Garbage Deck Brewing Thread

Wait, Azami is ~$0.40? Since when?

That surprised me too, but I guess there just are a lot of people that don't want her as a (nonfoil) Commander.

arthurxiv - That tokens list looks pretty solid, Genesis Chamber getting extra value off your +1/+1 counter ETB-ing creatures especially so. I wonder if the general concept could be made into a tougher brew. I had no idea Fallowsage existed, he seems like a neat combo piece of sorts who I might take a shot with sometime in the future. Glare of Subdual is a card I haven't seen in quite a while either - IIRC it was a good lockpiece for the standard of its time.

As for the $5 deck, I think I've managed to whip something up:

Budget UW Flyers

4 Welkin Tern
4 Loyal Pegasus
4 Tattered Haunter
4 Flutterfox
4 Aerial Assault
4 Daring Skyjek
2 Vaporkin
4 Empyrean Eagle
4 Favorable Winds
2 Revoke Existence
12 Plains
12 Island

Scryfall link for reference. It's roughly 4.70 to 4.90 USD if you pick your printings right. The strategy speaks for itself - stack as many anthems as you can, spam fliers, hopefully swing in for large chunks of damage.

Funnily enough Favorable Winds and Empyrean Eagle are cheaper than Serra Aviary and Soraya the Falconer, which didn't make the cut here. Goes to show age and availability do matter. Pride of the Clouds might've made it in any other context, but for ultra-budget reasons, obviously didn't. Flutterfox + Favorble Winds is a neat little combo and while I know there are potentially better options I found it cute enough to keep in, plus sometimes that extra point of toughness matters. Revoke Existence is there for the event someone tries to stall you out with Ghostly Prison type cards, and you might even be able to play around boardwipes unless your opponent is somehow running 7-8 of them.

In terms of whether it'll stay 5 USD total or less, that really depends on how much the cost of Empyrean Eagle and Favorable Winds will be in the future. WOTC has printed enough draft chaff cmc 2 mana 2 power fliers with drawbacks that you can really just change them up with the ones here to keep the price low, with Welkin Terns being as cheap as 1 cent. The Improvise deck I posted earlier in the thread is actually even lower costed at 2.28 USD - it was the basic lands that made it look like it was much more expensive. (Though, I'm pretty sure this UW Fliers deck has a much better chance of actually winning against someone, lol.)

Making a new post because the stack of edits was getting ridiculous:

For anyone trying to do one of these challenges:

1) Figure out the cost of basics that you're going to use. I think the cheapest modern-border basics are something like $0.02 or $0.03. Call that cost $A.
2) Check your card budget - let's call that number $B.

• $5: $0.08⅓ per card.
• $10: $0.16⅔ per card.
• $20: $0.33⅓ per card.

4) Give yourself some "free" money to spend on cards equal to C x ($B - $A).
5) Pick your cards. If they cost less than your average target, add the difference to your flex budget. If they cost more, subtract it instead.
6)
7) Win all the tournaments with your mighty deck.

For example, if I want to build a $5 card deck with 24 $0.02 basics in it, I should be spending roughly $0.08⅓ per card. I would also have an extra "budget" of 24 x ($0.08⅓ - $0.02), or $1.52, which I could use to pick up more expensive cards.

---

Going off these numbers, a $20 Commander deck with 40 $0.02 basics in it would have a budget of $0.20 per card with a "flex" budget of $7.20. That... actually sounds pretty doable, honestly.

If you do a search on www.mtgtop8.com/search you'll notice Loam Lion has top 8'd in Modern up until late 2018 and EDH in late 2019 while the best Sunblade Elf manages is either EDH or Standard (as in, it hasn't even gone as far as Pioneer). Nowadays Modern Naya decks would probably rather use Narnam Renegade instead for being a 2/3 with Deathtouch, but given that it and Kird Ape have been Top 8ing up until last December in Modern and are still top8ing this year in EDH there's still clear value to playing them.

Yes, Loam Lion may eventually be powercreeped out, but the card powercreeping it out is definitely not Sunblade Elf.

If you actually take this into an EDH game and try to win with it I salute you for your bravery, good sir.

Alright, not EDH, but here's a $9.71 spellslinger deck. It has a planeswalker and everything.



Yes, this deck does happen to have a janky version of the "make infinite copies, let Ral poke them to death" combo.

Now I'm curious to see whether or not any of the other rare planeswalkers are A) worth building around and B) less than a dollar (Ral is $0.93).

This one's a bit low effort, but I feel like I could turn it into something interesting if I could figure out where I was going with it:

Gruul Amplifire Toolbox

4 Amplifire
4 Channeler Initiate
4 Exemplar of Strength
4 Defiant Greatmaw
2 Ingot Chewer
3 Flametongue Kavu
4 Ghor-Clan Rampager
2 Conclave Naturalists
2 Explore
3 Adventurous Impulse
4 Commune with Nature
4 Evolving Wilds
8 Mountain
8 Forest
4 Gruul Guildgate

The base idea is to get an Amplifire down and use Amonkhet's -1/-1 creatures to buff it to absurd amounts, but that combo by itself wasn't enough for a deck, so I started to look for various ETBs and alternate ways to make creatures emulate the effects you normally use other card types for. All of our creature choices are made to ensure Amplifire will always be be a base 6/4 - this is why Conclave Naturalists is run over Acidic Slime and while Deathbellows is tempting we use Flametongue Kavu instead for a little more stability. We use a bunch of 1-mana draft chaff card selection spells and a few Explores to help smooth things out - Amplifire will filter through them once it's one the field. Not the most spectacular deck but it has a bunch of interesting interactions and is easily under $10 (Currently around $6-7 USD when I've tried to check it out) - if I really tried I could probably get it under 5 USD but my motivation to work on this deck wasn't exactly too high.

Next time, I'll probably either do Elementals Ramp, Firemaw Kavu, or draft chaff Ninjas, based on whatever catches my eye.

For these +3/+0 Elementals you will probably need 2 Thicket Crashers.

Sylvan Awakening is expensive but it could help. Skarrg Guildmage can help mostly in very late game sadly.

Agh, I had a whole reply typed up and accidentally hit the back button. The gist of it was that I ended up playing the Amplifire deck against a friend with a casual zombies deck and I think I agree with you - by the time Amplifire comes out and the -1/-1 guys are up and running there are far better 5-6 mana battlecruisers that will simply out-tough them. I was considering Greenbelt Rampager for a while but ultimately decided against it because I didn't want to make Generic Energy Arena Deck #100000 that just happened to feature Amplifire. Something along the lines of Scythe Tiger crossed my mind, as did a few strategies featuring the likes of Bloodrage Brawler and his many numerous worse draft-craft brothers with high P/T but discarding as a cost....but I'll have to think more on it. (As cute as the Consulate Dreadnought combo Arthur proposed is, I don't think it works bc Vehicles wouldn't be considered creatures at that point in time.)

I also had the chance to play arthurxiv 's Fevrent Charge deck (replacing 2 Oros with Oriflamme). It's a decent serviceable aggro deck as far as I've seen and can certainly hold its weight even without the namesake card, as long as you hold reasonable expectations of how far it can punch up. MonoBlue Hosers's strongest aspect, for that matter, is still hosing specific lands, but hey, if your opponents' combo depends on a targetable land or you absolutely need to colorscrew them, it gets the job done. Next time I want to take a shot at playing Chandra Elementals - UW Flyers is just too predictably weenie-esque for me to be interesting at the moment. I do want to fit Thicker Crashers in but am not sure which cards should go out for it.

(Also, given recent events, it appears Cockatrice is quite active - apparently they had to hit server capacity and double the server upkeep just to keep it running.)


Re:Bunch of Saps I find in situations like these it's better to commit to one good strategy then be stuck half-doing two okay strategies. Like I think you could probably benefit from one of the many Overrun variants out there instead of awkwardly running Elder of Laurels which is much slower and doesn't really play towards the same idea. Go-wide decks prefer Overrun because they can just turn sideways and get a giant-lethal out of nowhere. Alternatively, you could go all in on the Anthems theme with Gaea's Anthem supporting your Sporecrown Thallids, similar to what I did with the UW flyers deck. I do like the idea of Dreampod Druid though and will keep in mind for budget Enchantress decks.

Re:Stonewall Everything Which card is "Spear Thrower"? Closest I can find is Rage Thrower. I used to have a casual Vent Sentinels deck that used various card-drawing walls in like Wall of Blossoms to get into an Axebane Guardian and hopefully some giant X burn spell, but ultimately abandoned it because it ended up being too slow against my current playgroup plus the existence of High Alert and Arcades, the Strategist basically went "yeah, we're much better options for defender fans.". Flamewright is a card I wish I would see more of and it is honestly a damn shame that it isn't Pioneer legal. . Otherwise, besides the two you mentioned, there's Wall of Resistance, or Consulate Skygate.

Adding to the truly bizarre group of "why would anyone play this?" decks, I present to you all:


There Are Probably Better Ways to Roll Stones


4 Rolling Stones
4 Wall of Razors
4 Sunweb
4 Cinder Wall
4 Razorgrass Screen
4 Crude Rampart
4 Burning Oil
4 Divine Arrow
4 Thrill of Possibility
12 Plains
12 Mountain

Funnily enough, the most expensive card here is Rolling Stones at around 1.11 USD per copy. High Alert is far better and is almost half its price!

With that said, there are just enough high offensive value cheap walls that this deck is possible (and admittedly I built this partially because I wanted to put Sunweb in a deck because I love its flavor, but haven't had a good reason to put it anywhere). Falls around the 9 USD mark and tries to use Burning Oil/Divine Arrow to control the battlefield while Thrill of Possibility tries to draw walls out.


That said...do you know what good combo you can build for technically under 20 USD and keep it 100% Oldschool legal? (yes, print-wise as well!) This one.

Channel Fireball but It's REALLY on a Budget

4 Disintegrate
4 Wild Growth
4 Fireball
4 Hurricane
4 Channel
4 Wall of Wood
4 Wall of Earth
4 Blazing Effigy
4 Llanowar Elves
12 Forest
12 Mountain


In case it isn't obvious, your objective is to desperately mulligan for a hand that'll land you Channel + Fireball as fast as possible. Sometimes that means you'll kill yourself with Hurricane in the process, but I'm one of those people who hopes to 'win' with Divine Intervention someday, so take that as you will. If you can't find it....well, you've got a bunch of walls (sub Jalum Tome if you think you're getting away with 18-20 life past turn 3), good luck!

There are probably better budget Oldschool builds if you seriously want to play at an oldschool event, but I'd say this gets points for being a classic (and I wanted to build a combo that was less about creatures in general. =P)

I actually made a Saproling tokens deck recently with my trash cards at home. My goal was to go full tokens with almost the same cards as you, plus 4x Spore Swarm, because i initially wanted to create a deck around Echoing Courage ($0.01 btw).

I didn't know Divine Intervention, and i really don't thank you for having made me discover it. ^^

arthurxiv Echoing Courage seems like a devious idea for any token teck in general. I might have to keep it in mind for cats...

I swear I saw a GB Aristocrats deck somewhere recently (in Standard, maybe?) that reminds me of that deck. Golgari Germination is a sweet card, though. I've been thinking of brewing Fecundity bc some people I know feel the symmetrical effect of it as a turn-off for budget sacrifice decks, but I haven't hit upon anything crazy yet - might just playtest this deck and see if it gives me an idea or two.

Nah, man. Just win this week's challenge, as voted on by the community. Hopefully, we can get enough participants that making it frontpage will be worth it.

Hm, now that I think of it, there's no reason we couldn't adapt Deckbuilder's Challenge to work exactly like...well, how all of our other forum games do - it works, it isn't broken, there's no need to fix it, basically. I also have to agree Misc. Card Design Thread is kind of a blunder because it's really hard to search for them instead of Commander Challenge (and part of why I gave up - the other reason being that I'm not really one to build EDH lists these days, to be honest). I'll probably run this by the mod team but I think this might be a better way to go about making a poll-worthy challenge.



I don't have much to add to Memory Munchies since I normally don't play Mill but I was admittedly surprised I didn't see Vantress Gargoyle on the list. Mystery Booster Millikin is a bit more of a stretch (cheaper and colorless but also 0.33 USD as opposed to 0.11 USD Deranged Assistant) but I could see it. Maybe even To the Slaughter?