An old friend of mine recently got back into Magic, and of course, I encouraged him to get into Limited. He did a couple drafts, and as you'd expect of a player new to a format, he didn't do particularly well. (Although he did open two Windswept Heaths in his first event, which is arguably better than actually winning. With that kind of luck, I'd never do anything but draft again.)

He concluded that draft was too expensive and bought a budget mono-red deck to battle in Standard tournaments. Every time I hear from him after an event, he's beaten all the non-Abzan decks and lost every Abzan matchup. Because of the nature of Standard, this means he's consistently going 2-2.

At this point, he has a few options:

1. Continue to battle with budget red, perhaps occasionally getting lucky with matchups and going 3-1 or 4-0, but mostly finishing with a 2-2 record.
2. Work his way up through cash and trade to a Standard-viable red build (meaning picking up Goblin Rabblemasters, mostly).
3. Go all in on Magic and spend whatever it takes to build the deck he most wants to play in the format (something that is not a realistic option for him at this time, to be honest).
4. Get bored with losing and find other, less expensive games to play.

Sadly, I get the impression that he's leaning toward the last possibility. He recently added playsets of Stoke the Flames and Hordeling Outburst to his list, though, so maybe he'll have the reach to win an Abzan matchup or two. I'm hoping.

Anyway, my conversations with him and fruitless disputations against the idea of Draft being too expensive of a format made me decide that only math could solve this dilemma. So, today we'll be discussing how much money formats cost to play in both the short and long terms.

Draft

Let's start with my personal favorite. Based on a few recent sets, let's assume that average pack EV tends to fall between $2.50 and $3.00. For our purposes here, we'll assume the worst and put an opened pack's value at $2.50. I've played in drafts ranging from $9 to $15, so we'll take the average of those two and say a draft costs $12 (I admit, I'm biased toward that number because it's what my LGS actually charges). If your out is buylisting, you're likely selling your cards for 50 to 75 percent of their retail value, so let's say an opened pack is worth $1.75 in cash value—a 30 percent spread on your cards.

Assuming all these things means that a $12 draft will leave you with an average of $5.25 in cash value of cards. Doing a draft every week of the year at a net cost of $6.75 a draft totals $351. That figure assumes no prize packs, profitable trading, or selling cards at peak values—just averages. In my Zero to Draft series, I covered a number of strategies to stretch every dollar, and in the end, came out more than $200 ahead of where I started. Even if you aren't using any of those strategies, $351 a year is a pretty decent price for a once-a-week hobby.

If you're buylisting all those cards, you won't be growing a collection, which means that this cost recurs over the long term.  However, you can't convince me there exists a person who drafts every single week for years and doesn't start winning a lot more. For the most part, people either get good or they get bored. In the long term, the $351 figure per year only goes down, but by exactly how much is completely based on the individual.

Standard

In my article "The Real Costs of Entering Standard," I covered eight decks from Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir and how much it would ultimately cost you to purchase them outright and buylist the pieces the following summer. The decks ranged from around $35 to almost $400 after buylisting, but the average price of all eight decks was $221.22, so let's use $221 as our figure.

So far, that's $130 less than the $351 per year figure for drafting. Assuming you have a casual playgroup to play with, you could make the case that Standard is more cost efficient. But if you're looking to play in events, we've got to add some additional costs. Let's say you play in one $5-entry casual tournament per week. That's $260 a year, which leaves us with a total of $481.

And that $481 figure doesn't account for bigger tournaments with higher buy-ins, like Star City Games or TCGplayer IQ events. It also doesn't cover the fact that most players won't stick with one single deck all year, or may make many changes to a deck over the course of a year, adding incremental costs every single time.

In Standard's favor, tournaments that pay out in store credit generally tend to be more rewarding than winning some packs in a draft. With similar win rates in both formats, one could easily make up the difference of the higher price of Standard with a few 4-0 performances. But if we assume the worst—that you spend all this time and money playing but never actually win any prizes—Standard comes out as way more expensive than Draft, $481 as opposed to $351 per year.

In the long term, Standard rotation and continual buylisting to fund the next season means you won't be building up a collection. Like with Draft, one is sure to start winning more after playing every week of the year, but because of rotation schedules, it's mostly just treading water and not continually accruing value. And this analysis doesn't even account for the fact that we're about to get two rotations a year—who knows what that will do?

Modern

We've reached a non-rotating format, which I made an assumption about before doing the analysis: it would be a much higher initial buy-in, but be much cheaper in the long term. Does that hold up?

After Pro Tour Fate Reforged, I did the same kind of analysis of Modern decks as I did for the Standard decks of post-Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir. Of the seven major decks I profiled, there's a wide range of buy-in costs, from as low as $450 to nearly $1900. The average price of the seven is $921, but that doesn't really reflect the buy-in cost of any actual deck.

The median price of the seven decks profiled in the aforelinked piece is $624, which feels a little more realistic for someone buying into the format for the very first time. Part of me is bothered that I'm using the average for Standard but the median for Modern, but frankly, they're very different formats with very different financial implications, so I'm going to listen to the part of me that's okay with differing methodologies.

Assuming one lives in an area where a $5 weekly Modern tournament exists, we can add the same $260 a year to the cost of the deck, totaling up at $884 for the first year.

That's not the whole story, though! Assuming one's deck doesn't get banned out of the format or fall out of favor in the metagame (both big assumptions, but it happens for a few decks, like Affinity and B/G strategies), there's no need to buy a new deck every year. Whereas Standard requires $481 on a yearly basis to keep up with rotation, Modern only requires event fees after buying the deck. After three years, Modern averages out to $468 per year—less than Standard. After five years, the average is $384.80 per year, almost less that Draft.

If you're looking to play for a good long while and not just for a season or two, Modern seems like the place to be. And once you're done, you can always recoup a bit of your cost. The average prices of the seven Modern decks profiled after buylisting is much more clustered than their purchase prices, ranging from $165 to $550. The average is $312.15, which is less than $100 more than Standard—it's just that you're tying up more funds to play Modern.

Legacy

I haven't done an analysis of entering Legacy like I have for Standard and Modern, and frankly, I'm running out of words I can fit into this article. Assume that Legacy follows largely the same patterns as Modern, except with a slightly lower chance of having your deck banned out of the format. This is a huge positive, but the negative is that the buy-in price is probably two or three times that of a Modern deck.

I don't personally play Legacy, but it's one of my favorite formats to watch played, and is clearly a good choice for someone who is dedicated to the game for the long-long term (even more than five years), already has a decent collection to build off of, and wants to play one of the most diverse and interesting formats around—at a cost.

Casual Formats: Commander, Cube, and Tiny Leaders

I have to touch on these before closing. The cost of casual decks and cubes can vary greatly, and the total price of one's deck will largely depend on three factors:

• One's playgroup/metagame
• The length of time one has been playing
• The amount of money one is willing and able to put into the game

Even better than non-rotating competitive formats, casual formats offer the  opportunity to start with a budget deck and grow it into something awesome over time. Bannings nearly never impact these formats, and even if some rules committee bans a card, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't play it in your playgroup. As such, casual decks are great for someone who wants to start slow and build up over time.

A big downside to focusing on casual formats, though, is that you won't often have the opportunity to win prizes. This also means you won't have to pay tournament entry fees, so those two things tend to even each other out. You do need, however, to have a playgroup that plays as frequently as you'd like. Without that, there's little point to building casual decks other than just the thrill of collecting.

So Which Format Is Most Affordable?

That's hard to say, right? If you're looking at a ten-year window, you could argue that Legacy is most affordable, but over only one year, Draft is the competitive place to be. Casual decks could be even more affordable than Draft, or much, much more expensive, depending on a number of factors.

Having an idea of where you want to go with playing Magic in both the short and long terms is the best way to determine which format will be the most viable for you to enjoy. Once you've got an idea of your present and future in the game, that's when you can start making real decisions about where to put your hobby money.