I’m looking to play casually (in person) with some friends and we were wondering what the cheapest format to start buying for would be? And what might be some good pick ups (we have the starter decks but want some more variety) thanks
What do you expect from those games? Do you want to play magic or are you going for a free for all commander experience?
My and my friends always liked brewing our own decks so to encourage that and discourage net decking we’ve come up with our own casual budget format we call Bargain. The only special rules are your maindeck must be $30 or less on mtg goldfish and your leftover money plus an additional $5 can go toward a sideboard. We just check every couple of months whether a deck has gone way over budget and we haven’t had the need to ban or restrict any cards yet.
I recommend Commander for playing in a group, since it has lots of fun gameplay, there are plenty of powerful budget lists and basically all the cards ever printed (with very few exceptions) are legal, so you can play what you have and never have to worry about rotation. I recommend looking up some budget lists to start out with, as they are generally significantly more powerful than preconstructed decks (some exceptions apply, but those precons are no longer cheap), while not being all that much more expensive.
Alternatively, as others have suggested, Pauper is a fun format to play that is basically guaranteed to stay fairly cheap, due to all the legal cards being printed at common at some point.
I recommend looking through (budget) decklists for either format with your friends and then agree on which one looks more fun for your group.
Thanks everyone for your comments, I really appreciate them all!
