About

Hello new reader. My (nick)name is RedNightmare (Red for short) and an introduction seems in order.

I’m a Dutch* Master student in Scientific Communication. I play Magic, D&D, video games and all that stuff. I got into Magic the Gathering about 10 years ago. I loved the way every player brought his own cards to the game and someone’s personality could really shine through in his or her deck. But seeing as I also had other hobbies, I didn’t want to spend to much money on cards. That’s why my favorite column on the Wizards site was Building on a Budget. It gave cool deck ideas for making your own decks. I build a deck or two following that column, but once Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar took over, I was hooked. Every month or so, Jay took a Theme deck (Intro Packs these days) and very slowly played and adjusted the deck to be both fun and competitive in casual play. Even when Ben Bleiweiss took over the column, theme decks were still used a lot and if not, the slow evolution of the deck was still central. I learned a lot about deckbuilding from those two men alone. When Wizards changed the theme decks to intro packs and reduced the deck size to 40, I was out. Magic was getting less and less attention from me as it was and this was what pushed me away completely. My favorite way of building decks was lost to me. I came back about a year ago, just as New Phyrexia was coming out. The fact that Scars of Mirrodin returned the intro packs to 60 card decks probably had something to do with it. I bought the “Life for Death” intro pack and was hooked all over again.

Originally there was a disclaimer here about how I still like the current Building on a Budget, but between getting the idea for this blog and actually getting it online, the Building on a Budget column on the official Magic website was ended. Upside to this, is it means there’s more demand for budget deck building columns. Downside is, now I’m probably not the only one doing this and people will say I started this because of the original column ending. Oh well, c’est la vie.

The Rules
The rules I’ll be using for this blog will be taken mostly from Master Moldenhauer-Salazar himself. I may break them on occasion, if I deem it necessary, like when I add or remove an entire color from a deck, so they are more guidelines then rules.

–    Take a Standard Legal Intro Pack
–    Play at least 5 games between making changes
–    Change no more then 5 cards
–    Stay within 15-20 MTGO tickets

The last one is lower then the original Building on a Budget rule of 30 tickets. The reason for this is two-fold. 1) I need to pay this all out of my own pocket, so I need to be able to keep this up in the long run and 2) I believe that you can make good casual decks with just 20 tickets. This may change in later blog-posts, but for now this seems like a good starting point.

I’ll be updating every Sunday with a new article. Most evolutions will run about 4 weeks, but I may change this as the situation warrants. Additionally, I might mix in a one-off article about things like the best commons in Standard right now or another interesting topic. I hope you enjoy my articles and feel free to leave comments.

*I apologize for any grammar and spelling errors I will be making. Feel free to politely correct me.