By playing your creatures and spells at instant speed, you can catch your opponent off guard and gain a significant advantage. Nightpack Ambusher and Frilled Mystic are your main threats, while Essence Capture and Sinister Sabotage provide countermagic. Start by choosing an archetype known for being budget-friendly, like Mono-Red Aggro, White Weenie, or a base color deck with simple mana requirements. Next, look for prebuilt decks, either starter packs or from online decklist resources, and upgrade them gradually.
Cheap Deck Cores
There were two enchantment-based decks I could have talked about, the other being Bogles. This build uses Slippery Bogle and Gladecover Scout along with a huge pile of aura spells to make massive hexproof threats that are very difficult to deal with. Given that Storm has been a mainstay of Modern since day one, edh deck investing in this powerful combo deck should set you up on a good path as you venture into the format.
Ancestral Anger gives you card draw and trample on a creature for a turn, with an increasing stat boost for every Ancestral Anger in your graveyard. The whole deck can be built without a single rare, as all the cards talked about are either common or uncommon. Well, that’s it for our look at the best budget decks for MTG Arena in 2025. Whether you’re a fan of aggressive strategies, control decks, or something in between, there’s a budget deck out there for you.
MTG Pack Simulator
A pretty cheap deck featuring everyone’s favorite tribe of annoying little red creatures is 8-Whack. The name is a pun on the popular mono-black deck “8-Rack” that wins by combining discard spells with eight copies of The Rack, with copies five through eight being Shrieking Affliction. I tend to look at Constructed decks as being just 60 cards and ignore the sideboard. It’s a bad habit that stuck with me from my days as a teenager playing Yu-Gi-Oh where many players didn’t bother with it or had no idea how to do it.
Not the most powerful Midrange deck, but if you’ve played the Shigeki and Skyturtle combo, this deck feels very similar. This is a commonly built deck as a budget option for players on the Ranked ladder. Generous Visitor snowballs surprisingly well for costing one, and Jukai Naturalist making Enchantments cheaper lets you play out your hand pretty quickly. If you’re a fan of Enchantress and already have all the cards for this, then this deck should come easily to you.
I’ve been playing Magic since a little before the start of the Modern format. I have fond memories of playing with Soul Sisters and getting horrifically crushed by it. You can generally end up with multiple decks without spending much more than you spent for just the one if you look at cards that overlap across a number of decks. This deck is all about taking advantage of the absurdly low mana costs of both Daemogoth Titan and Daemogoth Woe-Eater. The catch is that these two Demons require a regular sacrifice to stick around.
The Mana
I have built well over 20 decks for myself, and I also build for most of our playgroup as well so… We can draw a ton of cards off Jhoira alone, but eventually we’ll reach a point where we have no more artifacts in hand and fizzle out. Recently I did an article showing how to play Commander on Magic Online for free using Cardhoarder’s new free 5 ticket loan accounts and five Commander decks that you can borrow for free using the program.
Unfortunately, as you might expect, there are a number of bad matchups that 8-Wack can face. Rakdos Scam, for instance, is dominant in the meta for a reason and can crush 8-Wack thanks to cards like Fury. Alongside this, Living End is an incredibly punishing match-up that you really won’t want to face. Build for the sake of building, and play what makes you proud to play.
Related to that last point is to find a new way of doing something. Pure freedom, being in the moment, and letting people live their best lives. Is what came out of that idea, and it’s a great change from the usual safisticblooddeathfireexplodiness that the color combination is known for.
While there are a few different routes for building around the Anvil, a Blood Token theme is probably the best route to go if you want to close out the game quickly. Voldaren Epicure and Bloodtithe Harvester are both great cards if you’re trying to get aggressive, but the card I feel like people are sleeping on the most here is actually Sanguine Statuette. With the amount of Artifact sacrificing that the deck does, starting turn three, that card is a 3/3 hasty creature for two mana that comes with the upside of making a sacrificeable token when played. Unlike many of the other decks we’ve looked at so far, though, this deck can grind out a long game if it needs to and has incredible reach. Very powerful deck, and if you are missing Deadly Dispute in Standard, I highly recommend you take it for a spin. So, how cheap can we get the deck on Magic Arena while still keeping its power?
Kenrith does a lot of things, but my personal favorite is his last black ability, which reanimates dead creatures. Mind, you can do this as many times as you want if you have the means to pay for it. I am using $1 as the breaking point for this list since it allows most of the really good budget cards to be a part of this list. The maybe-board is a listing of those cards which are borderline budget and may fluctuate into a budget range on a good day. The side board includes budget cards which are amazing but need to be built around to be automatic inclusions.
Furthermore, being a mono-colored commander means that the mana base could be as simple as 30 or so mountains. Toxic is a mechanic where when a creature with the ability deals combat damage, they will get a certain number of poison counters. If an opponent has ten or more poison counters, they automatically lose the game. Selesnya Toxic is an aggro deck that wants to deal as much toxic damage as possible to win the game early.
Thanks to this, it’s only a matter of picking the right deck, after all, if it’s not powerful, you can always upgrade it. While this does inherently demand spending a bit of extra cash, not every Commander card is $50. At its core, Bant Toxic uses its namesake mechanic to blitz through opponents by applying poison counters. The deck primarily does this by going wide, filling the board with Phyrexian Mites from Skrelv’s Hive and Crawling Chorus.