Hey there! I’m new to paper MTG and play Commander with my playgroup. We’ve been having a debate about whether the total value of a deck really indicates how strong it is. One of my friends argues that value doesn’t equal strength, but I can’t help but wonder when I keep losing to a deck with a higher price tag than mine.
I’ve been playing 1v1 games with my friend for a few months now, so I know their deck almost as well as mine. It can be frustrating when I can predict their moves but still can’t win with my basic deck. I understand the point that a couple of expensive cards in a deck won’t guarantee a win, but when a deck is upgraded with so many pricey cards, it feels like a whole different ball game.
For reference, we both started with precons, and both upgraded. I spent $20, they spent $120+. Inputing my deck list in a deck value calculator returns $103, which is lower than their upgrade alone lol
I don’t mind losing when the match is good. I hate losing when I’m always on the backfoot and can’t do much besides hoping to survive another turn
What are your thoughts on this? I’d love to hear different perspectives on the relationship between deck value and strength in the game.
edit: I received more responses than I expected, so I’ll need some time to go through them all and respond. Thank you in advance!
Some of my best commander decks are my cheapest. It’s almost all about synergy.
However
There is a saying, that the most powerful card in Magic is the credit card. I mean, look at something like Counterspell vs Mana Drain. Same mana cost, except one is cheap ($$) and the other is super expensive, and Mana Drain is insanely good.
Your friend could just have a deck that naturally counters yours, but I think having a precon deck with $120 in upgrades over $20 in upgrades will definitely give them a leg up. The only real way to compete is try to optimize synergies, which often involves upping the value of the deck.
You can stop reading here if you want, as the rest is anecdotal.
After a few years of playing, my group eventually slowly increased the power of our decks with good pulls from packs, or buying high synergy singles. You can really get lost in the weeds of optimizing your deck, and it turned into a financial arms race, which feels bad. I talked to most of my play group about this, and a lot of them agreed that this was getting kind of “pay to win” for us, and we all hit the brakes a bit with our deck optimization. The nice thing with Commander when you are playing with 3+ people, is the game is sort of self balancing. One person has a great deck and starts dominating? Well now all the others can agree to gang up on them, which can be fun.
Some of the decks in my group are crazy good, but we try and be considerate to what the power levels of the rest of the group might be playing. I think the healthy option is to just open the conversation with your friends and let them know how you feel or think, which is what you’ve done.
Personally, I love the PDH format. Uncommon creature as your commander, common cards in the rest of the deck. You can still have a great time with a lower power deck, and everyone is roughly on the same playing field due to the power limitations of the cards. A deck for PDH would cost me $30-$40 CAD, and it plays mostly the same as EDH.
I have to admit, their deck is seriously impressive compared to mine, especially after all the recent upgrades. Their deck is so streamlined and efficient, leaving no room for confusion about its strategy and execution!
My deck, on the other hand, is a bit more versatile but that comes with its own challenges. It can be tough to decide which upgrades to go for and what to swap out. Plus, as someone else mentioned, my deck might not be the best fit for this particular 1v1 scenario anymore. We used to be evenly matched, but now I find myself struggling to keep up and take the lead, I think I won only once since the upgrades, and only because they got mana screwed lol
I took another look at my calculations and realized that the $120 probably included all the fancy full arts and foils. Even though I had to rely on my memory and might have missed a few cards, the upgrades seem to be only $25 mine compared to their $75 for around the same number of cards (minus the lands).
It’s not as big of a difference as I thought before, but despite that, I still haven’t been able to get ahead in any of our games since then lol
It could also just be a bad match up, exacerbated by the fact that they likely did some high synergy upgrades. What you could do if you were so inclined is go to EDHREC, and look up your commander. It will show you high synergy cards and top picks, and it also gives you a price. The draw back to doing this is sort of what I touched on above, where one can really get lost in the weeds of doing upgrades. It also (IMO) makes your deck less “you” and kind of turns it into some generalized, optimized deck. The feeling of performing well with a deck you made with your own brain feels better than essentially scraping the deck list off a cheat sheet.
My preferred way of looking for cards is using the Scryfall advanced search, and looking up specific keywords for my deck. For example, if I have a green/white creature token generation deck, I would select green/white/colourless, set the colour identity to include any of the above colours, and use the Oracle text search “create a token”.
That way, everything that populated will be in at least one of the colours I’ve selected, and will show me everything with those specific 3 words in it. You can really find some fun stuff.
Another option instead of upgrading is maybe to look into getting another kind of deck. Having variety is always nice, but it’s really up to you which way you’d rather go.