#15$andadream

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Abzan Sac Tool Box

@colorguardian10 requested this list a good while back, and after fiddling with it for quite a bit I let it slip my mind. Upon coming back to working on it, I again felt like I was being drug down several different paths and was having trouble deciding which was appropriate. I finally settled on something that looks to generate value off of tool-box style creatures it can sacrifice and loop by reanimating them. There’s definitely more token heavy and sac heavy ways to build this list, but I think this one looks super fun and hope you do too, Color. 

Creatures (26)

1 Elenda, the Dusk Rose 2 Izoni, Thousand-Eyed 2 Jadelight Ranger 2 Knight of Autumn 1 Thallid Soothsayer 4 Llanowar Elves 4 Merfolk Branchwalker 4 Militia Bugler 2 Ravenous Chupacabra 2 Seekers' Squire 2 Whisper, Blood Liturgist  

Spells (11) 

2 Arguel's Blood Fast  2 Cast Down  2 Find // Finality  2 Journey to Eternity  1 Vivien Reid  2 Vraska, Golgari Queen 

Lands (23)

3 Forest   2 Memorial to Folly  4 Overgrown Tomb  3 Sunpetal Grove  3 Swamp  1 Plains  4 Temple Garden  3 Woodland Cemetery 

Militia Bugler hitting pretty much every creature I wanted to include in this deck is one of the main reasons it wound up down this path as opposed to the other options. It just generates loads of value. Whisper is one of our ways to re-use our creatures and does it while placing others in the yard to re-use later. Looping Izoni or Chupacabra or Knight of Autumn even just a couple times can be devastating. Izoni just does everything you’d want a card to be doing in a deck like this.

I just adore this entire cycle of cards that transform into lands. These two are both phenomenal in this list, being relevant both before and after they flip. Blood Fast is very powerful in a lot of matchups, as any deck not pressuring your life total gets punished by you getting to trade it in for cards. Journey is pretty easy to flip, and when we start being able to sac and reanimate cards every turn we should be able to drown our opponents. 

The deck likely sides heavily into removal. Cards like Vraska’s Contempt and Eldest Reborn are solid. I like playing a playset of Duress in any sideboard I can. 

-G

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Manaless Dredge

I’ve been dabbling some in Legacy recently, and wanted to highlight a budget deck that I got wrecked by yesterday. It placed second in the Legacy Challenge we played in, being piloted by the person I can only assume was the one who made it so cheap, vidieowiz4. Normally Manaless Dredge runs about 170 tix, or like 700 dollars. Which would arguably be a budget list for Legacy anyways, but in reality about 140 tix of that is in the sideboard. Vidieowiz4′s list has a much cheaper side board and still does all of the things the deck is supposed to do. [ LIST HERE ] (though this does appear to be a slightly different one than the one they ran yesterday)

It comes in at a measly 27 tix, which is pretty rad if you ask me. Lets take a peak under the hood at how it works.

The manaless part is no joke, as the list doesn’t run a single land. You just want to discard to hand size, preferably discarding one of the Dredgers in the list or Phantasmagorian. Phantasmagorian lets you discard excess cards and dredgers you’ve picked back up, while the suite of creatures like Narcomoeba that recur themselves from the grave do the bulk of the heavy lifting for the deck. Ichorid, Nether Shadow, Prized Amalgam all rush the board to let you start doing a bunch of sweet free stuff.

Cabal Therapy lets you pick your opponents hand to pieces, while simultaneously being a perfect sac outlet to create tokens off of whatever amount of Bridges you’ve managed to dredge so far. Dread Returns has plenty of useful interactions, but just allows you to win the game if you’re opponent can’t stop it by reanimating Balustrade Spy. Spy mills until it hits a land, which it never will, placing your entire deck in your graveyard and allowing you to go off.

-G

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Soul Sister’s Monument

@its-me-iz​ and I have been talking about the best way for monument to really shine in Modern, and I kind of came to the conclusion that building around the card as a value engine felt less powerful than enabling an existing archetype. Hopefully that’s alright @dongledingus, you made it seem like you didn’t mind cutting colors or moving stuff around. Iz thought it had a lot of potential in a BW aristocrats list, and there is always the UW Modern Monument list Saffron Olive used a while back. All seem like fine takes on ways to use the card, but I like mine best. ;D There’s no budget listed, so I just kept it under 100$. 

Creatures 

2x Ajani's Pridemate 4x Legion Conquistador 4x Martyr of Sands 2x Ranger of Eos 3x Serra Ascendant 4x Soul Warden 4x Soul's Attendant 4x Squadron Hawk 2x Whitemane Lion

Non-Creatures 

2x Aetherflux Reservoir  3x Conclave Tribunal  3x Oketra's Monument  1x Proclamation of Rebirth 

Lands 

2x Emeria, The Sky Ruin 4x Field of Ruin 2x Ghost Quarter  14x Plains 

This is predominately a Soul Sister’s deck that intends to gain a ridiculous amount of life while also going wide via Monument. It includes the Martyr Proc package and decks like this tend to have some interesting match-up dynamics. Loads of decks end up having a very difficult time winning through the amount of life you gain. 

The namesake of the deck stems from the 8 copies of the ‘Soul Sisters’, Attendant and Warden. They gain us life every time a creature ETB’s, meaning that each copy of the Sisters paired with Monument turns every creature we cast into 2 life. Monument does very little with the first half of the card in this deck except to drop Ranger’s cost and make Whitemane Lion into a serious token engine, but the second half will have use generating loads of creatures and life. Martyr of Sands can easily be gaining us 9-15 life per activation, making decks trying to make that life total zero look kind of bad. Paired with the Forecast of Proclamation of Rebirth letting us do it every turn, it is a little ridiculous.

A 6/6 Flying Lifelinker for W sounds like a fake card, but Serra Ascendant will often be just that. Ranger of Eos will almost always just be snagging as many copies of this that they can, and it’s a big plus that Proc also returns it. It and Ajani’s Pridemate are our main big threats. Aetherflux Reservoir was a card I hadn’t thought of until IZ mentioned it, but I love it as an alternate win-con for the deck. The deck naturally just gains loads of life, so this can often just be a live draw to kill. Squadron Hawk and Legion Conquistador just keep the decks wheels grinding and fill our hand to the brim, making it extremely difficult for decks to consistently keep us off playing creatures. They work phenomenally with Monument, the Sisters, and Martyr.

We have a disruptive land package that can hurt Tron and the Valakut decks, though Valakut can already have some trouble burning through our steep life total. As will several of the other combo decks. There’s also quite a few decks with a small amount of basics(2-3), so it won’t be too long before you’re just destroying opponents lands. This plan would be heavily benefited by Path to Exile, but I didn’t want to go over 100$ and decided the convoke ‘catch all’ was a fine enough replacement. The deck kind of auto loses to infect, but I think being a heavily favored against a more popular deck like burn makes up for it. 

We also get to run some of the best sideboard cards in modern, like RIP and Stony Silence.

-G

It’s also only like 12 tix, so maybe I’ll run it through a league and record it.

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Stream

I'm gonna be streaming tonight around 5pm PT, and I wanted to see before that comes around if there was anything in particular you folks would like to see! We usually do a couple drafts and that'll be my default for tonight if no one has any list they'd like to see piloted, but I'd be game to run any of the Standard or Modern lists on the blog through a league.

-G

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

B/W Vampires

Initially this deck was sitting at a budget of 30$, with Radiant Destiny in the place of Pride of Conquerors(Radiant Destiny is way better and you should just put it right back in). I then realized it was Black, White, and Tribal, just like the deck that inspired the blog and I wanted to pay a little tribute so I moved it around to have it sitting at 15$. 

Vampires

4x Adanto Vanguard 2x Champion of Dusk 4x Dusk Legion Zealot 4x Legion Lieutenant 4x Martyr of Dusk 2x Sanctum Seeker 4x Skymarcher Aspirant 4x Call to the Feast 3x Queen's Commission

Non-Vampires

4x Conclave Tribunal 4x Pride of Conquerors

Land

4x Forsaken Sanctuary 10x Plains 7x Swamp

I wanted to start off with a highlight of the bulk of our two drop vampires, as they all have a little something in common; they are kind of just bad targets for removal. Adanto Vanguard is just very hard to kill unless they are pressuring our life total, Dusk Legion Zealot replaces itself on ETB, and Martyr makes a token on death. I have to mention with the exclusion of Radiant Destiny, this deck does become noticeably weaker to Chainwhirler.

Making oodles of tokens in our tribe is just fantastic. Call to Feast and Queen’s Commission both do a fine job of getting us wide. Legion Lieutenant is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the budget version of this list, functioning as our only real lord/anthem. Just put Radiant Destiny in if you build it. Lieutenant is definitely a card they will need to answer. 

Sanctum Seeker functions as a secondary ‘lord’, allowing us to potentially just alpha right through blockers. Champion of Dusk has the highest mana cost in the list, but also has the most game-ending ability. Unless it’s literally going to kill us to cast it, we’ll always be happy to fill our hand back up to start dumping it out again. That is also likely not going to be a problem in a lot of games with how many life linkers we can generate unless we went all in on Adanto Vanguard earlier on. If it’s only drawing us a card or two when we’re at 5 mana, chances are things are not really going our way but that’s still a fine exchange. Drawing us 3-5+ cards is just ridiculously game-swingy. We get to play Conclave Tribunal, which is always rad.

The deck definitely wants Legion’s Landing and an improved mana base, but it will still function perfectly fine as is.

-G

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Mono R Burn

I’d like to preface this list with the fact that when I started working on it early last week it was sitting at only a few dollars over 15 bucks, as I was aiming at making it represent the namesake well. Buuuuuut it appears that people have fully accepted how good Risk Factor is in burn and the card has more than doubled in paper value and is still climbing. It remains the only card in the list worth more than a quarter or two, but I felt like keeping it included and would simply suggest replacing it with Vance’s Blasting Cannons or something similar to bring the budget back down.

Creature (20)

3x Captain Lannery Storm 4x Fanatical Firebrand 4x Ghitu Lavarunner 3x Rigging Runner 2x Dismissive Pyromancer  4x Viashino Pyromancer

Spell (19)

4x Lightning Strike 3x Risk Factor 4x Shock 4x Wizard's Lightning 4x The Flame of Keld

Land (21)

21x Mountain

I figured I would highlight the creatures that do things, as the rest are super cut and dry. One of Fanatical Firebrand’s main upsides is being able to sacrifice to be a Lightning Bolt on The Flame of Keld’s third saga. Also can just be used to kill off Llanowar Elf or some comparable 1 drop so you can save your shocks and stuff for their face, while also being decent as a turn 1 swinger to start the damage coming. Dismissive Pyromancer on the base level acts as our 9th and 10th Wizard to help keep Wizard’s Lightning from costing us 3, but being a looting engine and decent piece of removal are also great functions. He’s also the only card in mainboard that can one-shot a Shalai without assistance from Keld, and Shalai is definitely a very annoying card. Captain Lannery can often feel like a huge swing. On turn 3 we can jam in with it, sacrifice the treasure and Wizard’s Lightning(if we have a wizard) or Shock with the mana for quite a bit more damage than they were expecting. It also helps ramp us on those big turns with Flame of Keld and mitigates a little of the cost of Wizard’s Lightning when we don’t have one out. 

Risk Factor is just phenomenal in a deck like this, as 8 damage on a single card in a burn deck that doesn’t want more than 3 or 4 lands anyways is just so much. They will often have to let you draw on the second coming of the card, and any random 3 cards in this deck represent about 4 damage anyways so it’s fine with us. Punisher cards have historically been pretty weak as allowing your opponent to pick the best mode for them at any given time is normally a recipe for failure, so I’m very excited to see one that is good. 

I can’t say enough about the power level of Flame of Keld. This card is absolutely ridiculous for wrapping games up. You’ll often be pitching nothing or extra lands and your opponent is normally in a position where they kind of need to answer it before you even get to draw the cards, let alone the turn where your Lightning Strikes turn into Lava Axes. Every white deck does have access to two very powerful O-Ring effects they are main boarding some amount of so they might just have the chance to do that, but if they spend their turn answering it and you lost nothing good on discard and are able to attack in with your creatures it’s probably still a decent situation for you.

Since I cited Vance’s Blasting Cannons as the card to replace it with, I will say I think the card is definitely powerful enough to main board in this list. I think I like it a little more than Experimental Frenzy, even though Frenzy will often let you see a few more cards over the course of the time it’s out. Flipping Vance’s is not that hard for this deck to do, and at that point if things have been going your way at all a bolt a turn on top of what you are drawing will hopefully be enough of a clock to wrap the game up.

I’ll wrap up the list with some sideboard suggestions, Fight With Fire and Lava Coil being strong cards against creature based decks like midrange. Diamond Mare should make the mirror favorable. Control can have trouble with the pace you’re laying out already and with cards like Vance’s and Experimental Frenzy. 

-G

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Mono G Tron

A couple weeks back I posted [this list] of the core cards of Mono G Tron which help to assemble 7 mana turn 3. I left it open ended as an exercise in budget deck building to give you folks a chance to see how you would fill the gaps and replace cards on a budget. SO, if you still want to give that a shot before looking at the list I made feel free to check out the link above.

TRON (and friends)

4x Urza's Mine 4x Urza's Power Plant 4x Urza's Tower 1x Sanctum of Ugin  5x Forest 1x Ghost Quarter 

GO-GET GADGETS

4x Ancient Stirrings 4x Sylvan Scrying  4x Expedition Map  4x Chromatic Sphere 4x Chromatic Star 

BOMBS

4x World Breaker  2x Artisan of Kozilek 4x Bane of Bala Ged 1x Colossus of Akros 3x Myr Battlesphere

INTERACTION

3x Perilous Vault 2x Silent Gravestone 2x Spatial Contortion

Dedicating the largest chunk of the remaining budget to filling the playset of World Breakers feels just fine to me. The cast trigger and recursion are both fantastic. We’ll often just be on the mana denial route between World Breaker, Bane of Bala Ged having exile annihilator, and Artisan of Kozilek having regular annihilator. And Bane is obviously no Karn, but left unanswered exiling all of their permanents will certainly feel almost as degenerate. Myr Battlesphere is going to pretend to be our Wurmcoil Engine, with the upside of being ridiculously better against Path to Exile, which is a scary card against this deck. Worse in plenty of other situations, but you gotta take em where you can get em.

Battle Ball is also probably our best target for Artisan of Kozilek since it’s our only ETB, but recurring any of our threats on a cast trigger is just fine. Colossus of Akros might seem like a weird inclusion, but there’s plenty of decks that simply don’t have any way to interact with it. It also often threatens a one turn clock after Monstrosity since fetches and shocks can make a couple blockers unimportant. And once we have 8 mana with active tron, any tron land nets us the tenth mana to activate monstrosity. 

While it is definitely not an Oblivion Stone, Perilous Vault is much cheaper and there is definitely situations where it will be better than O Stone. There will also likely be more situations where it is not, but we need this kind of effect and are more than happy to balance the pros and cons to be able to include it. Hell, we’re stoked we get to run it. Silent Gravestone is a card I have still not decided whether it is worth the inclusion in this deck. It very poorly replaces the speed of Progenitus Relic. In the end I decided being able to replace itself in matches where it isn’t relevant made it a card we should still include over something like Tormod’s Crypt. It doesn’t stop us from recurring World Breaker and only prohibits Artisan from doing the do. Spatial Contortion just gives us some play to make T2 against an aggro deck so we don’t lose before we get to play our big bad beefy beaters.

Are there any cards any of you chose to play that I didn’t? Any card I chose you think could be improved? Would you like to see more interactive posts where you get a chance to flex your budget deck-building prowess like this in the future? Please let me know! 

P.S. - There was some massive differences between what could be done in paper vs. MTGO. I chose to use paper as the base for my budget, but if I’d used MTGO where Ugin is only 50 cents he would definitely be in here.  

-G

[15-dollars-and-a-dream]

Mono G Tron

Today we’re going to try something a little different than the norm. We’re going to do an exercise in crafting budget decks where you try and decide what the best payoffs are for your buck and the best replacement cards. 

If any of you are not familiar with the Tron archetype, it’s any deck based upon assembling the Urza Lands in the first couple turns of the game and can easily have access to 7 mana turn 3. They then play extremely powerful cards with this excess of mana much earlier than they should be able too. It’s a lot more resilient than the creature based ramp strategies.

These are the core spells that help find the pieces of Tron. While the deck only runs a handful of green sources, the Chromatic Sphere/Star package allow us to generate green mana pretty consistently to cast these spells to complete Tron ASAP. They also Cantrip, which is great. Scrying and Expedition tend to be powerhouses in the first two or three turns as you assemble tron and then just help filter lands out of the deck later, whereas Ancient Stirrings helps assemble Tron and can be used to dig for threats as the game goes on.

4 Ancient Stirrings 4 Sylvan Scrying 4 Chromatic Sphere 4 Chromatic Star 4 Expedition Map

4 Urza's Mine 4 Urza's Power Plant 4 Urza's Tower

This core part of the deck only costs 70$/20 tix. I normally keep my budget Modern lists around 50-60$, but 100$ is still an intensely low budget list in Modern. So we now need to find 7 lands depending on our card choices, though we should shoot for 5 or so green sources, which puts us up to a total of 39 cards in the deck. That means we need to find 12-15 bombs, and 6-9 spells that are interactive. I encourage you to try and brew up a budget modern Tron deck for under 100$/35-40 tix, and I will be posting my version either later this week or next Monday!

-G