Battle on a Budget: The $30 Vintage Takeover

Part of what makes Magic so great is the way its many different formats allow us to experience the game in different ways. Each format has its own metagame, history, community, and playstyles, and as we get more experienced most players will naturally home in on the ones we feel the most affinity for.

Vintage is different though. To the average player it’s more of a thought experiment than a playable format; the alien metagame and prohibitive price of paper decks distancing it from our experience of mortal Magic.

A small hardcore of MTGO grinders and occasional side events at major cons provide the only tangible evidence that anyone is engaging with and enjoying Vintage the way they do Commander or Modern.

Until recently, when some community members decided to tear down those daunting barriers and reintroduce players to the idea that Vintage can be great fun.

ETERNAL POWER AT A REASONABLE PRICE

The community format known as “Budget Vintage”, “$30 Vintage” or similar titles is basically self-explanatory. You build a 60 card deck with a 15 card sideboard and play (usually) 1v1 matches of normal, 20-life Constructed. All the rules are the same as normal Vintage (including the list of cards that are banned or restricted to one copy per deck), with one addition.

Your entire 75-card decklist has to come in at a total cost of $30USD or less, with the price tracker on decklist sites like Moxfield used as the measuring stick. It sounds like a fun gimmick – or maybe a less-fun one, if your motivation to play Vintage is just to try casting Magic’s most expensive and overpowered spells.

But a format as deep as this can offer much more than just the top 1% of broken cards, and building around dollar costs is a genuinely interesting and unique twist to apply to deckbuilding. It’s not an unprecedented one – MTGO has a similar community format called Penny Dreadful where no card can have a market value above one cent.

But $30 Vintage is a version of that concept which translates far more intuitively outside of the Magic Online context, and gives a whole swathe of the community a chance to see how much they might enjoy this kind of high-power Constructed play.

WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

Capping the cost of a deck is an excellent way to give players an on-ramp for Magic’s oldest format. But what might motivate someone who’s never thought about Vintage before to give this budget version a shot?

For me, it’s the depth of the card pool and the freedom to brew that brought me in. Vintage has the largest available card pool of any competitive format, and even with cards over $30 effectively added to the banlist it’s still an extremely rich environment for deckbuilding 

Brewers are further incentivised by the fact the metagame is WIDE open – all the established Vintage decks are built around the assumption you’re playing with broken mana, so knocking out that foundation leaves $30 decks with essentially a blank canvas to go with that enormous box of paints.

We know that open metagame won’t be changing anytime soon either. Sometimes there’s a concern that an influx of new players and attention will suddenly “solve” a community format with one perfectly engineered deck. But because prices for singles naturally fluctuate, spikes in demand for a popular decklist will eventually see its pilots forced to either downgrade some expensive spells to cheaper backups, or evolve into a new form using more affordable cards!

That doesn’t mean you can’t still wield the seductive power of Vintage Magic in this $30 version. Yeah, it’s a little diminished when not fueled by the star power of Black Lotus and friends, but you still get that signature Vintage feeling of souped-up, high-octane Magic. Remember, expensive does not equal powerful a lot of the time, and a lot of amazing staples can be had for cheap due to reprints, bannings, rarity and so on.

Combine some of that S-grade interaction and resource generation with your favorite pet card and boom – You’re probably ready to at least win some rounds at your next $30 Vintage event! I don’t know many Magic players who don’t have at least one idea for a crazy janky strategy they’d like to pull off, and surely the chance to do that in a Constructed environment is enough to balance out the tiny outlay this format asks of you?

METAGAME PREVIEW

It’s easy to sell a format in broad, airy terms as I just have. But even for something casual and fun, I know people will want to look at what decks are entering and winning events before they make up their minds.

You might find it tricky to get detailed data on the $30 Vintage metagame (such as it is): the format is still very underexplored, and not everyone playing it is even that concerned with finding the true best decks. But there are some primers and tournament results out there online for those with the will to Google them. 

For those less motivated, fear not – I will summarize.

The obvious place to start is with any high-tier Eternal strategies that famously run cheaper, more commonplace cards. You can start with most (though not all) tier decks from Pauper and then consider any non-common cards that still rank cheap in the dollars column as potential upgrades. 

For example, Pauper Affinity is mostly made up of dirt-cheap common artifacts – we can just replace common payoffs like Atog or Glaze Fiend with Commander set “chaff” like Kappa Cannoneer or Nettlecyst.

Mono-Red Burn can reap an even bigger advantage thanks to its Basic Mountain manabase: lands are often a pretty real chunk of the $30 limit for decks which need reliable access to multiple colors. That extra budget space can give you more freedom in choosing non-burn threats, or open up more costly sideboard tech.

In general though, top-tier interaction and utility spells come with a much lower price tag than top-tier threats. This means that spell-based control and combo decks can reach an extremely high ceiling playing classic staples like Brainstorm, Ponder, Swords to Plowshares or Accumulated Knowledge. The midrange piles aiming to keep up are incentivized to look for “narrower” mechanical themes – such as affinity – because those cards will typically be in less demand while still being able to reach a high ceiling in a dedicated shell. 

But the sneaky best source of deck-defining cards are actually the banned and restricted lists of other formats! Spells like Hogaak, Nadu, Grief, the Initiative creatures, and many others find themselves surprisingly low on the price list after B&R announcements put them out of a job – but here you can always play at least one copy (for restricted cards like Tinker), and usually four! 

If you’re not dead-set on brewing around a certain pet archetype and just want to play something strong, you could do much worse than starting with cards which have proven to be truly Vintage tier.

DIP YOUR TOES IN THE ETERNAL POOL

As a long-time fan of similar Constructed formats like 7-Point Highlander, I’m already sold on the fun you can have brewing weird but potent decks out of cards from across Magic history.

But those formats are always going to be niche due to the complex and idiosyncratic rules. Plus, even if I really appreciate the work done by the community leaders managing things, there’s still a huge amount of energy sunk into debating and updating the points list for 7-Point with all the new sets that release. Setting a $30 price limit is a (relatively) objective way of assigning those “points”, imposing unique deckbuilding challenges while dismantling the ugly pay-to-win elements which usually surround older formats. 

While we’re here I’ll quickly address one common concern people have: what if cards spike in price and push a deck over the price limit? This is a community format and from what I have seen, being a $30.85 deck isn’t going to get you bullied out of casual matchups or most leagues. Events with a slightly more serious approach will usually institute a submission window with a clear cut-off date: if your deck is $30 or under during that window when you click submit, then it’s locked in and playable for the rest of that event even if a card suddenly shoots up to $50!

Obviously there will be a point where you have to look at replacing that card if you keep playing the same archetype, but at least you don’t have to be looking over your shoulder at the price tracker before every single game. With that reassurance, I hope you all take a (very affordable) chance and see how much you like $30 Vintage!