Hear, hear!BlindMessiah94 said:
Sounds like my kind of group. I always had fun playing Magic (didn't bring my decks to Japan... they're sitting in my basement back in the US) and never spent more than $50 on a single deck. Like you, constructing effective decks on a budget was my goal. Unfortunately, I was only ever able to win against my friends, who built expensive decks, with one of my budget decks, a white/blue bird and soldier deck that really only won because I got lucky. I managed to get a godlike (2nd) opening hand after another player reset the board. My friends and I often played multiplayer, and I would manage to hang in there to end up one of the last two pretty often, but by that point the big expensive cards would come into play and overrun my little cheap guys.
Though I also liked putting themes to my decks. I had a "black aggro" deck, as one of my friends called it (it had a high amount of shades), made with classic Halloween monsters such as vampires, werewolves and ghosts (shades). And my friends were scared of it because although it never really won, it could dish out a ridiculous amount of damage. Another one of my favorites was my pirate deck, built around, well, piracy. The strategy was that if my opponent played anything it was either bounced, Tim-ed to death, or mine by their next turn. Plunder and pillage. Don't let anything hit the table on my opponent's side long enough to be effective. Unfortunately, I didn't really get to see it working in action. The only deck I was able to test it on was my friend's control deck, and we basically spent the entire time passing one creature back and forth until we just called it a draw.
