Are you on a budget?

Buying a deck for 7 points singleton is often cheaper than playing modern or standard over time. This is a slow format in which for example Sol Ring is a better card than Black Lotus and you don't need any of the power 9 cards to win tournaments.

And once you have your cards they will increase in value over time. No new cards will ever be printed for the format and more and more people are starting to play old school magic.

Use cardmarket.com (or tcgplayer.com if you are in the US) and you can buy from cheap sets such as 4th Edition, Chronicles, Revised, foreign language cards and so forth. Nobody will care if the cards you buy have some damage (as long as it does not affect the game) and proxies are allowed (but not counterfeits) in all play except in the annual world championship.

A budget deck can win tournaments. You can play monocolored or if you play two colors, the single dual land does not make a big difference in this format.

David McKinven went #7 of 44 in the world championship 2022 with a budget deck without any expensive cards. He played black and white without Chaos Org, Scrubland and Icy Manipulator. A number of players in the tournament did not have Chaos Orb in their deck.

Some proxy ideas:

  • Chaos Confetti is a common proxy for Chaos Orb.
  • Icy Manipulator from Ice Age is a common proxy from the one from Unlimited.
  • Strategy, Schmategy is a common proxy for Wheel of Fortune.
  • The Toronto Old School Community has provided this page with ready to print Playtest Cards & Tokens.

If you are anyway printing, don't miss this excellent PDF with beatiful tokens provided by the danish community.

Finding cards for your deck

Use these links to find popular cards that are legal in Old School and cost less than €10 to buy:

You can adjust the "eur<10" in the search box to to a higher or lower amount to better suit your budget.

Advice when buying many cards

Add all the cards you want in a Want List in cardmarket.com. You can specify minimum card condition, language, set and price. Then you can use their shopping wizard to find sellers with the best options for you and especially finding sellers that has many cards you need so they can be sent in the same shipping.

 

Essential Links

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Other formats

Other Old School singleton formats:

Other OS budget formats: