Considering getting into cash specs and if I did I would treat it like I did when I played online poker- I am buying this video game with spending money and the money is now virtual. Keeps you emotionally divested from risks and losses and keeps you out of trouble with needing the money.

You make a valid point, and one worth considering. This blurs the line between investing in magic and playing magic as a hobby. I used to strictly do the latter and I had a ton of fun playing. But as my friends moved away, I got married, and had a baby my time to play has diminished and so I’ve shifted to investing in Magic. It’s difficult to keep both separate in my mind. How do you do this?

Do the same with magic – use spending money or cash out some investment to buy a deck and a season of playing and think of it as completely separate from your investment bankroll.

On the topic of playing standard on a fixed budget, rather than recommending investing in specific tier 1.5 – 2 decks I recommend investing in your favorite color combination or shard. Get all the expensive cards and tweak your deck all season. Learn when U/W should be be aggro/control and when it should be slow control – Restoration Angel and Snapcaster are good in both. If you buy all the good Bant cards learn when you should be playing G/W ramp and when you should be playing U/W tempo. Be open minded enough to play cards that don’t see high level play when they will be good in your local metagame – Champion of Lambholt can be a blowout if no one plays much removal. By committing to a color combination and brewing a new strategy in those colors each time the metagame shifts you can play the same cards competitively all season.

I last had a Type 2 legal deck during Invasion/Odyssey blocks Type 2…

Back then I didn’t yet have nearly the collection I have now and many of the players at the university were playing Type 2. Even then I wasn’t all that fond of it, though I liked how one of the guys top 8-ed with a Last Stand deck with Necrologia tech that I suggested. It turned out that Necro-ing in response to an end of turn Fact or Fiction was pretty decent.

Not too much later I started aiming more and more towards serious casual decks and started building my casual oriented collection. To me playing something of the beaten path has always been more fun than the latest and greatest in Type 2. I was also already somewhat aware of the effects of rotation by then and this awareness quickly grew.

i ran a psychic spiral deck at a GPT locally. no epic experiment ’cause i flipped it but i still went 3-2-1 tieing and losing to 2 that made top 8.

play modern/legacy. draft standard. in legacy there are multiple deck archtypes to choose from. thragtusk isn’t in every deck, etc.

Thanks for the comment, drackmorph! It’s reassuring to hear that there are others in the MTG community experiencing the same dilemmas as I am. Balancing competitive play with family can be tough, and when the competitive play also drops the value of your collection it is almost too much for me to stomach. But I feel like this format is a lot of fun and I am missing out by not playing. I may try one of these Tier 1.5 decks. Epic Experiment does look fun and cheap…

Right now, it seems like there’s RDW for hyper-aggro, GW-Midrange (doesn’t use thragtusk) with a combination of rancor, silverblade, silverheart, Sublime. Epic Ex mill seems to be possible with temporals, and UR tempo control with electromancer, guttersnipe, and counters. Finally, I’m using a man-artifact removal build that has: 4x Supreme, 4x Sever the Bloodline and the GW and UW keyrunes. The other slots are all situational and based off of the meta at my LGS. Each of these decks are have hard counters that exist (besides maybe the RDW and GW) so they aren’t exactly T1, but they’re close in the right meta.

This is an interesting approach and one I should consider trying. I enjoy playing Tier 1.5 Standard decks as a challenge to “get there” against all the expensive decks. What deck would qualify for this description now?

This is a strong point. My personal situation holds me back at times because of my wife and baby boy. Going to FNM’s until 11:00 at night is very suboptimal for my family, so I often cannot stay long enough to earn those prizes. A personal choice but an impactful one nonetheless.

@Pi – It does sound like we have the same value equation holding us back from Standard (although I do enjoy the format from time to time). I hate holding Standard cards for too long, and the knowledge that the hot potato may end on me deters me from enjoying the format to its fullest.

In the absolute you are correct – market forces of supply and demand dictate a card’s price and this is an objective process. The problem is, most decisions we make have an emotional slant associated with them. In this case, it is my emotions interfering with my ability to enjoy a format like Standard. I know that if I want to play a winning deck I need to drop 80$ on Thragtusks (for example) and by the time I want to move my Thragtusks, they’ll be $10 each. While I would certainly get enjoyment from using the cards, the logical side of me says why take on that additional cost when it is unnecessary?

It’s an ongoing battle between my desire to enjoy the hobby and my desire to make money from the hobby.

For example, while Delver was the format I built a mono white that could match or even outpace Delver with Silverblade, Nearheath Pilgrim, and Angel of Jubilation. W/o Phyrexian mana almost every Delver deck got shut down. The most expensive cards in my deck were caverns to ensure the angel. Once the angel was down, I just hold faith’s shield to keep it from being bounced. I consistently won every fnm so I used the winnings as funding for the deck and got stuff like Champion of the Parish and Elite Inquisitor (which combined with Celestial Purge destroyed zombies easily).

Mainly, I just hold onto dual/shock lands regardless of price (only exception has been woodland cemetery). They’re sure to be worth money later, so I don’t mind keeping them so that when I do build a standard deck my mana base is solid.

While I agree with you in principle, I am in a situation where it simply does not make much sense to me to trade for high value standard cards. I have little use for them myself outside of the possible lone copy I might need for EDH and I have few people within easy reach who are looking for standard cards, making me likely to be holding the hot potato if/when the card drops in value. Of course if that changed I should make sure to understand high value from a Standard perspective, but for me in my current position there would be little benefit to trying to formulate a hypothesis on why a card like Thragtusk currently has a high value. My time is better spent trying to do the same for a card like The Abyss that is within my scope (and for which I admittedly am also not sure why it’s suddenly rising, though I do have a guess). I like to stick with what I know.

Similarly the cost/benefit equation for Sig might have a similar result.

@Sig, I’ve pretty much stayed away from standard for the reasons explained, however contrary to yourself, the format does not really draw me either. I find it rather frustrating to know there are better cards in my collection than I could play in the deck but I am not allowed to (specifically Duals). Still, should a card be nice for EDH I do try to obtain a copy, even if I know full well that the price will drop. Thinking of Baneslayers purchased for 30 euros still hurts.

I should probably not even set aside the single copies for EDH usage but just trade or sell them if I come across an opportunity and repurchase/trade only when I absolutely need them for a deck.

I feel like your approach to prices is holding back your analysis. A price is just a data point that represents the collective actions of market participants, and the more efficient the market the more objective that price is. Ascribing a subjective perspective on prices seems limiting to me. Basically when you say a price is ‘absurd’ or ‘baffling’, you are saying ‘I don’t understand what is going on’. Why not forward hypotheses and then refine and develop your ideas? If you can develop your understanding then it will lead into being able to take advantage of future opportunities.