Budget Beginners Guide
Magic the Gathering has a lot of mechanics to understand. The objective of this guide is to teach new players, step by step, the most important things to know to be familiar to the game. This guide was inspired by this one.
I separated this guide into eight different parts. All the decks are very cheap and are supported in the modern format.
I would recommend the players to buy/construct online all the decks and play against each others to understand how they work :) If you have a group of 8 it will cost you like 15$ each to be introduced to mtg and start a good collection of cards!
This is how it works
This deck will introduce you to Ramp cards such as
Llanowar Elves
and
Elvish Mystic
. You will learn about Draw with
Wall of Blossoms
and
Elvish Visionary
. Tokens and Life gain will be introduced too thanks to
Thragtusk
.
Genesis Hydra
will introduce costs,
Oran-Rief Hydra
introduces Counters, Landfall and Trample.
Hornet Queen
introduces Flying and Deathtouch and
Lovestruck Beast
Adventures.
Blossoming Defense
will show the players the importance of Hexproof and
Epic Proportions
the importance of Flash.
The players will understand how to use Instants and how to use more difficult cards such as
Prized Unicorn
.
This deck will introduce creatures that are boosted with spells such as:
Blistercoil Weird
and
Kiln Fiend
. Double strike will be introduced with
Assault Strobe
and
Temur Battle Rage
. Phyrexian spells are also presented here thanks to
Gut Shot
and
Apostle's Blessing
(that also introduces Protection).
If you like it, you need to know that this is the cheapest archetype you can play competitively.
This deck will introduce Tribes. The ones I'm presenting here are Soldiers and Humans. I'm also presenting Vililance with
Militia Bugler
, First Strike with
Preeminent Captain
, Indestructible with
Unbreakable Formation
and Auras with
Pacifism
.
This will be the first deck with a non-basic land:
Memorial to Glory
.
The players will need to understand the difference between +1+1 and counters, so, the difference between cards like
Veteran Swordsmith
and
Unbreakable Formation
.
Artifacts are going to make their entrance too. Two Equipments are presented in this deck:
Mortarpod
who teaches Living weapon and
Sword of Vengeance
who introduces Haste.
The last deck introduced
Pacifism
. In this one I'm gonna show you more Auras and Enchantments.
Flying will also show it's true power in this deck thanks to
Gryff's Boon
.
New mechanics will be presented here such as Infect (
Necropede
), Shadow (
Temporal Isolation
) and Totem armor (
Spider Umbra
).
“‘Aristocrats’ is a [Magic] deck archetype that seeks to sacrifice its own creatures, especially many low-cost and/or token creatures, to accumulate game-winning benefits. Aristocrats decks use a combination of sacrifice outlets and cards that trigger when their creatures enter and/or leave the battlefield.”
source: https://edhrec.com/articles/deep-analysis-aristocrats/#:~:text=“‘Aristocrats’%20is%20a%20%5B%20Magic%5D%20deck%20archetype%20that,when%20their%20creatures%20enter%20and%2For%20leave%20the%20battlefield.”
In this deck I wanted to introduce you to the Sacrifice mechanic and to the Aristocrats archetype. Many decks in EDH (the format I play the most) use it and I think that is important to know that it exists.
You will also see new keywords such as Flashback (
Lingering Souls
), Morbid (
Tragic Slip
and Hideway (
Windbrisk Heights
).
6 - Graveyard - You have two options here
The deck number 6 is here to introduce you into the importance of the Graveyard. A new player may think that the cards that go to the grave are useless but that isn't true for all decks! You must choose which deck you want to try (or both if you want). The first one is a Reanimator deck (you revive big creatures from your graveyard), the second is a Dredge deck (you mill and discard yourself and revive lots of small/medium creatures).
If you have tried the 5 decks before this one you will see that you can now understand a lot of the basic magic keywords. In this one you will only see one new: Rebound (
Ephemerate
).
The challenge of this deck is to be patient enough to have a big creature into your graveyard and revive it with
Bond of Revival
,
Unburial Rites
or
Vigor Mortis
.
You also have an enter the battlefield mechanic that you can exploit with
Ephemerate
. The objective is to blink
Siege Rhino
and
Ashen Rider
as much as you can to destroy your opponent. By the way, you can blink
Terastodon
to destroy all the lands your opponent controls :) the 3-3 are not a problem.
You will also see that
Stirring Wildwood
is a weird land. In fact, you can pay to transform it into a Creature! But be careful, you opponents can target it as a creature to destroy it.
Ah yeah, I almost forgot.
Bone Shards
says something about planeswalkers. Just ignore it ;) You will see it in the deck number .
This is the other graveyard deck that I propose you to try. In comparaison to the Reanimator one, this one is more difficult to play and a bit more expensive. It's also less common in Standard, Modern and EDH. It's more a Legacy/Vintage deck but I'm showing it to you because I think that it's a great deck to make you understand the power of the Graveyard.
The main mechanic of this deck is Dredge. Lot's of cards have it:
Golgari Thug
,
Stinkweed Imp
,
Dakmor Salvage
. Is it okay to mill yourself and make yourself discard sometimes and I'm gonna proove it to you! You will also find one new keyword: Madness thanks to
Blazing Rootwalla
.
Finnaly! A Control deck! Personnaly I think that this kind of decks are the funniest and the hardest to play. The difficulty of this deck is because you want to play your cards during your opponent's turn and then, when you have controlled him, you play your value creatures. This is a 15$ version. Normally, control decks are very expensive because they want to have a response to anything your opponent will play. You will not see incredible cards like
Fatal Push
,
Snapcaster Mage
,
Cryptic Command
,
Thoughtseize
or
Liliana of the Veil
because they are too expensive to this tutorial, but you need to know that people will run them!
edit: I changed
Narset, Parter of Veils
for
Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor
because it's cheaper. You can still play Narset if you can add 2$ to your deck :)
Lots of new mechanics are presented here. Let's start with the most complicated in my opinion: Planeswalkers. The only walker present in this deck is
Narset, Parter of Veils
. She is the best cheap commander you can play (imo). How it works: you pay and she enters with 5 loyalty counters. She has a -2 ability that let's you see the top cards of your deck and draw. When you play this ability the first time (she doesn't have summoning seekeness) she will pass from 5 to 3. Creatures can also attack her and make her lose her loyalty counters. When she is at 0: she dies. She also has a passive ability which prevents your opponent of drawing cards. This kind of mechanic is named Stax.
Stax is a term used to describe a deck strategy that mostly relies on resource denial, taxing effects, disruption, and sacrifice enablers to potentially lock down opponents and make it difficult to cast spells, play creatures, attack, breath, sleep, and/or have any kind of reliable board state. The goal is to build your Rube Goldberg contraption of denial as fast and efficiently as possible thus allowing you to set up your win cons unopposed. Stax decks use a inefficient = efficient mentality when it comes to the game of Magic the Gathering. What this means is you're turning cards that normally would hinder everyone work to your advantage. A simple example is playing
Winter Orb
when you have a stronger presence of alternative mana production. This allows you to play through such effects more efficiently than your opponents.
source: https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/commander-edh/204260-the-stax-primer
This deck has:
* Complicated thief stuff:
Gonti, Lord of Luxury
* Delve:
Tasigur, the Golden Fang
* Kicker:
Inscription of Ruin
* Boardwipes:
Languish
* Removals:
Doom Blade
* Surveil:
Thought Erasure
* Fuse:
Far / Away
* Counterspells:
Mana Leak
* Fetches:
Evolving Wilds
I am also introducing you the Sideboard. In short, imagine you are playing a best of three. After your first game against your opponent you will know his strategy. For example, if he is playing an you will need to add cards to counter more his strategy. You would like to add cards like:
Dispel
,
Dragon's Claw
,
Duress
and
Test of Talents
. You will notice that your
Languish
,
Gonti, Lord of Luxury
and
Tasigur, the Golden Fang
are too slow against him, so you will remove them to add better cards to fit against him!
If you are playing against a graveyard deck why wouldn't you add a
Tormod's Crypt
3:)? Or if you are playing against a or deck you can consider
Noxious Grasp
.
The objective of a good sideboard is to have cards to fit against all the matchups you will face!
The last but not least: Combo decks. Combo decks are pretty hard to make budget because they need to go as fast as they can to win. Those decks lack of interaction and when you have your combo... you just win. It's not very ~~fun~~ in my opinion. That's why I'm introducing you to combos with a Storm deck. This kind of decks are hard to play and are not i-just-win-lol-decks, it's a bit more complex than that: you don't need 3 or 4 cards to win but 20!
The objective of this deck is to
Grapeshot
your opponent after playing 19 spells before it. You can also
Empty the Warrens
if you know that the opponent will not wipe the board during his turn.
To help your combo you have
Goblin Electromancer
who will reduce your spells' cost. You have lots of card draw and some spells that generate mana such as
Desperate Ritual
. I'm also introducing you into the Arcane spells!
The original deck Gifts Storm has some pretty expensive cards such as
Manamorphose
,
Pyretic Ritual
and
Baral, Chief of Compliance
. To replace them, I chose the
Twiddle
version. Instead of adding mana to your mana pool (and drawing cards), you will untap your lands. It's less powerful but it's cheaper. To contribute to this, you will play
Izzet Boilerworks
.
I did not have the choice to keep
Past in Flames
and
Sleight of Hand
even if they are a bit more expensive: they are too good in the deck! As I said, a combo deck is normally very expensive because it needs to very fast, but if you don't go fast enough you can't win.
In the last deck we explored how to Sideboard. That's why I'm including a sideboard here too, but, you notice that in a combo deck is not that important... hehehe.
Have fun! This one is pretty hard to play!
✅ The next step
Your next step is to choose a format you and your friends want to play and have fun!
