Let's say I wanted to get into Magic entirely from scratch as a beginner...

Let's say I wanted to get into Magic entirely from scratch as a beginner. How much would I need to spend and what would I need to buy?

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Learn how to play from several people, go to a draft for $15 (DO NOT do "rare redraft" unless you like getting shit for prizes), then tell people you're new. You'll get a huge pile of shit people already have 8 copies of.

When you actually know how to play and what your style is, go find a decklist and buy it off TCGplayer.com or whatever. Probably cost you a couple hundred bucks unless you open something good at draft.

This depends wholly on who you will be playing with.

If you have friends that currently play Magic, you will want to start playing the same format(s) they do or if you are just looking to start going to Friday Night Magic at your local game store then you can just stick with Standard, etc.

Each format has its own type of pricing but you can go budget and still have fun in any format.

My best advice is this - regardless of what you decide to play, SET YOURSELF A BUDGET and don't go over it. You can spend tons of money on Magic in a heartbeat.

I started playing in Beta (1994) and took a 10 year break from Magic after selling my entire collection (Mirrodin to Innistrad) and with a budget of $50.00 per month I now have all of the cards that I "missed" and I have several tier 1 / 2 Legacy and Modern decks built along with tons of casual stuff. Yes, it took 3 years or so to do that but the point is don't drop $1000 bucks to play a format you don't even know if you like up front.

For absolute starters, do drafts at a local store. They are generally casual and you get to have fun and keep the cards you draft with. Often players will give you the leftover commons / uncommons that they already have like 20 of if you say you are just starting out.

Don't listen to the other guy. Your local game store should have free intro decks. These are 30 card decks meant to be played against each other. Grab a couple of them and try playing with a friend.

Once you get comfortable with that you can go to a draft (~15$) or just buy some packs and upgrade the decks that you got for free.

Getting into magic is super cheap assuming you're not heading into competitive

I always see shills saying newbies should draft, but IMO, thats the worst advice you can give to someone who barely knows the rules, sucks at deckbuilding and hasnt memorized the set.

Find a play group. That's the first step.

You buy according to the format they are playing.

Depends on what you want to do, what you want to play. The primary formats (Modern, Legacy, Commander/EDH, and Limited) all have different price points and play styles.
Modern and Legacy are the most expensive (a good Legacy deck can run a couple thou) and also the most competitive.
EDH is more casual and also cheaper to play.
Limited (either Sealed or Draft) is usually the cheapest (like $12 for a single Draft), but does require more people to play.
You can also just dick around with decks with your friends, usually called "Kitchen Table" play.
As far as other stuff you might need, I'd recommend card sleeves and a playmat. Good sleeves aren't more than probably $10, and playmats are maybe a little more than that. All other costs depend how you want to play the game.

First of all, spend 0$.
I got into Magic the wrong way and spent hundreds, but I never actually play with anybody, but I know a lot about the game. Please conserve capital and invest wisely. It's easy to spend very little money and have a blast with your friends.

-Get a FREE welcome deck from your local tabletop game store. Get one of each Color (your friends can pick some up too) and play with those a bunch. Then mix them up to make actual 60 card "real" decks.
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-Do not buy booster packs. Similarly, don't draft.
-Do not buy cards from the latest set. Ignore Magic "News". Once you start focusing on this, you quickly fall into the fake Magic scarcity trap. It's all just a ploy to make more money.
-Only buy cheap older cards nobody pays attention to or uses. All the popular focus is always on the latest set and expensive 'powerful' cards. So lots of really cool cards are always ignored and shoved alone in a corner by the popular vocal part of the community.
-If you want to spend the fewest amount of dollars on Magic, but still have some structure, look into a format called Pauper. It ignores all the big expensive cards.
-Other than that, it's very viable and fun to ignore "formats" - don't look into them. It's dumb and confusing and expensive. Once you start using the 'format' mindset, you start draining your bank account. Just buy a few Duel Decks that look cool to you, and maybe some big batches of cards for cheap, and use those to make decks and play with your friends. If you find yourself talking with major Magic spergs, they will ask you about format, and you would just respond with 'kitchen table'.
-Also don't worry about Planeswalkers they are dumb and just a huge marketing tactic.

Don't buy packs.
Don't buy packs.
DO. NOT. BUY. PACKS.

This so hard. If you NEED a certain specific card, just buy it as a single.

Holy shit, good advice.

>NEED to spend
>NEED to buy
Technically you could play magic for $0, but I doubt that's the answer you really want.

To learn how to play, I would actually suggest getting one of the Duels of the Planeswalker games for your gaming device of choice. You can get one from a few years ago for cheap.

Once you've got a handle on the rules and the basics of how a deck is built, go to a prerelease event. It's a casual event where you buy 6 packs, build a deck from them, and then play other people.

After that, investigate the various formats and find out what you want to play.

Then how is he supposed to get cards, moron?

Pauper and limited are great, good luck finding people who play pauper though

You steal them :^)

Addendum:

Buying packs to draft isn't a bad thing (booster box drafting with friends is a blast) but buying packs for singles is a bad deal. If you need a card buy a single. This is sage advice, for you will save tons of money.

Then you realize how terrible kitchen table is when your friend builds a deck that isn't even legal in Vintage and destroys your group.

>somehow, this doesn't lead to the whole group making completely broken decks full of banned cards and actual fun

"Hey wanna play?"
Nah that's alright, your deck isn't fun to play against.

>let the die roll determine who wins is fun
ayy lmao

Packs are the kind of thing you buy when you have an extra five bucks in your pocket as you walk home past the game store. They aren't something you go in to buy big bunches of.

That said, I buy a lot of them, because I enjoy trying to make decks out of the random shit they give me, and sometimes you get lucky. The best packs are always used in some kind event though, like sealed or draft or whatever

Now you've driven a wedge between yourself and your friend, all because you thought kitchen table was a good idea.

draft is the best format
You'll draft the most recent cards so in the event you get super into Magic you'll be up to date with the standard meta
It teaches you every aspect of the game
Next to prereleases draft is the most casual sanctioned format so it's easy to get into and has access to sanctioned judges for rules questions
Even if you lose every match you end up with 3 booster pack's worth of cards

Start with playing the MTG duels game on steam. It's FTP with microtransactions, but it will teach you the core rules without spending a dime or even needing to head to a card shop.Don't buy any of the microtransactions, since WotC officially dropped support for the game.

Once you're sure you actually like the game and understand the rules, go to a hobby shop and meet people and watch different formats. For beginners, I recommend doing one of these:

>Standard
Rotating format made of recent sets. Top tier decks are usually $200-250 with decent decks costing $50-100. You will need to update the deck as new sets come out though.

>Limited
Places have draft/sealed tournaments where you have cards provided to you and you build a deck on the spot. The good news is you don't need to have any cards going in. The bad news is that since you're essentially buying packs every week, you will likely spend somewhere between $10-35 per week. You do get to keep the cards you open, but you will usually not make you money back (unless you win more packs, then maybe).

>EDH
The casual free for all format. Most players in this format aren't building their decks entirely to win, and the multiplayer aspect of this format often helps balance things out, so you don't need to fully optimize your deck. $30-50 for a precon deck and then $50-100 for singles will give you a decent starting point. Bans in this format are rare and the format doesn't cycle, so you don't NEED to keep pumping money into the format. Keep in mind this is not a competitive format, so dont expect formats.

>so dont expect formats.
*don't expect many tournaments

Ignore this guy

If you want to learn magic, you can do it at a gameshop when people are just sitting around playing games. Ask someone to borrow a deck as a beginning and walk you through a few games.

But until you're comfortable with the mechanics, people will want to draft with you because they know you'll pass them good cards in your ignorance. Drafting is hard even for people who have played the game for a long time, though it is a fun way to experience magic, it throws way too many variables at you at once to be enjoyable if you don't know all the rules.

This guy is right
You can learn to play (and play with friends) for $0
If you want to "compete" with other players (this is really just to scratch the itch of pitting your mind and deck against some other autists and I don't really recommend it), you will need to buy actual cards or they won't let you play. The cards in each set are designed so the alternatives to some cheap, good cards in your deck have slight advantages but cost 10x as much money because of scarcity.

Lookup tournament decklists on mtgGoldfish or mtgtop8 and you'll see that decklists for standard are ~$500, modern is ~1000-1500, legacy are ~$2500, and Vintage is pointless because no one will play with you.

Depending on how hooked you'll get you might spend $100, $1000, or $10k lifetime.

Don't buy packs unless you want the rush of a scratch-off lottery ticket

>All the popular focus is always on the latest set and expensive 'powerful' cards
Spoke like someone who doesn't know what modern is

EDH is pretty awful for beginners imo. The board states will get confusing and the politics can easily get toxic.

Modern doesn't influenciate the market prices in the slightless, retard.

Which is why Modern staples that aren't legal in Standard are dirty cheap, right?

Draft means you'll lose and not have fun.

Buy a preconstructed deck (Google) and take it to a store fri-sun evenings and play people. Tell then your story, enjoy.

Find a group of people who do deck sharing (almost everyone I know does) then borrow a few until you know what you like. Don't buy anything until you have played 20-100 games, then build the casual version of your favorite archetype and build towards the modern/legacy/vintage version.

That is how I got a full play set of Jund Deaths Shadow. I got the deaths shadow as a replacement for goyfs when I was poor, scavenging oozes next, and so on (while occasionally my purchases got banned: deathrite shaman I am looking at you).

Definitely. I'd recommend some casual, kitchen table kind of stuff to start off with, as well as sitting in on games during any kind of store events, and then going into maybe something like prereleases or sealed, just to get an easier to deal with environment than draft.

EDH is the thing you start up later, once you've gotten a good enough feel for the game that you can deal with the crazy bullshit.

I've learned that complete sets are superior. Buy a box and not get all the cool cards except two? Fuck that.

Sets or bust, sure opening packs is fun, but deck building is funner.

Fair point, though honestly I'm much more of a long game kind of collector when it comes to cards. If I see something I like, I'll get it, but I'll build decks based around what ideas I can see from my limited pool of resources. You can get some pretty fun stuff when you're limited down like that.

They're expensive because they maintain their standard price. Come on, show me a card that increased its price once it rotated from standard because modern? I'll be waiting.

Deaths Shadow, Serum Visions.

>I don't understand how supply and demand works
I think you might actually be retarded user.

Play LEGACY
Just use the cheap lands like 8POST
Or more seriously, it's a good time to get into standard. It's dirt cheap to build a simple one/two color deck with whatever gimmick you fancy.
Pick your favorite colors and maybe look up some lists.

Look at this cool new card
This totally looks modern legal
I'll run a set of them. I'll have a lot of common cards like goblin electromancer and manamorphose and pyretic ritual. Maybe a grapeshot or two.
Hey, Temporal Fissure is a common, right?

Most guys at FLGS's seem receptive to newbies and willing to help them out, just get a basic box and get to know the locals, they'll hook you up.

As a new player who wants to play tribals and win, should I just do modern merfolk?