Last night I got a txt message from a friend asking me for help on building a cheep yet competitive MtG deck. Right now cheep and competitive are kinda at opposing scales as I understand the metagame.

Metagame- The highest level of strategy in many complex games, metagame refers to any aspect of strategy that involves thinking about what your opponent is thinking you are thinking.

And in MtG terms how to build a deck to attack the other decks you think might be floating around. So this is a real challenge, tasty.

So around 9 or so I went to get started putting money cards into a trade binder thinking I might go hang on Thrusday night go get some fun games in and maybe make some trades…

As I was sorting cards I started to hit on a fairly straight forward build that I am going to share.

Dudes:
4 Hopeful Eidolon
4 Phalanx Leader
2 Cavalry Pegasus
2 Fabled Hero

2 Battlewise Hoplite
1 Daxos of Meletis

3 Triton Fortune Hunter (Wavecrash Triton)
2 Stealer of Secrets

Spells/Heroic Enablers:
2 Dauntless Onslaught
4 Gods Willing
1 Ethereal Armor
4 Aqueous Form
1 Triton Tactics
2 Celestial Flare

Lands:
8 duals (4 shock lands, 4 tap lands)
plains and islands to 23

Side Board thoughts:
Gainsay
Glare of Heresy
Pacifism

This is just what I had handy while I was sorting so final numbers are off but it is a fine starting point. You may or may not want more Daxos. I think you do. The life gain is huge. And over at Channelfireball.com he is less then a dollar. I know going to four Ethereal Armor is the right call, but I only have the one but as they are a common they should be cheep. Fabled hero is an all star, going to 3 or 4 is a no brainer and could be worth cutting the Battlewises to make room for them.

There are some sweet interactions with this deck.

Cavalry Pegasus makes humans fly when it attacks, and other then the Triton Fortune Hunter and the Hopeful Eidolon all our dudes are humans.

Ethereal Armor, gives +1/+1 for each enchantment and Hopeful Eidolon is an enchantment dude, that is an interesting interaction. Caught Remmie in play testing more then once thinking I was attacking with a 2/2 first striker and I was really attacking with a 3/3 first striker because of the enchantment dude.

Speaking of enchantments Aqueous Form is exactly what this deck is looking for, it is both a heroic trigger but it is also allows you to attack with out worry about blocks and fixes your draws.

I think the number of Triton Tactics, Dauntless Onslaught and Gods Willing are questionable. They all trigger heroic, Tactics and Onslaught trigger 2 dudes and they still wins. Gods Willing is also a nice trick save a dude or make attack easy or hard. I think 3 of each might be a good place to start.

Speaking of places to start I added 5 dudes that draw cards. In a weenie deck card draw is key because your guys normally get out classed real quickly. Maybe less so with all this heroic giving +1/+1 counters…. But I can see sideboarding or even main deck switching to some number of Wavecrash Tritons to go more controly vs BIG guys.deck depending on your meta.

I know for those of you that are not Magic players this was not the most compelling read but if you think you might want a low cost deck for the current standard that can totally grow as you can add money this is a fair start.

<3s