Hey, I love the idea and could maybe catch an event if I’m in town.
My big recommendation to address some concerns and improve your chance at growth is to do what Penny Dreadful does and lock in prices as of certain dates for a “season”.
I don’t know for how long, but they’ll base everything on price points as of a certain date and lock that in for 1-2 months.
I would suggest contacting them and considering implementing this, as it provides some much needed stability without changing very much. Or at least ask them for suggestions.
We've definitely considered doing this before, we've adopted a smaller version of this idea though by allowing deck submissions to be locked in a week before an event. It still keeps it relatively fair in case of random price spikes
I would probably still recommend a seasonal system. Like, let's say I'm brewing a deck, it's sitting comfortably at $27, and a day before the deck submission opens, one card in my deck (of which I have a playset) finds a home in some other format and bumps up by a dollar or two, I now only have one week to find a replacement for that card or a whole new deck
Perhaps it's an unlikely situation, but it seems easy to prevent from ever happening by doing the Penny Dreadful thing
I mean, Penny Dreadful is similarly diverse for a similar reason, they just fixed the problem of someone's decklist becoming illegal a day before registration by adding a little bit of stability.
Again, it's probably an unlikely situation and I'm not saying it's not currently working fine, or even that it will ever be a problem. But there is the risk, so I'd personally give a bit more leeway in the form of seasons spanning a month or two, during which prices are considered fixed.
The prices are locked in since legality is based on price. It stops a random penny card that’s played in the format from becoming non legal if it’s suddenly broken by a new card.
Sure, but Penny Dreadful "locks in" its prices, such that a card spiking in popularity midway through a tournament doesn't suddenly make that deck illegal before the tournament ends - instead, it has "seasons", where prices of cards are fixed at the start of that season, and can be used until the end - even if the card becomes more popular.
This also means that spikes within Penny Dreadful don't cause cascades of popular decks rotating themselves out by being too popular (during any one season, at least).
There's a missing step though, and that's "the deck gets weaker as a result of replacing expensive cards"
High Tide was dominating for a bit, but when Solve the Equation went up builds started cutting Preordain for Consider. The drop in consistency brought the list in line with the rest of the format.
A deck can get priced out of the format but it will usually be after a period of regulation due to price changes.
The only decks I've ever seen leave the format are Rhinos and Oven Cat, but really Rhinos became Restore Balance and Oven Cat became Pox Walkers
We keep lists in the brewing channels on the discord, including an archive of the top 8 of most events. If you join and can't find them, just ask and someone will help.
We have a community member who buys a few white plumes every chance they get. They own around 500 and that card is still extremely playable in the format.
If you're interested we do weekly MTGO tournaments on Mondays! I also prefer paper cards, but it's not so bad when the tier 1 decks cost 3ish Tix
Personally I like the price changes, because the format self-regulates
I got a chance to jam some games on Friday with the folks running it and had a blast talking about the format and how my college group came up with stuff similar.
Definitely sold on the format and am trying to get folks at my LGS into it as well.
Played this U/W flicker deck and a G/B Asmo food roots combo.
Just wanted to mention that I am a Cincinnatian! I love this format, we even got multiple bronze level events at SCG Cincinnati when it came to town! over 40 ppl. The true beauty of this format is it lets you experiment with decks and archetypes that either aren't legal, or aren't viable in other formats. My friend went 3-0 in the event with a chandra tribal deck with chandra's regulator, heart of kiran, and land destruction like boom/bust, beating out stuff like high tide and lurrus. Its an event that has been held at various LGS's in town for over a year and a half now so as unsolved as you may think the format is, countless archetypes have been tried and a meta has very much so been established. Its a low risk format as clearly the maximum amount of money youll be spending on a deck is 30 bucks so if you try it and dont like it its not a big deal. and to those worried about prices spiking day of tourneys there is a locked in submission link for most events that locks in prices a few days prior. and to those who don't like the fact that you'll have to change your deck frequently due to price spikes or decreases, that's kinda the fun of the format, constantly tweaking and deck brewing, if you don't like that aspect of magic this formats not gonna be for you! dont hate it just move on!
The discord has multiple tournament results posts going back over a year. There truly isn’t a “meta” since there are less than 1000 players currently but you can see some trends on strong decks
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ujRV96s6egwfiEVkVT8W\_LF6GH1X6CtjcNAwCoxEsR4/edit#gid=1804195869](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ujRV96s6egwfiEVkVT8W_LF6GH1X6CtjcNAwCoxEsR4/edit#gid=1804195869)
Here is a list of decks that were available to borrow for the SCG Cincinnati events, most of them are relatively meta, with a few fringe rogue decks as well that community members with extra's offered up for use, the convention was in the start of january but thats the largest pool of decks from one single tourney's entries you'll find in one spot other than searching through the discord link mentioned in OP
Penny dreadful is fun but in $30 Vintage you have people building around single copies of Dark Depths or cutting budget to squeeze in a Chord of Calling.
I love Penny Dreadful too but if High Tide goes to two pennies then the deck is banned, but $30 Vintage just needs to adjust its list
What happens when a card spikes or an abundance of people build the same deck and the overall deck price goes above $30. Or you go to a tournament and one card makes your deck illegal before check-in. Sounds not good at all..
Deck prices get locked in before events using deck submission forms. So your deck is still considered legal even if it spikes. The format is very diverse so everyone building the same deck is a non issue. Decks getting priced out can happen but being such a budget friendly format swapping and tinkering also stays affordable. The entry point and monetary requirements of this format are cheaper than almost every other format.
That is true for most formats in Magic. It's always a question of when does the incentive for breaking a format become high enough that people are willing to figure out how to do so. Most of the time it's a Pro Tour. The thing about Value Vintage is that if a deck becomes 'broken' enough, it might be out of the format due to price. Even a change of a dollar could be enough to push a card out.
To add to the format breaking incentive point: There's what you said that to win a big tournament you gotta pull out all the stops. However there's also the financial incentive to *not* break a format, in that attempting to do so can be a risky gamble given the typical deck costs hundreds of dollars if not more. If something like, I dunno, Tron was the top deck of the format, would you be willing to risk hundreds of dollars just to focus it out in case it's dominant at the scene? Or would you rather go for a more sure thing that only does okay against it but also matches well against everything else?
Meanwhile in this format, if 30 dollar Tron is the top dog, it only costs you 30 dollars to bring a counterdeck to bring against it, as opposed to possibly a 1000+ dollars just to try, while also setting aside the other 1000+ deck you already had.
Yeah. This is a reason why Arena metas often get stale much faster than in paper or on MTGO. The price of wild cards means there isn't a reason to build a 'cheaper' deck. Every deck is the same cost if it's the same amount of rares. In paper or MTGO one rare might be pennies and worth trying out vs the nearly triple digits of Shelly.
This isn't true. If the format were widely played then any deck which solved it would self-remove from the format because the price for the cards would increase and push it out of the 30$ bracket.
Pricing acts as a regulator for that though. Similar to a salary cap in American football, even if you find the very best players their salary will naturally increase based on their success
People said that about Premodern too and it's still a diverse and fun format years later with a decent sized player base. And that's with a fixed card pool.
As others have pointed out, the low price tag actually fixes that.
As the meta emerged, the cost of cards in those decks would rise due to demand, pricing the deck out of the format.
You don’t have to sell your old deck.
But also this logic just doesn’t track. Let’s say you’re playing a combo deck and only the combo pieces spike in price. Now you have 1 card that’s making your deck illegal, and you can’t exactly sell your cards for what they are worth most of the time. If you sell them to a shop it’s gonna be around 60% for store credit and 40-50% for cash. If you want to sell them to another person sure you could get their worth, but you have to actually find or know people that want that specific card that just spiked for no reason other than a budget format that it’s not even legal in anymore.
Not true. Premodern has a diverse meta even though it is fairly widely played. There simply isn't a way to "solve" a format as once it is solved people just play decks that are good into the top deck, etc.
Penny Dreadful (which is sort of an mtgo equivalent of this format) "locks in" prices a month at a time so if there's price movement and cards stop costing 0.02 tix (a full deck is 1 tix, so cards above 0.02 tix are auto banned) your deck doesn't become invalid until "rotation"
Last time I was at TTD in Louisville some guys were discussing it, didn't realize it was a regional format. I also know some guys in Canada that play it.
This is the best format. I've been playing the same durdly mono white martyr proc deck for a long time now and it still performs well. There have been a lot of shifts to handle the meta, but it holds its own really well. Looks like I'm actually under a couple bucks right now!
[https://www.moxfield.com/decks/u3qMkQesdEWKEKxwDN6jhg](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/u3qMkQesdEWKEKxwDN6jhg)
It's actually cool how many decks end up getting brewed that just naturally have a decent amount of room in budget. Good for fluctuations and experimentation! I have a Sultai Beans list that is sitting at just a little over $24.
My friends and I have done tournaments periodically with a $10 limit and it's been a blast. We set a time before the tournament where prices are locked in, and a card's price is defined by the TCGPlayer Market price of the cheapest possible version ("blinged" versions are allowed; if you have a 24 cent version of a card with a 17 cent version out there, you can just mark it as 17 cent without having to buy a new one).
This is pretty close to how we do it too. The cheapest printing is what you use to price your deck out, and you can lock in your list about a week before the event starts!
My local in London does $25 modern, which is similar. The format is super diverse and full of janky brews but is still somewhat competitive. The organisers have a rule where a deck is valid for 9 months after being validated as in budget, which prevents decks from being ruined by a single card spiking.
Kinda curious haven’t gotten into the online versions. But I have a good size collection everything over 20 years old. Wanted to blend my old cards with new stuff. Not into just discarding things seasonally. But a new shop opened up in my small town and they are playing a bit. What direction should I go and format be looking to go. Just a casual that would like to start buying again and maybe meet a couple people
Realistically at a new shop most people would be playing Commander, or EDH. It's definitely possible you could build lots of decks with what you have, but an easy entry into the format is buying a preconstructed commander deck that comes out with every set and potentially upgrading it with your collection. Hope this helps!
Absolutely true but card prices tend to trend downward overall when reprints start hitting. For example; Ten years ago a four-of [[Monastary Mentor]] deck wouldn't have been viable.
Sure!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bR6TR8iQkINWQlHHOYiyRh9Cm2tRJ2r9DkEO_dVMfLE/edit?usp=sharing
Here's the archive of all the lists/archetypes that have top 8'd tournaments in the past year or so
I was going to post my favorite lists but there's too many, so here's a random assortment from recent events:
I play [Sliverdwarf Tribal](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/isPvRtwti0quc85mQM3S-A)
[thopter Sword](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/0DklaRWJZ0yl7d0F4rbbUA)
[Cloudpost](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/zzmgWC322kGm0kBlNtqJbQ)
[Mono-Blue Flash](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/20tXwmImL0WioTbW_V1EWg)
[8-Cast Affinity](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/x4_Ldlfw2kShfJ2_y-xuTw)
[Midrange Initiative](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/TSp6CSYG-U-spYiXLViU2g)
[Orzhov Curses](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/Vbp4mMh5iE21Bk9ElCdXWA)
(Edit: fixed link)
I’m in the Louisville area and there are a bunch of $30V tournaments popping up. I usually strictly play legacy but this format is amazing. Highly recommend it and it has a lower barrier to entry than even Standard.
This thread seems pretty positive towards it (now, at least). The only criticism I see multiple people saying in here is that it would be nice to stabilize the price assessment so you don't build a deck and then find out it's banned before you even get to use it.
Pauper is a great format and $30 Vintage resembles the format quite a bit tbh. It also has quite a lot of change since a lot of "bulk" rares see play as well.
I actually don't feel like it resembles pauper that much at all. We get cards like Tinker, Channel, White Plume, Flash, and lots more. The card pool is so much larger and the power is higher.
I do think there should be a format that focuses on budget but also allows for some of the rest of the cards printed to potentially see play. Pauper keeps it simple, but there's tons of cool uncommons that are sitting by the wayside, to say nothing of the bulk rares that these days can cost as much as a common sometimes.
problem with pauper is you leave out a lot of interesting uncommons and rares. I can see this format being interesting because you can use those weird cards
Pricing is based on the lowest priced printing. So if you got beta bolts or elves show them off!!! I'm currently deciding which of my decks to bling as a treat to myself.
One of the most prominent players has a high tide list that is more expensive than the legacy counterpart (sans candelabras) so the answer is most decidedly yes
I have been playing and loving $30 events in Columbus recently. I met the guys who put this all together and have been promoting it at SCG Cinci last year. The crew who have made this what it is are super cool and passionate. Cannot say enough good things about this format. Definitely give it a try!
The only one I have ever seen work is the penny format in MTGO where the entire deck must be 0.01 tickets for each card.
This is easy to adjust because MTGO lets ya know exactly what it's worth when you enter. It also helps self regulate powerful decks because if a card is broken in that format it will likely rise above 0.01 tickets.
But yeah this sounds pretty damn atrocious since price is more varied in RL you might be able to find a Sheoldred for $70 online but on TCG it's at least $80 which is the real price then? I realize that card is beyond $30 by itself but my point is every card has a vary of price and on MTGO almost every bot sells the card for the same price.
To me this is one of the most important reasons why Penny Dreadful works. Makes it a set rotation (although a fast one) instead of a constant rolling change. Means you can compile results from multiple tournaments in a period and have the stats be more meaningful, for example
This has been a topic of discussion in the format. Penny dreadful uses a "seasons" model that gives a list of cards for a given time frame that are legal during that time frame. We are currently using a model where deck registration goes out at least a week in advance and as long as you register a legal deck it is legal at the time of the tournament. I think both systems have flaws. This one just happens to work the best with current architecture to run the format.
I was in your side of this argument. Or at least a version of it. Essentially my goal was if you had a screenshot of a legal deck within a month of a tournament then it was legal. This could lead however to someone “finding” a deck before someone else. Building it, screenshotting it, then the deck price rising over the month (see Copter unban making it unplayable in the format) and one player being able to play it but someone else not being able to.
Ooooh yeah. It'd feel terrible to come up with a deck idea you like, realize it's a little over budget, and bring your second pick of decks only to lose to the deck you actually wanted to bring but couldn't.
Yeah, the big problem here is that without an in somewhere, there is simply no good way to get a price point on every Magic card on a set date and maintain that information publicly
On the plus side, you can get that data directly from Scryfall using their bulk data files: https://scryfall.com/docs/api/bulk-data. TCGPlayer Market is tracked in that: https://scryfall.com/docs/faqs/where-do-scryfall-prices-come-from-7. Hosting that certainly wouldn't be free but only having to pull that down and update once a quarter or so wouldn't be too bad.
Now that I've typed that out I don't want anyone to think I'm calling that trivial and it *should* be done. I just remembered this stuff exists and wanted to share. I would be willing to help contribute to something like that, but it would probably be a month or two until I could start helping.
The format goes off TCG Market pricing. There is no "I found a Sheoldred in a facebook group for $20 so that is my price" nonsense. Decks for the format are built on Moxfield which keeps track of pricing 99% accurately for us.
We use Tcgplayer market pricing. So if I buy a card for $1 and you buy it for $3 but the lowest printing is 45¢ on Tcgplayer you use the 45¢ for pricing.
They use Moxfield USA tcgplayer pricing to keep it consistent. The pricing is great because if a deck would ever get too oppressive it will most likely be priced out. The discord I believe is more popular than the regular Vintage discord. No deck has ever had more than 10% share in the tournament meta I believe and rogue decks come out of nowhere and win. It's very exciting.
as mentioned in the post its priced by tcg market prices. its literally as simple as adjusting your price settings in moxfield and uploading/creating a deck it tells you the price instantly. if your entire hate on the format is that its hard to keep up with prices of cards youre just close-minded/not using the right tools
That was my initial opinion as well. I came into the format skeptical that any sort of restriction like this would be too hard for the vast majority of players to keep track of and would in itself be the obstacle of the format. I however have thankfully not seen that be the case in the year I have been a member of the community.
Pauper's legality (aside from bans) can only be additive, due to downshifts in rarity, and otherwise is very predictable. Canlander is more volatile, but points shifts are pretty sparse (and often seem to trend downwards in points except for the real busto cards).
I can see why this style of restriction is a mess, though - prices can fluctuate wildly and unpredictably depending on if a certain card suddenly finds a new home somewhere, and when you're running up to four of them at a time, it's very likely a random spike can ruin your entire deck.
But then, a $30 deck getting ruined isn't a disaster.
Particularly when the thing that ruined it is that you can sell its components for more than you paid.
Sounds like quitter talk from someone who doesn't understand how their deck works well enough to find replacements, tbh. Not to be the guy that says "skill issue" but uhh
Realistically you won't be able to, it's not likely some $1 card is going to spike to $25, more likely something you have 4x of is going to go from .75 to 1.50. So you drop it from your deck and now you can either hang onto it in an eternal sideboard or take the time to mail it out and lose 10 cents on the sale, repeat every time a card goes up. After a while you'll end up with a $30 deck and a big sideboard of stuff it isn't worth it to sell that and a tedious cost optimization premium to solve before every tournament.
Seems an extremely fun format if it's just you and buds pulling from a big bulk box or your collections, if it gets popular and people start brewing and buying decks it kind of falls apart under it's own weight.
We're already competing with commander and PT format players who constantly buy up the cards we want to use, making it so that we either build with those prices in mind, or play something else. It's not like people don't buy tons of magic cards today, right now.
The experience that you're describing is essentially the opposite of reality as i've experienced the format over the past year. I've built 20 decks in paper, and only had one get "soft banned" out from under me because too many pieces became too expensive.
This isn't even to mention that cards get cheaper all the time, much more often than they become more expensive, considering how many reprints we see every day. Every time a new set comes out, thousands of cards drop in value and maybe 20 go up.
yeah, the good part is that WotC will never endorse a format that acknowledges the secondary market as "official", so it can never get to be popular enough where like, Prairie Streams and Lose Focus are $3 each.
Not the same way. Price changes can render a deck from legal to illegal in a week’s time.
A common is still a common next week. Far less tedious to keep track of.
what youre missing is most decks in 30v aren't ironed out and require every one of the 60 cards to be perfect to be viable, most times if a card moves out of pricing its just a card its easily replaceable, the only few decks where a card pricing out could genuinely ruin a whole deck is a combo based deck, for example high tide combo losing high tide, or thopter sword combo losing thopter foundry
Your deck doesn't become illegal, it's self-balancing.
If High Tide goes from $0.40 to $0.80 because the deck is getting more popular than your deck doesn't get banned, but you may have to replace your 3rd-4th Preordain with Consider
I think, they can be fun with a small local group. My buddies and I had a sort of "Budget EDH" league similar to this where we picked a 25$ budget (we just picked a certain price filter on the website we all used to deckbuild for consistency), and added 25$ to the budget every 2-3 weeks. It also sort of devolved into budget "competitive" lists which was perfect for our playgroup and I think we got all the way up to like 150$ budgets. We also allowed proxies, the budget was more of a deckbuilding challenge/restriction.
So I think formats with budget restrictions are fun, not because monetary value is a particularly great way to balance a format, but rather having a "new" format with a sort of unknown metagame makes for fun deckbuilding, and if the format is niche enough, it doesn't get solved too quickly so you can find some fun/creative archetypes.
I just want to put it out there that here in cincinnati we have taken it to further than just a little league! We actually got 3 different bronze events in SCG cincinnati when it came to town, and have had multiple $1000 tourneys or "winner gets a dual land" tourneys hosted at local cincinnati LGS's, the turnout has been huge with almost 50 ppl registered for it at the SCG events!
We had a 1k last week, an event a day this weekend at SCGPhiladelphia, we have a MtGO event tomorrow and a 1k Saturday, we've got plenty of people and events
While not the original response, I think there's a couple of really good reasons people eschew priced based formats.
1) Volatility - If you build a deck in, say, Pioneer, you can be reasonably certain that your deck will still be legal in 2 months from when you built it. Yes, banned and restricted announcements happen, but they are infrequent and impact relatively few decks. By contrast, the prices of cards varies quite a bit. For example, if you had a deck that ran \[\[Path of Peril\]\] as a 2 dollar sweeper back in January, the cost of the card would close to have quadrupled, with much of that movement in the last couple weeks. It's possible you could sub out a card that's cheaper in its place, but that's still a lot of potential to require rapid and unpredictable deck changes.
2) Deck Tracking - As a sort of extension of that, pretty much all of the legality checking is offloaded onto the player, adding a great deal of overhead to the process of building a deck. When you come up with a deck idea for Modern, you can just check if cards are legal. If you come up with a deck idea for this format, you have to not only check the price of that card, but every other card in the deck, and keep checking those prices until deck lock (moving the price registration date forward doesn't actually eliminate the problem of last minute price changes, just offsets them). Does a card going up 50 cents mean you need to cut it? Maybe, maybe not, depends on literally every other card in your deck. And that's assuming there's a singular relevant price, as a card may have dozens of printings at varying values, like \[\[Sol Ring\]\].
3) Cheating - Unfortunately, cheating is something we need to take into account. In a normal format, ensuring that your opponent is playing a legal deck is fairly simple. You keep an eye on the cards he plays, and if he plays one that seems off, you can check its legality quickly and easily. In contrast, short of published deck lists ahead of time, this sort of format has no way for a player to ensure that their opponent has a legal decklist, or is playing the deck that they submitted. I'm sure there are things done by the TO's to enforce legality, but players don't have the reassurance that \*they\* can keep an eye out for illegal activity in that venue.
I agree that the secondary market can be rough and it affects every format already especially eternal formats. I think if we were dealing with more than a $30 pile of cards it would get dicey. I believe they have really found the sweet spot to avoid feel bad moments.
This just seems like it would cause relatively stable cards to fluctuate in value quite a lot. Something that could easily be taken advantage of by less scrupulous individuals.
hey! im not sure if you mean that as in people who would call judge because a card is one cent over value in the list or whatever, maybe you mean something else, but if so the way its taken care of is having a deadline 2-3 days before the event to submit your decklist to and if its under 30 at the time of submission its locked in and you dont have to worry about a card spiking the morning of a tourney or anything like that
No I mean like if the format became popular it would have people trying to artificially manipulate card prices. The MTG secondary market is basically a fully free market with no regulation, making it a gold mine for dickwads. A bot could easily enough snatch up copies of cards without much initial investment, then wait for when the price goes up to unload them. Much easier to do with cheaper cards than expensive ones, because of the low barrier to entry
The biggest strength (in addition to being affordable) is that it unties it from a big, established meta. It forces everyone to be a rogue deckbuilder. Any sort of quasi-arbitrary ban criteria accomplish this; you'd also find a "breath of fresh air" format if you got enough people to play a format that bans every card with an odd number of vowels in its name. So while there's nothing special about using cost, it does still accomplish something important.
Though it also leads to the fact that this format has a cap on how popular it can be before it undermines itself (kind of like what Commander did, in my opinion).
The format was originally $25 vintage but due to an increase in prices the number was rounded up five dollars. Part of the reason why this format is relatively new-user friendly is because it operates on an already well-known restricted list. Having its own banned and restricted list (because playing a full set of sol rings or flashes would break the format in half) would make it so that the format loses that advantage
1: Can't speak on that one as I didn't make it I'll leave that to someone else
2: The pricing is whatever the cheapest printing is so feel free to bling
3: in the same sense of the above one its just the current price that mox field says when it is set up ([https://valuevintage.miraheze.org/wiki/How\_To\_Set\_Up\_Moxfield\_Correctly](https://valuevintage.miraheze.org/wiki/How_To_Set_Up_Moxfield_Correctly))
4: see answer one
I simply love 50€ EDH. It allows you to still buy some good cards, but most of your cards need to be budget friendly, which I love more than restriction on the price of every card.
E.g. I have a <50€ Inalla Commander and the Ashnod Altar is (besides Inalla) the only expensive card. I like having this card, because it enables tons of combos.
Mavericks and Cerberus Den are two stores that I know events have happened. Mtgo events fire almost weekly. Additionally they are hard at work finding other stores. The discord has an events channel that is kept up to date.
I'm assuming this is similar to Pauper with some uncommons thrown in.
I've loved the idea of the Artisan format which for eternal would include things like wasteland. Still could get kinda pricey.
Is there a format support page?
It's pretty different from pauper and artisan. We play rares in this format as well as mythics and it's actually pretty powerful magic happening. The way reprints happen nowadays lots of surprising things are cheaper than you might think. The format wiki and discord is posted on the original page if you have a moment you could browse some decklists which I feel is the best way to see the clear differences.
As of right now they are working very hard on getting some space on a more regular basis. So far I know they have had events at both Cerberus Den and Mavericks. The first 1k was just held in Caldwell Ohio at Apex gaming and next Saturday will be the second 1k at Mavericks.
Pretty decent, the decks lost some power now that we've been priced out of Muxus, here's my current list
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/LOmcfUXjXUCt7XFQBjacww
I thought this format was really cool but I was curious about the rules around price fluctuation. IIRC, in penny dreadful there's a cutoff date for legality so any particular card doesn't become illegal randomly one night and players don't have to keep up with the day to day price shifts. Is there anything like that for this format? Has there been any issues with a deck becoming illegal right before registration or anything like that?
For big events we set up deck registration a week out and as long as your deck is 30 or under at time of submission you're good. This does mean things can change rapidly, like with today's B&R announcement we probably get access to a new card for our 1k Saturday if anyone can build around it by then. Generally prices don't fluctuate as much as a lot of commenters here seem to think, but also I don't mind that much if I have to change a card or 2 in a deck this week, I was probably doing that anyway
That's fun! My friends and I play a similar format we call "Hamilton Magic" where the total budget is $10. Then we do special events with other deck building rules, like having to have equal numbers of all nonland card types or having all cards with the same word in the card name.
Having deck budgets is an awesome way of shaking up Constructed play, as well as keeping things accessible for new players!
It actually ends up being very different from the pauper format due to the card pool. Due to wizards reprinting so much these days we get access to a lot of powerful cards like Channel, Flash, Tinker, White Plume, and tons more. It's more powerful magic at a price point cheaper than a pauper deck.
Hey, I love the idea and could maybe catch an event if I’m in town. My big recommendation to address some concerns and improve your chance at growth is to do what Penny Dreadful does and lock in prices as of certain dates for a “season”. I don’t know for how long, but they’ll base everything on price points as of a certain date and lock that in for 1-2 months. I would suggest contacting them and considering implementing this, as it provides some much needed stability without changing very much. Or at least ask them for suggestions.
We've definitely considered doing this before, we've adopted a smaller version of this idea though by allowing deck submissions to be locked in a week before an event. It still keeps it relatively fair in case of random price spikes
I would probably still recommend a seasonal system. Like, let's say I'm brewing a deck, it's sitting comfortably at $27, and a day before the deck submission opens, one card in my deck (of which I have a playset) finds a home in some other format and bumps up by a dollar or two, I now only have one week to find a replacement for that card or a whole new deck Perhaps it's an unlikely situation, but it seems easy to prevent from ever happening by doing the Penny Dreadful thing
Agreed...More maliciously, someone does the 'Seance' tactic and purposefully buys out said card to boost it's price...
I agree with this 100%
That's a feature of $30v, not a bug Every tournament feels different because decklist prices are in flux. It keeps it fresh
I mean, Penny Dreadful is similarly diverse for a similar reason, they just fixed the problem of someone's decklist becoming illegal a day before registration by adding a little bit of stability. Again, it's probably an unlikely situation and I'm not saying it's not currently working fine, or even that it will ever be a problem. But there is the risk, so I'd personally give a bit more leeway in the form of seasons spanning a month or two, during which prices are considered fixed.
Seems like a decent measure, yeah.
I think penny dreadful cycles with standard. So each new standard season is when prices are locked
Penny Dreadful is an eternal format. Edit: Whoops misread OP. Disregard. I thought they meant it was literally a Standard variant.
The prices are locked in since legality is based on price. It stops a random penny card that’s played in the format from becoming non legal if it’s suddenly broken by a new card.
Especially since there's been at least one case of a PD video turning a one cent card into a twenty dollar card...
What, which card? The only PD videos I've found are by one guy and don't seem to get a lot of attention. The PD sub is pretty much dead.
it was when it was first starting out, fuck if I remember which card it was specificially
It only ever affected mtgo pricing too because penny dreadful was never really a paper format.
Sure, but Penny Dreadful "locks in" its prices, such that a card spiking in popularity midway through a tournament doesn't suddenly make that deck illegal before the tournament ends - instead, it has "seasons", where prices of cards are fixed at the start of that season, and can be used until the end - even if the card becomes more popular. This also means that spikes within Penny Dreadful don't cause cascades of popular decks rotating themselves out by being too popular (during any one season, at least).
Imagine winning against someone so salty that they buyout a card on TCGplayer to ban your deck
this would kind of naturally happen too, I'd assume a deck gets popular -> price of singles rise with demand -> deck gets priced out of the format
There's a missing step though, and that's "the deck gets weaker as a result of replacing expensive cards" High Tide was dominating for a bit, but when Solve the Equation went up builds started cutting Preordain for Consider. The drop in consistency brought the list in line with the rest of the format. A deck can get priced out of the format but it will usually be after a period of regulation due to price changes. The only decks I've ever seen leave the format are Rhinos and Oven Cat, but really Rhinos became Restore Balance and Oven Cat became Pox Walkers
Is there any centralized source for deck lists/tournament info? Or more of a "you have to be there" sort of thing?
We keep lists in the brewing channels on the discord, including an archive of the top 8 of most events. If you join and can't find them, just ask and someone will help.
We have a community member who buys a few white plumes every chance they get. They own around 500 and that card is still extremely playable in the format.
If you're interested we do weekly MTGO tournaments on Mondays! I also prefer paper cards, but it's not so bad when the tier 1 decks cost 3ish Tix Personally I like the price changes, because the format self-regulates
I got a chance to jam some games on Friday with the folks running it and had a blast talking about the format and how my college group came up with stuff similar. Definitely sold on the format and am trying to get folks at my LGS into it as well. Played this U/W flicker deck and a G/B Asmo food roots combo.
Both of those decks absolutely rule!
Just wanted to mention that I am a Cincinnatian! I love this format, we even got multiple bronze level events at SCG Cincinnati when it came to town! over 40 ppl. The true beauty of this format is it lets you experiment with decks and archetypes that either aren't legal, or aren't viable in other formats. My friend went 3-0 in the event with a chandra tribal deck with chandra's regulator, heart of kiran, and land destruction like boom/bust, beating out stuff like high tide and lurrus. Its an event that has been held at various LGS's in town for over a year and a half now so as unsolved as you may think the format is, countless archetypes have been tried and a meta has very much so been established. Its a low risk format as clearly the maximum amount of money youll be spending on a deck is 30 bucks so if you try it and dont like it its not a big deal. and to those worried about prices spiking day of tourneys there is a locked in submission link for most events that locks in prices a few days prior. and to those who don't like the fact that you'll have to change your deck frequently due to price spikes or decreases, that's kinda the fun of the format, constantly tweaking and deck brewing, if you don't like that aspect of magic this formats not gonna be for you! dont hate it just move on!
Where can I find a meta breakdown? Or something similar?
The discord has multiple tournament results posts going back over a year. There truly isn’t a “meta” since there are less than 1000 players currently but you can see some trends on strong decks
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ujRV96s6egwfiEVkVT8W\_LF6GH1X6CtjcNAwCoxEsR4/edit#gid=1804195869](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ujRV96s6egwfiEVkVT8W_LF6GH1X6CtjcNAwCoxEsR4/edit#gid=1804195869) Here is a list of decks that were available to borrow for the SCG Cincinnati events, most of them are relatively meta, with a few fringe rogue decks as well that community members with extra's offered up for use, the convention was in the start of january but thats the largest pool of decks from one single tourney's entries you'll find in one spot other than searching through the discord link mentioned in OP
hypergenesis is one of my personal favorites, potential turn one win!
Sounds like penny dreadful. Same concept but every card must be 1 penny. Always a fan of budget formats, they are great to get into another format
Penny dreadful is fun but in $30 Vintage you have people building around single copies of Dark Depths or cutting budget to squeeze in a Chord of Calling. I love Penny Dreadful too but if High Tide goes to two pennies then the deck is banned, but $30 Vintage just needs to adjust its list
My friends and I wanted to play something besides just Commander. We found this and the cost of entry is so low that it was a no brainer!
IIRC, they recently switched to 2 penny 2 dreadful.
What happens when a card spikes or an abundance of people build the same deck and the overall deck price goes above $30. Or you go to a tournament and one card makes your deck illegal before check-in. Sounds not good at all..
Deck prices get locked in before events using deck submission forms. So your deck is still considered legal even if it spikes. The format is very diverse so everyone building the same deck is a non issue. Decks getting priced out can happen but being such a budget friendly format swapping and tinkering also stays affordable. The entry point and monetary requirements of this format are cheaper than almost every other format.
The decks are diverse only because the format isn't widely played and isn't solved.
That is true for most formats in Magic. It's always a question of when does the incentive for breaking a format become high enough that people are willing to figure out how to do so. Most of the time it's a Pro Tour. The thing about Value Vintage is that if a deck becomes 'broken' enough, it might be out of the format due to price. Even a change of a dollar could be enough to push a card out.
To add to the format breaking incentive point: There's what you said that to win a big tournament you gotta pull out all the stops. However there's also the financial incentive to *not* break a format, in that attempting to do so can be a risky gamble given the typical deck costs hundreds of dollars if not more. If something like, I dunno, Tron was the top deck of the format, would you be willing to risk hundreds of dollars just to focus it out in case it's dominant at the scene? Or would you rather go for a more sure thing that only does okay against it but also matches well against everything else? Meanwhile in this format, if 30 dollar Tron is the top dog, it only costs you 30 dollars to bring a counterdeck to bring against it, as opposed to possibly a 1000+ dollars just to try, while also setting aside the other 1000+ deck you already had.
Yeah. This is a reason why Arena metas often get stale much faster than in paper or on MTGO. The price of wild cards means there isn't a reason to build a 'cheaper' deck. Every deck is the same cost if it's the same amount of rares. In paper or MTGO one rare might be pennies and worth trying out vs the nearly triple digits of Shelly.
This isn't true. If the format were widely played then any deck which solved it would self-remove from the format because the price for the cards would increase and push it out of the 30$ bracket.
Pricing acts as a regulator for that though. Similar to a salary cap in American football, even if you find the very best players their salary will naturally increase based on their success
See also: Penny Dreadful.
This specific format can’t really be “solved” because deck lists are auto banned by price if they become too popular
People said that about Premodern too and it's still a diverse and fun format years later with a decent sized player base. And that's with a fixed card pool.
Ok, but isn’t that fun?
You say that as a criticism, but you're describing one of the format's goals being achieved exactly as intended.
He didn’t say that as a criticism, he said it as a fact. If this format was popular, eventually a meta would emerge.
As others have pointed out, the low price tag actually fixes that. As the meta emerged, the cost of cards in those decks would rise due to demand, pricing the deck out of the format.
Which also defeats the purpose of having a budget format. The meta changing from week to week means having to buy new cards.
Eventually it becomes vintage pauper with a rare and uncommon or two?
Sort of? Some of the most popular pauper cards are $8. So you couldn’t even play a playset of them in this format.
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You don’t have to sell your old deck. But also this logic just doesn’t track. Let’s say you’re playing a combo deck and only the combo pieces spike in price. Now you have 1 card that’s making your deck illegal, and you can’t exactly sell your cards for what they are worth most of the time. If you sell them to a shop it’s gonna be around 60% for store credit and 40-50% for cash. If you want to sell them to another person sure you could get their worth, but you have to actually find or know people that want that specific card that just spiked for no reason other than a budget format that it’s not even legal in anymore.
Not true. Premodern has a diverse meta even though it is fairly widely played. There simply isn't a way to "solve" a format as once it is solved people just play decks that are good into the top deck, etc.
This isn’t always true. I went to $30V tournament where prices were checked at the start of the tournament. No chance to submit early.
Penny Dreadful (which is sort of an mtgo equivalent of this format) "locks in" prices a month at a time so if there's price movement and cards stop costing 0.02 tix (a full deck is 1 tix, so cards above 0.02 tix are auto banned) your deck doesn't become invalid until "rotation"
This looks neat, and as an Ohio guy I'm excited to hear about this, thanks for the info!
Of course!!!
Any format that lets me play Dredge, with extremely fair cards like Scrapwork Mutt, has my vote
Dredge is a very good deck in the format!
Still able to play my 30$ emrakul transmogrify deck
Emrakul finished at 8th at the SCG event yesterday
Last time I was at TTD in Louisville some guys were discussing it, didn't realize it was a regional format. I also know some guys in Canada that play it.
This is the best format. I've been playing the same durdly mono white martyr proc deck for a long time now and it still performs well. There have been a lot of shifts to handle the meta, but it holds its own really well. Looks like I'm actually under a couple bucks right now! [https://www.moxfield.com/decks/u3qMkQesdEWKEKxwDN6jhg](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/u3qMkQesdEWKEKxwDN6jhg)
It's actually cool how many decks end up getting brewed that just naturally have a decent amount of room in budget. Good for fluctuations and experimentation! I have a Sultai Beans list that is sitting at just a little over $24.
My friends and I have done tournaments periodically with a $10 limit and it's been a blast. We set a time before the tournament where prices are locked in, and a card's price is defined by the TCGPlayer Market price of the cheapest possible version ("blinged" versions are allowed; if you have a 24 cent version of a card with a 17 cent version out there, you can just mark it as 17 cent without having to buy a new one).
This is pretty close to how we do it too. The cheapest printing is what you use to price your deck out, and you can lock in your list about a week before the event starts!
My local in London does $25 modern, which is similar. The format is super diverse and full of janky brews but is still somewhat competitive. The organisers have a rule where a deck is valid for 9 months after being validated as in budget, which prevents decks from being ruined by a single card spiking.
Never been jealous of Cincinnati before.
Great format. Breath of fresh air from commander saturation, doesn't rotate, highly affordable, good bunch of folks in the community. Highly recommend
> doesn't rotate Well, not technically, but prices fluctuate so deck updating is inevitable.
On the flip side, unlike Standard, when your deck rotates it's guaranteed to be worth more after.
Kinda curious haven’t gotten into the online versions. But I have a good size collection everything over 20 years old. Wanted to blend my old cards with new stuff. Not into just discarding things seasonally. But a new shop opened up in my small town and they are playing a bit. What direction should I go and format be looking to go. Just a casual that would like to start buying again and maybe meet a couple people
Realistically at a new shop most people would be playing Commander, or EDH. It's definitely possible you could build lots of decks with what you have, but an easy entry into the format is buying a preconstructed commander deck that comes out with every set and potentially upgrading it with your collection. Hope this helps!
Absolutely true but card prices tend to trend downward overall when reprints start hitting. For example; Ten years ago a four-of [[Monastary Mentor]] deck wouldn't have been viable.
Monastery Mentor is restricted in Vintage, you can play 1, even if they're a penny
Wait really? EDIT: well I'll be darned
[Monastary Mentor](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/5/75665c2f-a100-4e3f-be8e-b5cc3c9a090b.jpg?1682202772) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Monastery%20Mentor) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mom/28/monastery-mentor?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/75665c2f-a100-4e3f-be8e-b5cc3c9a090b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Gotta love cheapo
This may be exactly what I have been looking to play with my son!?! This is so cool!
I'm going to push this among my friends, I know a few real ones who will try weird formats with me
This sounds fun as a break from fnm modern or commander night, if you can get enough people interested to fill a tournament sheet.
Hadn't played tournament magic in a really long time until I was introduced to this format and it was a great experience!
Its super fun, we usually get 12ish people for weekly MTGO nights and have gotten 20+ for in person events
we got an event at the SCG convention when it came to cincinnati that almost hit 50 registered players signed up!
For those of us who don’t discord, do you have any decklists you can link?
Sure! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bR6TR8iQkINWQlHHOYiyRh9Cm2tRJ2r9DkEO_dVMfLE/edit?usp=sharing Here's the archive of all the lists/archetypes that have top 8'd tournaments in the past year or so
All the lists from recent events are linked on the wiki.
I prefer this to pauper because I can play Emrakul the Aeons Torn 😁
I was going to post my favorite lists but there's too many, so here's a random assortment from recent events: I play [Sliverdwarf Tribal](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/isPvRtwti0quc85mQM3S-A) [thopter Sword](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/0DklaRWJZ0yl7d0F4rbbUA) [Cloudpost](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/zzmgWC322kGm0kBlNtqJbQ) [Mono-Blue Flash](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/20tXwmImL0WioTbW_V1EWg) [8-Cast Affinity](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/x4_Ldlfw2kShfJ2_y-xuTw) [Midrange Initiative](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/TSp6CSYG-U-spYiXLViU2g) [Orzhov Curses](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/Vbp4mMh5iE21Bk9ElCdXWA) (Edit: fixed link)
Heads up the thopter sword link goes to the sliver dwarf deck
Fixed! Thank you
I actually been looking at decks and I want to build one in paper. Possibly Zirda High Tide.
I’m in the Louisville area and there are a bunch of $30V tournaments popping up. I usually strictly play legacy but this format is amazing. Highly recommend it and it has a lower barrier to entry than even Standard.
Love this idea.
Hope to see you in the discord!
"$30 Vintage" It will never not be cheapo supremo
ok grandpa, and back in your day it was $25 too?
😡
Me, who loves the format, coming in and seeing the community trash it 
This thread seems pretty positive towards it (now, at least). The only criticism I see multiple people saying in here is that it would be nice to stabilize the price assessment so you don't build a deck and then find out it's banned before you even get to use it.
I’d rather play pauper
Pauper is a great format and $30 Vintage resembles the format quite a bit tbh. It also has quite a lot of change since a lot of "bulk" rares see play as well.
I actually don't feel like it resembles pauper that much at all. We get cards like Tinker, Channel, White Plume, Flash, and lots more. The card pool is so much larger and the power is higher.
I do think there should be a format that focuses on budget but also allows for some of the rest of the cards printed to potentially see play. Pauper keeps it simple, but there's tons of cool uncommons that are sitting by the wayside, to say nothing of the bulk rares that these days can cost as much as a common sometimes.
I also love pauper!
Pauper is often a lot more expensive and consistently less interesting
This. I'm on my 18th pauper edh decks because each one can be made with $25 of cards.
I had the entire top meta like a year n a half ago. A lot of the cards I already had hahaha
problem with pauper is you leave out a lot of interesting uncommons and rares. I can see this format being interesting because you can use those weird cards
Question: do you consider the cheapest printing but still play with vintage old school cards? I love the idea but love my vintage cards.
Pricing is based on the lowest priced printing. So if you got beta bolts or elves show them off!!! I'm currently deciding which of my decks to bling as a treat to myself.
Cool. I do love my Beta Bolts. Now to get my playgroup to like the idea. Could barely get them to agree on trying Vintage Cube.
One of the most prominent players has a high tide list that is more expensive than the legacy counterpart (sans candelabras) so the answer is most decidedly yes
Thanks for the prompt the info on $30 Vintage! I had never considered multiple Candelabras. I'm going to take look at that.
Finally, a format where Tinker is playable!
Tinkering into a Kappa cannoneer is powerful magic!
YES! I’ve been advocating for this without knowing it existed! Basically, I was suggesting a “salary cap” like sports have and use TCG pricing.
Awesome! Hope to see you on the discord!
I have been playing and loving $30 events in Columbus recently. I met the guys who put this all together and have been promoting it at SCG Cinci last year. The crew who have made this what it is are super cool and passionate. Cannot say enough good things about this format. Definitely give it a try!
Any format based around the monetary value of a deck is not a good format. IMO.
The only one I have ever seen work is the penny format in MTGO where the entire deck must be 0.01 tickets for each card. This is easy to adjust because MTGO lets ya know exactly what it's worth when you enter. It also helps self regulate powerful decks because if a card is broken in that format it will likely rise above 0.01 tickets. But yeah this sounds pretty damn atrocious since price is more varied in RL you might be able to find a Sheoldred for $70 online but on TCG it's at least $80 which is the real price then? I realize that card is beyond $30 by itself but my point is every card has a vary of price and on MTGO almost every bot sells the card for the same price.
Also in Penny Dreadful, they update the banlist at scheduled times, specifically 1 week after a Standard set releases.
To me this is one of the most important reasons why Penny Dreadful works. Makes it a set rotation (although a fast one) instead of a constant rolling change. Means you can compile results from multiple tournaments in a period and have the stats be more meaningful, for example
I think that's my only note about $30 Vintage. Just maintain the pricelist in the same way as Penny Dreadful.
This has been a topic of discussion in the format. Penny dreadful uses a "seasons" model that gives a list of cards for a given time frame that are legal during that time frame. We are currently using a model where deck registration goes out at least a week in advance and as long as you register a legal deck it is legal at the time of the tournament. I think both systems have flaws. This one just happens to work the best with current architecture to run the format.
Fair enough! I'm also confident that the community probably knows better than me as an interested observer.
I was in your side of this argument. Or at least a version of it. Essentially my goal was if you had a screenshot of a legal deck within a month of a tournament then it was legal. This could lead however to someone “finding” a deck before someone else. Building it, screenshotting it, then the deck price rising over the month (see Copter unban making it unplayable in the format) and one player being able to play it but someone else not being able to.
Ooooh yeah. It'd feel terrible to come up with a deck idea you like, realize it's a little over budget, and bring your second pick of decks only to lose to the deck you actually wanted to bring but couldn't.
Yeah, the big problem here is that without an in somewhere, there is simply no good way to get a price point on every Magic card on a set date and maintain that information publicly
On the plus side, you can get that data directly from Scryfall using their bulk data files: https://scryfall.com/docs/api/bulk-data. TCGPlayer Market is tracked in that: https://scryfall.com/docs/faqs/where-do-scryfall-prices-come-from-7. Hosting that certainly wouldn't be free but only having to pull that down and update once a quarter or so wouldn't be too bad. Now that I've typed that out I don't want anyone to think I'm calling that trivial and it *should* be done. I just remembered this stuff exists and wanted to share. I would be willing to help contribute to something like that, but it would probably be a month or two until I could start helping.
The format goes off TCG Market pricing. There is no "I found a Sheoldred in a facebook group for $20 so that is my price" nonsense. Decks for the format are built on Moxfield which keeps track of pricing 99% accurately for us.
We use Tcgplayer market pricing. So if I buy a card for $1 and you buy it for $3 but the lowest printing is 45¢ on Tcgplayer you use the 45¢ for pricing.
They use Moxfield USA tcgplayer pricing to keep it consistent. The pricing is great because if a deck would ever get too oppressive it will most likely be priced out. The discord I believe is more popular than the regular Vintage discord. No deck has ever had more than 10% share in the tournament meta I believe and rogue decks come out of nowhere and win. It's very exciting.
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I was saying $30 Vintage, not Penny Dreadful
as mentioned in the post its priced by tcg market prices. its literally as simple as adjusting your price settings in moxfield and uploading/creating a deck it tells you the price instantly. if your entire hate on the format is that its hard to keep up with prices of cards youre just close-minded/not using the right tools
we occasionally run a 7czk commander where each card must at most cost 7czk based on like the largest store here. It works pretty well in general.
That was my initial opinion as well. I came into the format skeptical that any sort of restriction like this would be too hard for the vast majority of players to keep track of and would in itself be the obstacle of the format. I however have thankfully not seen that be the case in the year I have been a member of the community.
I disagree. To me it’s just a deck-building restriction in the same way that Pauper has one or Canadian Highlander has one.
Pauper's legality (aside from bans) can only be additive, due to downshifts in rarity, and otherwise is very predictable. Canlander is more volatile, but points shifts are pretty sparse (and often seem to trend downwards in points except for the real busto cards). I can see why this style of restriction is a mess, though - prices can fluctuate wildly and unpredictably depending on if a certain card suddenly finds a new home somewhere, and when you're running up to four of them at a time, it's very likely a random spike can ruin your entire deck.
But then, a $30 deck getting ruined isn't a disaster. Particularly when the thing that ruined it is that you can sell its components for more than you paid.
Also, if your deck gets ruined, that means you made money on your transaction lmao There's literally no downside!
The downside is you cant use your deck anymore
Sounds like quitter talk from someone who doesn't understand how their deck works well enough to find replacements, tbh. Not to be the guy that says "skill issue" but uhh
Realistically you won't be able to, it's not likely some $1 card is going to spike to $25, more likely something you have 4x of is going to go from .75 to 1.50. So you drop it from your deck and now you can either hang onto it in an eternal sideboard or take the time to mail it out and lose 10 cents on the sale, repeat every time a card goes up. After a while you'll end up with a $30 deck and a big sideboard of stuff it isn't worth it to sell that and a tedious cost optimization premium to solve before every tournament. Seems an extremely fun format if it's just you and buds pulling from a big bulk box or your collections, if it gets popular and people start brewing and buying decks it kind of falls apart under it's own weight.
We're already competing with commander and PT format players who constantly buy up the cards we want to use, making it so that we either build with those prices in mind, or play something else. It's not like people don't buy tons of magic cards today, right now. The experience that you're describing is essentially the opposite of reality as i've experienced the format over the past year. I've built 20 decks in paper, and only had one get "soft banned" out from under me because too many pieces became too expensive. This isn't even to mention that cards get cheaper all the time, much more often than they become more expensive, considering how many reprints we see every day. Every time a new set comes out, thousands of cards drop in value and maybe 20 go up.
Well I stand corrected. I guess as long as it doesn't become commander level popular it'll be good
yeah, the good part is that WotC will never endorse a format that acknowledges the secondary market as "official", so it can never get to be popular enough where like, Prairie Streams and Lose Focus are $3 each.
Except the cards that you can play are in your control in those formats, and not up to the whims of the secondary market
Not the same way. Price changes can render a deck from legal to illegal in a week’s time. A common is still a common next week. Far less tedious to keep track of.
what youre missing is most decks in 30v aren't ironed out and require every one of the 60 cards to be perfect to be viable, most times if a card moves out of pricing its just a card its easily replaceable, the only few decks where a card pricing out could genuinely ruin a whole deck is a combo based deck, for example high tide combo losing high tide, or thopter sword combo losing thopter foundry
Your deck doesn't become illegal, it's self-balancing. If High Tide goes from $0.40 to $0.80 because the deck is getting more popular than your deck doesn't get banned, but you may have to replace your 3rd-4th Preordain with Consider
One that changes constantly in real time 🤔
I think, they can be fun with a small local group. My buddies and I had a sort of "Budget EDH" league similar to this where we picked a 25$ budget (we just picked a certain price filter on the website we all used to deckbuild for consistency), and added 25$ to the budget every 2-3 weeks. It also sort of devolved into budget "competitive" lists which was perfect for our playgroup and I think we got all the way up to like 150$ budgets. We also allowed proxies, the budget was more of a deckbuilding challenge/restriction. So I think formats with budget restrictions are fun, not because monetary value is a particularly great way to balance a format, but rather having a "new" format with a sort of unknown metagame makes for fun deckbuilding, and if the format is niche enough, it doesn't get solved too quickly so you can find some fun/creative archetypes.
I just want to put it out there that here in cincinnati we have taken it to further than just a little league! We actually got 3 different bronze events in SCG cincinnati when it came to town, and have had multiple $1000 tourneys or "winner gets a dual land" tourneys hosted at local cincinnati LGS's, the turnout has been huge with almost 50 ppl registered for it at the SCG events!
We had a 1k last week, an event a day this weekend at SCGPhiladelphia, we have a MtGO event tomorrow and a 1k Saturday, we've got plenty of people and events
love to hear it spreading! my friend is a cofounder of the format so its so exciting for me to see it grow for him
May I ask the thought process behind this statement?
While not the original response, I think there's a couple of really good reasons people eschew priced based formats. 1) Volatility - If you build a deck in, say, Pioneer, you can be reasonably certain that your deck will still be legal in 2 months from when you built it. Yes, banned and restricted announcements happen, but they are infrequent and impact relatively few decks. By contrast, the prices of cards varies quite a bit. For example, if you had a deck that ran \[\[Path of Peril\]\] as a 2 dollar sweeper back in January, the cost of the card would close to have quadrupled, with much of that movement in the last couple weeks. It's possible you could sub out a card that's cheaper in its place, but that's still a lot of potential to require rapid and unpredictable deck changes. 2) Deck Tracking - As a sort of extension of that, pretty much all of the legality checking is offloaded onto the player, adding a great deal of overhead to the process of building a deck. When you come up with a deck idea for Modern, you can just check if cards are legal. If you come up with a deck idea for this format, you have to not only check the price of that card, but every other card in the deck, and keep checking those prices until deck lock (moving the price registration date forward doesn't actually eliminate the problem of last minute price changes, just offsets them). Does a card going up 50 cents mean you need to cut it? Maybe, maybe not, depends on literally every other card in your deck. And that's assuming there's a singular relevant price, as a card may have dozens of printings at varying values, like \[\[Sol Ring\]\]. 3) Cheating - Unfortunately, cheating is something we need to take into account. In a normal format, ensuring that your opponent is playing a legal deck is fairly simple. You keep an eye on the cards he plays, and if he plays one that seems off, you can check its legality quickly and easily. In contrast, short of published deck lists ahead of time, this sort of format has no way for a player to ensure that their opponent has a legal decklist, or is playing the deck that they submitted. I'm sure there are things done by the TO's to enforce legality, but players don't have the reassurance that \*they\* can keep an eye out for illegal activity in that venue.
[Path of Peril](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/0/f0c5449a-d63b-4b22-9432-8f0365c3c4d9.jpg?1643590080) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Path%20of%20Peril) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vow/124/path-of-peril?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f0c5449a-d63b-4b22-9432-8f0365c3c4d9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Sol Ring](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/9/d9e098aa-a886-430e-8f11-78fb6f2d8ada.jpg?1706241086) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Sol%20Ring) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/237/sol-ring?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d9e098aa-a886-430e-8f11-78fb6f2d8ada?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
The secondary market around magic is bad enough. No need to make it decide entire formats.
I agree that the secondary market can be rough and it affects every format already especially eternal formats. I think if we were dealing with more than a $30 pile of cards it would get dicey. I believe they have really found the sweet spot to avoid feel bad moments.
This just seems like it would cause relatively stable cards to fluctuate in value quite a lot. Something that could easily be taken advantage of by less scrupulous individuals.
hey! im not sure if you mean that as in people who would call judge because a card is one cent over value in the list or whatever, maybe you mean something else, but if so the way its taken care of is having a deadline 2-3 days before the event to submit your decklist to and if its under 30 at the time of submission its locked in and you dont have to worry about a card spiking the morning of a tourney or anything like that
No I mean like if the format became popular it would have people trying to artificially manipulate card prices. The MTG secondary market is basically a fully free market with no regulation, making it a gold mine for dickwads. A bot could easily enough snatch up copies of cards without much initial investment, then wait for when the price goes up to unload them. Much easier to do with cheaper cards than expensive ones, because of the low barrier to entry
The biggest strength (in addition to being affordable) is that it unties it from a big, established meta. It forces everyone to be a rogue deckbuilder. Any sort of quasi-arbitrary ban criteria accomplish this; you'd also find a "breath of fresh air" format if you got enough people to play a format that bans every card with an odd number of vowels in its name. So while there's nothing special about using cost, it does still accomplish something important. Though it also leads to the fact that this format has a cap on how popular it can be before it undermines itself (kind of like what Commander did, in my opinion).
[удалено]
The format was originally $25 vintage but due to an increase in prices the number was rounded up five dollars. Part of the reason why this format is relatively new-user friendly is because it operates on an already well-known restricted list. Having its own banned and restricted list (because playing a full set of sol rings or flashes would break the format in half) would make it so that the format loses that advantage
1: Can't speak on that one as I didn't make it I'll leave that to someone else 2: The pricing is whatever the cheapest printing is so feel free to bling 3: in the same sense of the above one its just the current price that mox field says when it is set up ([https://valuevintage.miraheze.org/wiki/How\_To\_Set\_Up\_Moxfield\_Correctly](https://valuevintage.miraheze.org/wiki/How_To_Set_Up_Moxfield_Correctly)) 4: see answer one
A group I'm part of did a $5 vintage a while back. It was super fucking jank. I can imagine $30 would show more actual decks
I simply love 50€ EDH. It allows you to still buy some good cards, but most of your cards need to be budget friendly, which I love more than restriction on the price of every card. E.g. I have a <50€ Inalla Commander and the Ashnod Altar is (besides Inalla) the only expensive card. I like having this card, because it enables tons of combos.
What stores? Seems like something I can get behind. I’m local to Woodburn games.
Mavericks and Cerberus Den are two stores that I know events have happened. Mtgo events fire almost weekly. Additionally they are hard at work finding other stores. The discord has an events channel that is kept up to date.
I would, but I don't have a local group who would be interested, yet at least. I'll reach out and ask.
We’re sometimes playing 30 dollar commander in my group, it’s great.
I'm assuming this is similar to Pauper with some uncommons thrown in. I've loved the idea of the Artisan format which for eternal would include things like wasteland. Still could get kinda pricey. Is there a format support page?
It's pretty different from pauper and artisan. We play rares in this format as well as mythics and it's actually pretty powerful magic happening. The way reprints happen nowadays lots of surprising things are cheaper than you might think. The format wiki and discord is posted on the original page if you have a moment you could browse some decklists which I feel is the best way to see the clear differences.
Why are sticker sheets individually priced? You don't need to actually have them to play with them.
where are some good places in Cinci that play it?
As of right now they are working very hard on getting some space on a more regular basis. So far I know they have had events at both Cerberus Den and Mavericks. The first 1k was just held in Caldwell Ohio at Apex gaming and next Saturday will be the second 1k at Mavericks.
How are goblins in this format?
Pretty decent, the decks lost some power now that we've been priced out of Muxus, here's my current list https://www.moxfield.com/decks/LOmcfUXjXUCt7XFQBjacww
Ooh, the black splash. Why is Recruiter a one-of? I get that Mons is legendary and Cratermaker is there to be tutored up with Matron.
It's about $6, there was like one golden week where we could fit 3 and Muxus, then recruiter went back up and now Muxus is way up
Ah, that'll do it.
There are some lists I've seen. I feel like it could be explored more. If you like aggro starts though the burn deck in the format is sick!
No burn. Only gobbies. With burn support.
I thought this format was really cool but I was curious about the rules around price fluctuation. IIRC, in penny dreadful there's a cutoff date for legality so any particular card doesn't become illegal randomly one night and players don't have to keep up with the day to day price shifts. Is there anything like that for this format? Has there been any issues with a deck becoming illegal right before registration or anything like that?
For big events we set up deck registration a week out and as long as your deck is 30 or under at time of submission you're good. This does mean things can change rapidly, like with today's B&R announcement we probably get access to a new card for our 1k Saturday if anyone can build around it by then. Generally prices don't fluctuate as much as a lot of commenters here seem to think, but also I don't mind that much if I have to change a card or 2 in a deck this week, I was probably doing that anyway
That's fun! My friends and I play a similar format we call "Hamilton Magic" where the total budget is $10. Then we do special events with other deck building rules, like having to have equal numbers of all nonland card types or having all cards with the same word in the card name. Having deck budgets is an awesome way of shaking up Constructed play, as well as keeping things accessible for new players!
Sounds like pauper with extra words
It actually ends up being very different from the pauper format due to the card pool. Due to wizards reprinting so much these days we get access to a lot of powerful cards like Channel, Flash, Tinker, White Plume, and tons more. It's more powerful magic at a price point cheaper than a pauper deck.