Budget Magic and Budget Cards

Lets start with a few definitions and assumptions.

There are quite a few good sources for "budget" Magic: the Gathering decks; some of the ones I regularly look at include Saffron Olive's Budget Magic articles on MTGGoldfish and Neal Oliver's Budget Brews on ChannelFireball.  The main quibble I have with most of the budget content available is that the budget is too high!  So below are some basic thoughts related to budget Magic.

Definitions (in almost alphabetical order)

• Budget deck - a Standard format deck with a "real" cost to build of about $20 US.  I use MTGVault to build decks (note that many of my publicly shared decks are from previous Standard formats), and their middle price is usually pretty realistic, but when I cite a price for a specific card, I am usually looking at the lowest price for a Lightly Played or better on TCGPlayer.  You can build other format decks on a budget too, but $20 is really stretching it to make a functional deck in any other format.
• Bulk rare - a rare card priced around $0.50 or less.
• Bulk mythic - a mythic rare card priced around $1.00 or less.
• Marginal rare - a rare or mythic rare card that costs somewhere in the $0.50 - $2.00 range.  We can include a few marginal rares and still make a budget deck.
• Playset - 4 copies of the same card.  I mention this only to say that most decks want playsets of their best cards, so keeping to a $20 budget usually means limiting the number of playsets of upper-end marginal cards.  A playset of a card that only costs $1.25 is $5, a quarter of our budget!
• Sleeper - a card that is only bulk or marginal because people haven't decided that it is good yet.  If you are trying to make money by playing the market, you want to buy sleepers because of the potential profit of selling after they pop.  If you are a budget player, you want to buy sleepers before they pop because that is how you play with better cards for less money.
• Secondary card market - (or just "market") cards sold as singles instead of unopened products.  Unopened product is the primary market.

Helpful Assumptions and Generalizations

The Standard market balances itself.  It took me some time to understand exactly why this works, but the general concept is that there is essentially unlimited supply of unopened product in Standard-legal sets (because WotC can always print more), so if the values of individual cards become too high, people who sell cards will open more product as long as they can make a profit by selling the singles, and then prices will go down as supply meets demand.  Thus, the average expected value (EV) of a pack of cards is less than or equal to the price of a pack of cards.  So within a particular set, there will always be a large number of bulk rares to offset the value of the expensive rares.  This is an important concept, because rares are important, and most of the untapped potential of a Standard environment is hidden in bulk rares.

Colors and lands make decks expensive.  One of the frustrations of playing on a budget is that better mana fixing is always expensive.  This applies in every format that exists, and the reason is that WotC prints most of the better mana lands at rare.  In Standard, rare dual or multicolor lands often range anywhere from $1.00 to $10 per copy (due to consistent high demand), and we just don't have room for many land playsets even at the best case of $1.00.  Basic lands are essentially free, so we'd much rather fill most of our land slots with those.  So most budget decks in most formats will have to be either mono-color or two-color in order to function.  There are exceptions -- decks based heavily in green can have more multicolored mana sources, and multicolor sets like Khans of Tarkir provide better mana fixing at common and uncommon -- but usually we are best off sticking to one or two colors.

Prices are always falling.  On average, over time, cards drop in price.  This is because more product is always being opened, and because people are more likely to spend their money on new cards and less likely to spend money on cards that will rotate out of Standard soon.  Some cards will increase or hold value, but those are the exceptions.  So we can usually get more for our money if we don't buy cards that were just released.  Many marginal rares will become bulk if we wait awhile.  The Pro Tour (two weeks after release of each set) is the biggest opportunity for cards to pop, so if we want to speculate on cards that we think are better than their price, the week before the Pro Tour may be the last chance.

You need some rares.  There is a very deliberate process to how Wizards of the Coast R&D assigns rarity, particularly now that Limited formats are a major part of their focus.  Common cards often have weaker stats than uncommon and rare cards, but more importantly, common cards are rarely better than 1-for-1.  They also tend to be low-complexity, which results in less potential for having hidden strengths.  Uncommon cards are extremely variable, but uncommon is where many of the better "support" cards for constructed come from -- removal, counterspells, cheap card draw.  Rare is a completely mixed bag, but rare cards almost always come with either high raw power or high/hidden complexity.  This is where you will get your scalable card advantage, your >2-for-1's, and your build-arounds.  And mythic rare is exactly what you would expect from the rest of the rarity progression.  At $20 budget, most purely strong mythics are out of your price range, leaving high-mana cost cards, mega build-arounds, and downright weird cards.  There are hidden gems to be found at mythic, but $0.25 - $0.50 rares offer a lot of punch if you can match their synergies with some uncommon and common cards.

You can win with cheap cards.  I believe that Wizards of the Coast R&D is committed to making a game that is fun and diverse.  They know that the more stratified the card quality and strategy quality becomes, the less fun people will have, the less they will play, and fewer cards will be sold.  Every set is obviously seeded with a variety of card types to appeal to their various audience segments -- the different psychographic groups, people who play different formats, and people who play at different skill and competition levels -- but there are enough cards that can win games that they can't all be expensive.  Sure, some strategies will be generally better than most in a vacuum, but R&D does try to ensure that every threat has an answer, and every answer has a threat that beats it.  You may have to sacrifice some consistency or some raw power, but there are other advantages you can gain, such as experience playing the same deck longer-term than people who shift decks with the metagame, or the element of surprise.  It's a wonderful feeling to know exactly what is in your opponent's deck when they have no idea what you are trying to do.
What do you think?  I know some of these assumptions are conditional, but I think that we can work with these.