Building a Commander deck on a budget

Updated 1 November 2026

A Commander deck can cost thousands, but it doesn't need to. Most of what makes a deck work is cheap. The expensive cards tend to make a deck faster or more consistent, not more fun. Here's how to spend a small budget where it counts.

Where the money goes in a Commander deck

In most expensive decks, a small number of cards make up most of the price. They usually fall into three groups:

• Lands that fix your colours perfectly, such as the original dual lands, fetch lands and shock lands.
• Fast mana and tutors, cards that let you skip ahead or find exactly the card you need.
• Popular staples that see play in thousands of decks, so demand keeps them pricey.

You can leave out almost all of these and still have a deck that plays well at a casual table. In fact many of them are Game Changers, which aren't allowed in brackets 1 and 2 anyway.

Cheap cards that pull their weight

These are common, often reprinted, and usually cheap. Prices move, so check before you buy, but these are a safe place to start.

Ramp

• Sol Ring and Arcane Signet: in nearly every preconstructed deck, so there are lots of copies around.
• Mind Stone, plus the Signets and Talismans in your colours.
• In green: Rampant Growth, Cultivate, Kodama's Reach and Farseek.

Lands

• Command Tower, which taps for any of your commander's colours.
• Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse, which fetch a basic of any type.
• Gain lands, the guild Gates and the three-colour tri-lands. They enter tapped, which matters less in Commander's slower games than in other formats.

Removal

• White: Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile.
• Green: Beast Within, which answers almost anything.
• Board wipes such as Blasphemous Act in red or Austere Command in white.

Basic lands are better than you think

In a one- or two-colour deck, basics do most of what expensive lands do. A mono-coloured deck can be almost all basics. The pricey dual lands matter most in three-, four- and five-colour decks, so a tight budget is easier in fewer colours.

Pick a commander that doesn't need expensive support

Some commanders only work with a few specific, costly cards. Others want lots of ordinary cards that share a trait, like a creature type or "whenever a creature enters". Those tribal and token commanders are often the cheapest to build well, because the cards they want are plentiful.

Set the budget before you start, not after

It's easy to build a list and then discover it's twice what you meant to spend. Decide the total first and give no single card more than a fair share of it. Brewhall works this way: type a budget and it spreads it across the deck, keeping any one card to about a fifth of the total, then uses what's left to upgrade.

Buying the cards

In the UK and Europe, Cardmarket is usually the cheapest place for single cards, especially if you buy several from the same seller to share postage. Paste your list into a Cardmarket wants list to compare sellers. Check what you already own first. A box of old cards from a friend or a local game store often covers the ramp and removal.