race, which feels bad. I talked to most of my play group about this, and a lot of them agreed that this was getting kind of “pay to win” for us, and we all hit the brakes a bit with our deck optimization. The nice thing with Commander when you are playing with 3+ people, is the game is sort of self balancing. One person has a great deck and starts dominating? Well now all the others can agree to gang up on them, which can be fun.
Some of the decks in my group are crazy good, but we try and be considerate to what the power levels of the rest of the group might be playing. I think the healthy option is to just open the conversation with your friends and let them know how you feel or think, which is what you’ve done.
Personally, I love the PDH format. Uncommon creature as your commander, common cards in the rest of the deck. You can still have a great time with a lower power deck, and everyone is roughly on the same playing field due to the power limitations of the cards. A deck for PDH would cost me $30-$40 CAD, and it plays mostly the same as EDH.
Some of my best commander decks are my cheapest. It’s almost all about synergy.
I have to admit, their deck is seriously impressive compared to mine, especially after all the recent upgrades. Their deck is so streamlined and efficient, leaving no room for confusion about its strategy and execution!
My deck, on the other hand, is a bit more versatile but that comes with its own challenges. It can be tough to decide which upgrades to go for and what to swap out. Plus, as someone else mentioned, my deck might not be the best fit for this particular 1v1 scenario anymore. We used to be evenly matched, but now I find myself struggling to keep up and take the lead, I think I won only once since the upgrades, and only because they got mana screwed lol
a precon deck with $120 in upgrades over $20 in upgrades will definitely give them a leg up
I took another look at my calculations and realized that the $120 probably included all the fancy full arts and foils. Even though I had to rely on my memory and might have missed a few cards, the upgrades seem to be only $25 mine compared to their $75 for around the same number of cards (minus the lands).
It’s not as big of a difference as I thought before, but despite that, I still haven’t been able to get ahead in any of our games since then lol
It could also just be a bad match up, exacerbated by the fact that they likely did some high synergy upgrades. What you could do if you were so inclined is go to EDHREC, and look up your commander. It will show you high synergy cards and top picks, and it also gives you a price. The draw back to doing this is sort of what I touched on above, where one can really get lost in the weeds of doing upgrades. It also (IMO) makes your deck less “you” and kind of turns it into some generalized, optimized deck. The feeling of performing well with a deck you made with your own brain feels better than essentially scraping the deck list off a cheat sheet.
My preferred way of looking for cards is using the Scryfall advanced search, and looking up specific keywords for my deck. For example, if I have a green/white creature token generation deck, I would select green/white/colourless, set the colour identity to include any of the above colours, and use the Oracle text search “create a token”.
That way, everything that populated will be in at least one of the colours I’ve selected, and will show me everything with those specific 3 words in it. You can really find some fun stuff.
Another option instead of upgrading is maybe to look into getting another kind of deck. Having variety is always nice, but it’s really up to you which way you’d rather go.
Money has an impact but is largely irrelevant outside of competitive environments which you’re clearly not in. There are $40 tuned pauper decks that could walk all over your edh deck. You can slot a $2700 Tabernacle at Pendrale Veil into any deck and that isn’t going to make it better. Are you ever going to beat a $25k fully powered blinged out cEDH deck? Probably not. But as a new player your likely issues are with building efficient mana bases, prioritizing cards that advance your game plan over being fun, and making your deck more consistent. Nobody says you’re required to do any of that, just understand what your goals are. Do you want to have fun, make friends, and/or win? None of those are a wrong reason to play magic, you just need to pick yours
You are absolutely right, and I completely forgot to mention that neither of us invested in expensive lands. I agree that focusing solely on upgrading lands wouldn’t have necessarily increased the combat power of our decks. The same goes for purchasing one large expensive card. Instead, our upgrades were aimed at improving our creatures, by swapping weaker ones for stronger ones. So, I don’t think we wasted any money on unnecessary items.
Before the upgrades, our matches were evenly matched and quite enjoyable. However, after the upgrades, I have consistently been on the losing end, never having a moment where I am able to take control and set the pace of the game. I always find myself responding to their moves, that’s why I thought about the correlation between upgrade cost and performance.
Thanks for the reply!
@bec A lot of decks are expensive due to their manabase. When trying to compete on a budget stick to decks with fewer colours (but 1 is better than 0 for cost). An all islands manabase is ~free and pretty good, where the ideal 4 colour manabase will be 24 $10~50 cards (or $500 if looking are revised duals).
Yeah, you make a good point! Having more colors does tend to mean pricier lands that come into play untapped, among other things.
I’m not necessarily trying to keep up with them in terms of budget, but it’s clear they have more to spend on their deck than I do. And it sounds like they’re planning on taking it even further! I have no idea what improvements they have in mind, but I might have to rethink our 1vs1 games. Maybe I’ll need to build a new deck specifically to counter theirs, or perhaps suggest they splurge on upgrading their second deck instead (although I highly doubt they’ll go for that option)! Otherwise I’ll have to refuse their challenges, since being always on the losing end and being stomped isn’t much fun
@bec budget differences are more fun when it means more decks. Repeating the same matchup gets boring unless you are very lucky.
