I’ve been playing a lot of MTG Arena lately, but I refuse to spend any money on it, which means I can’t craft many rare cards. When I look up meta decklists, they always include a lot of rares and mythic rares. I don’t want to spend all my rare wildcards on one deck!

That’s sort of what the Pauper format is for. Pauper decks are only allowed to use common cards, which makes them cheap. But that format isn’t quite what I’m looking for, for four reasons:

  1. There is no Pauper ladder on Arena, there are only tournaments.1 I don’t want to play a tournament, I just want to be able to hop on and play a few games.
  2. I have some rare wildcards that I can use to craft rare cards; I don’t have to limit myself to commons only. I just don’t have very many rare wildcards, so I want to spend them judiciously.
  3. All the strongest Pauper decks are aggro decks. What if I don’t want to play aggro?
  4. There are thousands of MTG cards that aren’t playable on Arena, so I can’t build most Pauper decks anyway.

There’s the Artisan format which is Arena-specific (so it fixes problem 4), but it still has the other three problems.

What I really want is to build a Standard deck using only 4–8 wildcards to craft the most important rares, and then if I decide I like the deck enough, I can craft some more. Which means I want to know which rares I really need, and which ones I can replace with common or uncommon substitutes.

I created a demo to show what this might look like. Below is a table with an interactive decklist for a Dimir Control deck2 with a sliding scale from “budget” to “all rares”. I picked this deck because it’s a non-aggro deck that requires relatively few rares and mythics.

I’m no Pro Tour player, so I’m sure some of my choices are wrong. But I made my best attempt to put together a budget-friendly decklist where the rare cards are ordered from most to least replaceable.

This table shows a Dimir Control decklist. As you slide the slider from left to right, the expensive cards get replaced by cheaper substitutes one by one. I’m not a web designer any more than I’m a Pro Tour player, so consider this a proof of concept.

Expensive Budget
Card Count Card
●Consult the Star Charts 4 ●Stock Up
●The End 2 ●Hero's Downfall
●Three Steps Ahead 4 ●Refute
●Scavenger Regent 1 ●Bitter Triumph
●Marang River Regent 4 ●Eddymurk Crab
●Dispelling Exhale 4 ●Don't Make a Sound
●Caustic Exhale 4 ●Long Goodbye
●Deadly Cover-Up 4 ●Aetherize
●Intimidation Campaign 1  
●Shoot the Sheriff 2  
●Bitter Triumph 1  
●Strategic Betrayal 2  
Lands 27  
Total 60  

Consult the Star Charts is a strong card, but it’s the first card to get subbed out because Stock Up is a powerful replacement. Deadly Cover-Up is the most indispensable rare card because there are no proper common/uncommon board wipes—Aetherize vaguely resembles a board wipe, but it’s really not the same thing.

Dispelling Exhale and Caustic Exhale are commons, so it might seem superfluous to replace them; but they work best in a deck that has dragons, and once you replace Marang River Regent, the deck doesn’t have dragons anymore.

A better version of this interface could allow for more complex changes. For example, I wouldn’t replace Marang River Regent one-to-one with Eddymurk Crab because the Regent isn’t just a big creature, it’s also a card-draw spell. I’d want to rearrange the deck to bring in Quick Study or something. My demo is too simple to do that, but it’s possible in theory. You may have also noticed that Bitter Triumph appears twice on the budget decklist; it would be better to collapse those into one row.

If any MTG players think my budget decklist is wrong, I’d be happy to hear suggestions because I play this deck often. The version I use right now is most of the way toward the Budget side, plus some small changes like bringing in Quick Study.3

My main point isn’t about this specific decklist. My point is that when I get a deck off the internet, I want to know which rare cards I should craft in what order. Which ones are indispensable and which ones don’t matter? That table I made is a prototype of the sort of thing I’d like to see.

Posted on Nov 26, 2025

Notes

  1. And the people who play in those tournaments are really good at Pauper. I tried playing one once and I got destroyed every game. ↩

  2. Azorius Control and Jeskai Control are better right now, but I don’t think there’s any way to make budget versions of those decks. Black has good common/uncommon removal spells, but white’s only good removal cards are rare. And then there are singular cards like Jeskai Revelation and Beza, the Bounding Spring that you can’t replace. ↩

  3. Plus some rares that I got lucky enough to open in booster packs—I have one copy of Marang River Regent and one Three Steps Ahead. ↩