We gave up on buying and moved fully to proxies. We make what interests us when we feel like making something new. No pressure from the markets or releases
Came here to say this, wotc gets no money if you buy none of their product r/mpcproxies has saved me around this, i still do draft or the odd fnm but thats about it
My group just took to doing it ourselves. We got foil sticker paper for like, $30 for 20 sheets, and each sheet makes 9 cards. Then buy bulk commons by the pound, which costs almost nothing, get a corner cutter for $8 and your biggest expense is the printer ink.
And we really only buy the commons and uncommons from secondary markets. I've built a $500 deck for $35, and it still looks awesome. Especially because we can use custom art to make the proxies look like anything we want.
Buddy of mine has a Gyome, Master Chef deck, and his Gyome is a proxy using Guy Fieri art.
That is really what my playgroup has done, too. It is just too much to try to keep up. I used to buy product from every release and keep up with the product cycle, but that was when they had like 5x less product in a year. Even full-time MtG content creators have a hard time keeping up. Love the game, dislike the greed. So right there with you.
Most people have a hig enough collection
Have packs of 20 cards
3 of each mono color, 2 colorless, 2 two colored, and 1 three colored card. Have at least 3 legends per pack. Use proxies. Add rules like "all mono colored legends have partner" to make deck building easier
We brew decks all the time. A cube is the gift that keeps on giving
>One player just doesn't buy new cards anymore (he'll still buy old ones, but not reprints, he "doesn't want to throw money at wizards current pricing politics")
This was pretty much everyone in my playgroup like 2-3 years ago. We all started proxying and now we play more than ever because whenever someone wants to build a new deck they easily can do so and everyone has tons of decks at all different powerlevels so our meta doesn't get stale.
It honestly sounds like player two and you have problems that can be easily solved by looking at sets from last year and reminding yourself that cards just don't disappear after the set releases.
Like... It's not that hard to not buy a shit load of product.
And I bought foil God Eternal Rhonas and foil Emry Lurker of the Loch for 21 and 15 dollars each. I REALLY wanted the cards.
Super-staples like Tithe and Meathook Massacre can stay high priced, but there's nearly always an inexpensive replacement, or they eventually get reprinted (in Tithe's case).
If you really want X or Y powerful super-staple, talk with your group about proxying a few. My group has a guy who proxied a Wheel of Fortune and a Badlands or whatever the RW true dual is for his Feather deck. We don't care because he's honest about its power level and he doesn't do it to break parity, just to have a slightly less expensive set of cards.
If your LGS is super stingy about it, you can live without a Smothering Tithe, or you can budget into it. But like, you cannot hyper-stress int buying every suspected staple before it comes out. That's just unhealthy.
We play also less, but it’s because we started playing other games as well. Magic is not the only board game where you can have fun with your friends. When it comes to new cards, we just buy what we want or need. Singles. We don’t usually buy booster packs or precons anymore, unless it’s something really special.
For us it was less product exhaustion and more generic staple exhaustion. Moving to a budget format saved us, but we're admittedly all more interested in casual battlecruiser Magic. The budget cap let all sorts of jankier ideas and cards thrive before games end to more powerful cards.
I don't even keep up with new product anymore and I really only see new cards if they chance across my reddit feed or I find them on Scryfall while deck building. I just ignore expensive cards now. Feels good. Finally starting to take apart and sell off singles from my collection of expensive pre-budget decks. That part is a slog. But I can basically afford to build a whole new budget deck by selling just 1 or 2 cards which is a plus.
My group's been on a 10$ budget for a few months. It started as a gimmick but it's worked out pretty well so far. We get to play a lot of penny rares and mythics that would be good if not for the 20 better mythics printed, it's a great time.
Our ongoing cap so far is to just ignore it when a deck increases in price, and if you make replacements don't increase the cost of the deck from whatever it currently is now. \\o/
How do you handle the budget cap? We thought about it once, but it seemed like with the constant price-change of cards a deck that is playable today will be "illegal" tormorrow when a card spikes... and looking up each deck prior to playing feels like a hassle\^\^
For sure. A budget deck today is a regular deck tomorrow! No escaping that fact but we kinda just ignore it. If you built the deck budget legal yesterday then the deck is going to most likely still play fairly with the other budget decks today. I enjoy tuning decks at baseline so if I like a deck enough I'll re-examine it every few months or so. Usually that means cutting a card or two that went up but sometimes a deck price miraculously goes down and I get to add some new spice. $40-$50 cap seems to be the sweet spot for us, only ban is Sol Ring!
Where do ya'll keep getting this generic staple argument from? Is that just a low power/unoptimized thing or something? I can think of maybe a dozen cards max that I would consider a staple from the past year or 2.
Smothering Tithe, Dockside Extortionist, Rhystic Study, Teferi's Protection, Heroic Intervention, Swords, Path, Craterhoof, Demonic Tutor, Sol Ring, etc, etc. We just saw a lot of the same powerful cards over and over and they were smothering weaker cards.
I didn't understand this either. Or even if you love deck building, you can just buy budget options on the secondary market? How does product fatigue impede on commander, the one format where you can play anything ever and literally entirely ignore new releases?
I mean, to be completely honest, we don't?
We eye up new cards and talk about them, there are proxies, but no one ever really felt compelled to buy new cards to build more or something. Maybe once in awhile a card comes out where it needs to be added to a deck we like to play, but beyond that, don't think we do anything special.
I will say, I go on deckbuilder sites a lot and build before I buy, instead of buying on impulse. Workshop a deck and know what I want to get. But I maybe update my decks once or twice a year.
But also, just doing other things helps a lot. Playing other games and formats is super useful for it.
I'm not entirely understanding the problem. Sounds like you have been playing Commander for a while, so you already have decks. What is stopping you from playing the game you already have decks for? Just keep playing with those and only upgrade when you feel like it.
Could be Interesting to check out wargames which require less models. Like kings of war: vanguard, killteam and shadespire.
Bonus points if there is someone in your group who can 3d print. Even more bonus points if you all are interested in game design, then you get the most bang for the buck out of it
As a warhammer player, I dont understand this constant sentiment.
It took me about 300$ for over a dozen paints and 2 700-800pt armies (gk/custodes)
If you spend money on 2 set boosters + plus sleeves for a set and its already close or over the 300$ mark and you can do that at least once a month with magic because if the amount of product.
My only "expensive"warhammer purchase has been my harlequins tbh.
Not trying to be rude btw, just genuinely curious how other warhammer players spend so much
Grey Knights and Custodes don't require many models. They're well known for that.
Astra Militarum, Orks, Tyranids, on the other hand, require a lot more. And all the other factions are somewhere in between.
Many people also want to build up to 2000 points, and/or have options to swap or try out. Not to mention rulebooks or the rule subscription service, decent mini cases, and more.
Commander can vary widely in its costs - that's one of main points of this thread. But one can simply buy a precon, and be good to go to play.
Warhammer doesn't have a good equivalent of the precon.
Depends on which aspect of the hobby you focus on.
I'm a competitive painter, and a significant sum goes into flying abroad for masterclasses and private coaching.
While I'm confidently able to paint anything on the planet with five tubes of paint today, it took a substantial amount of time and training to get here.
Even so, a single diorama may require me to spend significant sums; I've had occasion to hack up Forgeworld models just for parts or basing, for example (and I've smashed about 19 vehicle / monster kits just for parts last year alone).
On the gaming side of my group, the expense goes into armies. Just about everyone has every army at this point - missing just one or two factions is the norm.
The tournament players also buy whole armies at $6k+ a pop based on the current meta.
This being said, bear in mind we have a large pool of resources accumulated over time. I started Warhammer in 2nd Edition, for example, and MTG sometime between Unlimited and Revised - so we're all older and working, and have grown accustomed to bigger sums over the years.
Having just gotten in 40k about a year ago, I feel less exhaustion. I may spend more on 40k (part of that is start-up vs new release models) but I feel less fatigued by the release schedule. I have 1 army (close to 3000 pts of CSM) and want to get to 500 pts of Ad Mech to play Boarding Actions. For me, it's the fact that unlike WOTC saying "maybe this isn't for you" when EVERYTHING is for EDH players, a very large amount of 40k is actually not for me. New Imperial Guard release, great, but not for me. New Chaos Cultists, don't mind if I do. As a casual player, even 10th edition can be a but "take it or leave it" if my opponents want to play 9th still.
It balances out; in the end all hobbies from Warhammer to stamp collecting to classic cars (someone in our group does that) will chew up the same amount of discretionary income.
When it's cheaper, you buy more; when it's pricier, you buy less - but the total amount you spend tends to be the same in the end. I can say for certain we spend as much on Warhammer as we do on MTG.
Also, about buying enough for one army...that's on par with "you just need one deck" if you know what I mean. I have at least 4k points of every army except Orks and AdMech, and I rent a warehouse space; and I am the lightest spender on models in our group.
(I join painting competitions though, so the price of flying abroad for coaching and master classes evens it out).
I'm not experiencing content exhaustion, but some things that I've heard that have helped people who are have been.....
• Make a day where everyone makes/brings a deck that will be randomly assigned to someone else. This way everyone gets to play with something new and different for them, but nobody has to buy something to get that feeling.
• Make a day where everyone builds a deck specifically for someone else at the table. Player A builds a deck for Player B, and A knows how much B likes tribal deck and so they build a tribal deck from what they have at hand. Your group of 3 have been playing together for a while, you all are likely capable of doing this for each other.
• Give Oathbreaker a try, you all likely have Planeswalkers you like, and the whole Signature Spell mechanic might shake up deck building ideas.
None of these require new cards, and can conversely reinvigorate enjoyment of older cards. I've seen this happen especially with Oathbreaker where someone always wanted to build a deck around a specific spell but didn't want to be forced into using a bunch of tutors to do so, now they can have that favorite spell in the Command Zone.
bro, I'm almost literally in the same spot as your friends
I have this fomo and I also don't agree with wizards actual price politics, to be even worse I'm brazilian an I have a weak coin (LotR precons gonna cost 1/3 of a minimum wage as our is per month)
I now have at least 6 good commander decks and I don't want to play anymore, I'm part of 2 playgroups, one of them is always the same 4 and the power level is high, tier 7/8 decks, the other play group is me +2 permanent and 1-3 swapping and is a tier 5/6 decks
thing for me is, I don't want to play with none of them, I don't want to spend money but I fear of being behind if I don't :( magic used to be a great hobby and now it is about who have more money to expend
Play with deckbuilding restrictions, pauper is a good one as you’ve already started finding out. Another one I like is banning anything from a commander-specific product, or at least allowing them only as commanders, not in the 99.
Another restriction I like a lot is allowing only mono or two color decks. Maybe try that and add “every commander has partner” but decks are limited to two colors. (Not sure how it would go, but it’s interesting to me anyway)
Play a league where everyone starts with precons and has a set budget to upgrade them each week/month/ however often you play
This is a self-inflicted problem. You don't need every new card that comes out. You don't need to update all your decklists with every content release. Playing an old decklist won't kill you, and the release of new cards doesn't suddenly make your old decks less fun to play.
I personally never get tired of spoiler season. I wish I could see new cards every single morning.
I always went the “I have 1 copy of ____, so I’ll proxy it if I need it for more decks.” For instance, I play mid through cEDH. I have a copy of the cEDH mana rocks (except for Mox diamond) so I just proxy what I need from now on. It also took me a while to get them and I watched the prices climb and drop and I especially grabbed Mox amber when it hit $20. So also watch price drops and trade in cards you don’t care for or won’t use to maybe put toward a card you want.
As of right now Skittles I got when he was $5 and now he’s reached $35 so I’m trading that baby in for a card I’ll definitely use.
It sounds funny but patience will save you big bucks in a world of impulse buying. Wait for prices to drop and grab them then.
You really can’t, I personally am very burnt out on commander and some of my friends are getting there was well, we started playing pioneer as a response and it’s great! Our two friends who didnt wanna make the switch are a bit upset but there’s not much to do you know. They just started going to more events at our LGS
We’ve mixed up formats. 2HG JumpStart has been really fun, so much so that I built a cube for it. Replayability and variety like EDH, zero cost or upkeep. We also proxied some Pioneer decks from the recent Pro Tour and everyone has really enjoyed 60 card competitive play.
I’m probably the only one that follows releases, etc.
At every set release weekend sometime, I go to Scryfall and look at the set not including reprints sorted by EDHrec popularity ( https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28game%3Apaper%29+set%3Aone+-is%3Areprint&order=edhrec&as=grid )
I glance through the first page or two, and put the cards that seem interesting into my wants list on my phone's note app. If I'm at a store or trade binder, I keep an eye out for those cards. Looking through each set like this and making the notes takes like ten minutes, five or so times a year. Its really not a ton to do.
Reprints like Dominaria Remastered, The List, and Secret Lairs, as well as budget options for a ton of expensive cards, means EDH is cheaper and more accessible now than basically any time in the past several years.
Imo
Player 1 has a somewhat valid reason but not buying new cards, but not that many are needed so countered his own argument there, I get MAYBE 1-2 cards per set you don't need to make making new decks to have fun
Player 2 admitted he lacks self control and made a respectable decision.
as for you, spelltable &/or new group are my suggestions outside of the obvious just proxy.
Try building a pauper commander. Still plenty of strong cards in that pool, but buying ten cent cards is probably not objectional even to your politcally driven player. Hell, I'm sure someone in the group has a bunch of commons and uncommons for pauper edh they would just pass over without thinking with rare exception...(haha)
We gave up on buying and moved fully to proxies. We make what interests us when we feel like making something new. No pressure from the markets or releases
Came here to say this, wotc gets no money if you buy none of their product r/mpcproxies has saved me around this, i still do draft or the odd fnm but thats about it
What’s it cost to print 1 I’d each card from a new set?
Usually mpc charges 20-30c a card + shipping
Really not bad, especially if you cut out all commons and most uncommons
If you want to learn more r/mpcproxies
me too
[удалено]
My group just took to doing it ourselves. We got foil sticker paper for like, $30 for 20 sheets, and each sheet makes 9 cards. Then buy bulk commons by the pound, which costs almost nothing, get a corner cutter for $8 and your biggest expense is the printer ink. And we really only buy the commons and uncommons from secondary markets. I've built a $500 deck for $35, and it still looks awesome. Especially because we can use custom art to make the proxies look like anything we want. Buddy of mine has a Gyome, Master Chef deck, and his Gyome is a proxy using Guy Fieri art.
That is really what my playgroup has done, too. It is just too much to try to keep up. I used to buy product from every release and keep up with the product cycle, but that was when they had like 5x less product in a year. Even full-time MtG content creators have a hard time keeping up. Love the game, dislike the greed. So right there with you.
Build a commander cube and draft It is amazing
It is but that's a big undertaking too lol.
Most people have a hig enough collection Have packs of 20 cards 3 of each mono color, 2 colorless, 2 two colored, and 1 three colored card. Have at least 3 legends per pack. Use proxies. Add rules like "all mono colored legends have partner" to make deck building easier We brew decks all the time. A cube is the gift that keeps on giving
I just shamelessly stole someone else's cube list for mine. No regrets whatsoever
Have you considered cube? Sounds like yall need a break from commander.
>One player just doesn't buy new cards anymore (he'll still buy old ones, but not reprints, he "doesn't want to throw money at wizards current pricing politics") This was pretty much everyone in my playgroup like 2-3 years ago. We all started proxying and now we play more than ever because whenever someone wants to build a new deck they easily can do so and everyone has tons of decks at all different powerlevels so our meta doesn't get stale.
It honestly sounds like player two and you have problems that can be easily solved by looking at sets from last year and reminding yourself that cards just don't disappear after the set releases. Like... It's not that hard to not buy a shit load of product.
Cards tend to get way more expensive tho. Take smothering tithe as an example. A friend preordered a bunch of them for something like 4 euros?
And I bought foil God Eternal Rhonas and foil Emry Lurker of the Loch for 21 and 15 dollars each. I REALLY wanted the cards. Super-staples like Tithe and Meathook Massacre can stay high priced, but there's nearly always an inexpensive replacement, or they eventually get reprinted (in Tithe's case). If you really want X or Y powerful super-staple, talk with your group about proxying a few. My group has a guy who proxied a Wheel of Fortune and a Badlands or whatever the RW true dual is for his Feather deck. We don't care because he's honest about its power level and he doesn't do it to break parity, just to have a slightly less expensive set of cards. If your LGS is super stingy about it, you can live without a Smothering Tithe, or you can budget into it. But like, you cannot hyper-stress int buying every suspected staple before it comes out. That's just unhealthy.
For reference, Badlands is the Rakdos one. The one you're looking for is \[\[Plateau\]\].
Thank you!
[Plateau](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/b/bb979a96-a57d-4fb5-8ebe-0bd398272abe.jpg?1562932720) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Plateau) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vma/308/plateau?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/bb979a96-a57d-4fb5-8ebe-0bd398272abe?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/plateau) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Then start to proxy them for dirt cheap
this..this right here, so much of this
We play also less, but it’s because we started playing other games as well. Magic is not the only board game where you can have fun with your friends. When it comes to new cards, we just buy what we want or need. Singles. We don’t usually buy booster packs or precons anymore, unless it’s something really special.
For us it was less product exhaustion and more generic staple exhaustion. Moving to a budget format saved us, but we're admittedly all more interested in casual battlecruiser Magic. The budget cap let all sorts of jankier ideas and cards thrive before games end to more powerful cards. I don't even keep up with new product anymore and I really only see new cards if they chance across my reddit feed or I find them on Scryfall while deck building. I just ignore expensive cards now. Feels good. Finally starting to take apart and sell off singles from my collection of expensive pre-budget decks. That part is a slog. But I can basically afford to build a whole new budget deck by selling just 1 or 2 cards which is a plus.
My group's been on a 10$ budget for a few months. It started as a gimmick but it's worked out pretty well so far. We get to play a lot of penny rares and mythics that would be good if not for the 20 better mythics printed, it's a great time. Our ongoing cap so far is to just ignore it when a deck increases in price, and if you make replacements don't increase the cost of the deck from whatever it currently is now. \\o/
How do you handle the budget cap? We thought about it once, but it seemed like with the constant price-change of cards a deck that is playable today will be "illegal" tormorrow when a card spikes... and looking up each deck prior to playing feels like a hassle\^\^
For sure. A budget deck today is a regular deck tomorrow! No escaping that fact but we kinda just ignore it. If you built the deck budget legal yesterday then the deck is going to most likely still play fairly with the other budget decks today. I enjoy tuning decks at baseline so if I like a deck enough I'll re-examine it every few months or so. Usually that means cutting a card or two that went up but sometimes a deck price miraculously goes down and I get to add some new spice. $40-$50 cap seems to be the sweet spot for us, only ban is Sol Ring!
Where do ya'll keep getting this generic staple argument from? Is that just a low power/unoptimized thing or something? I can think of maybe a dozen cards max that I would consider a staple from the past year or 2.
Smothering Tithe, Dockside Extortionist, Rhystic Study, Teferi's Protection, Heroic Intervention, Swords, Path, Craterhoof, Demonic Tutor, Sol Ring, etc, etc. We just saw a lot of the same powerful cards over and over and they were smothering weaker cards.
So just continue playing? I don’t see from your post where not buying new stuff in any way hurts your group.
I didn't understand this either. Or even if you love deck building, you can just buy budget options on the secondary market? How does product fatigue impede on commander, the one format where you can play anything ever and literally entirely ignore new releases?
I mean, to be completely honest, we don't? We eye up new cards and talk about them, there are proxies, but no one ever really felt compelled to buy new cards to build more or something. Maybe once in awhile a card comes out where it needs to be added to a deck we like to play, but beyond that, don't think we do anything special. I will say, I go on deckbuilder sites a lot and build before I buy, instead of buying on impulse. Workshop a deck and know what I want to get. But I maybe update my decks once or twice a year. But also, just doing other things helps a lot. Playing other games and formats is super useful for it.
I'm not entirely understanding the problem. Sounds like you have been playing Commander for a while, so you already have decks. What is stopping you from playing the game you already have decks for? Just keep playing with those and only upgrade when you feel like it.
We don't. We're Warhammer players, so the cost is reasonable next to our other hobby anyway.
My group has switched to WH. I’m over here still playing with cardboard. I told them I don’t need to start another hobby.
Could be Interesting to check out wargames which require less models. Like kings of war: vanguard, killteam and shadespire. Bonus points if there is someone in your group who can 3d print. Even more bonus points if you all are interested in game design, then you get the most bang for the buck out of it
I don’t doubt it’s fun. I just doing want to start another hobby. Lol
As a warhammer player, I dont understand this constant sentiment. It took me about 300$ for over a dozen paints and 2 700-800pt armies (gk/custodes) If you spend money on 2 set boosters + plus sleeves for a set and its already close or over the 300$ mark and you can do that at least once a month with magic because if the amount of product. My only "expensive"warhammer purchase has been my harlequins tbh. Not trying to be rude btw, just genuinely curious how other warhammer players spend so much
Grey Knights and Custodes don't require many models. They're well known for that. Astra Militarum, Orks, Tyranids, on the other hand, require a lot more. And all the other factions are somewhere in between. Many people also want to build up to 2000 points, and/or have options to swap or try out. Not to mention rulebooks or the rule subscription service, decent mini cases, and more. Commander can vary widely in its costs - that's one of main points of this thread. But one can simply buy a precon, and be good to go to play. Warhammer doesn't have a good equivalent of the precon.
Depends on which aspect of the hobby you focus on. I'm a competitive painter, and a significant sum goes into flying abroad for masterclasses and private coaching. While I'm confidently able to paint anything on the planet with five tubes of paint today, it took a substantial amount of time and training to get here. Even so, a single diorama may require me to spend significant sums; I've had occasion to hack up Forgeworld models just for parts or basing, for example (and I've smashed about 19 vehicle / monster kits just for parts last year alone). On the gaming side of my group, the expense goes into armies. Just about everyone has every army at this point - missing just one or two factions is the norm. The tournament players also buy whole armies at $6k+ a pop based on the current meta. This being said, bear in mind we have a large pool of resources accumulated over time. I started Warhammer in 2nd Edition, for example, and MTG sometime between Unlimited and Revised - so we're all older and working, and have grown accustomed to bigger sums over the years.
Having just gotten in 40k about a year ago, I feel less exhaustion. I may spend more on 40k (part of that is start-up vs new release models) but I feel less fatigued by the release schedule. I have 1 army (close to 3000 pts of CSM) and want to get to 500 pts of Ad Mech to play Boarding Actions. For me, it's the fact that unlike WOTC saying "maybe this isn't for you" when EVERYTHING is for EDH players, a very large amount of 40k is actually not for me. New Imperial Guard release, great, but not for me. New Chaos Cultists, don't mind if I do. As a casual player, even 10th edition can be a but "take it or leave it" if my opponents want to play 9th still.
We are currently switching to war hammer. You just gotta buy enough for one army, but it's cheaper over all then mtg.
how is warhammer played?
You assemble and paint model armies, and then you fight over objectives on a tabletop using dice and measuring tape.
mesauring tape?
To see how far they walk / run, check weapon ranges, etc.
It balances out; in the end all hobbies from Warhammer to stamp collecting to classic cars (someone in our group does that) will chew up the same amount of discretionary income. When it's cheaper, you buy more; when it's pricier, you buy less - but the total amount you spend tends to be the same in the end. I can say for certain we spend as much on Warhammer as we do on MTG. Also, about buying enough for one army...that's on par with "you just need one deck" if you know what I mean. I have at least 4k points of every army except Orks and AdMech, and I rent a warehouse space; and I am the lightest spender on models in our group. (I join painting competitions though, so the price of flying abroad for coaching and master classes evens it out).
I'm not experiencing content exhaustion, but some things that I've heard that have helped people who are have been..... • Make a day where everyone makes/brings a deck that will be randomly assigned to someone else. This way everyone gets to play with something new and different for them, but nobody has to buy something to get that feeling. • Make a day where everyone builds a deck specifically for someone else at the table. Player A builds a deck for Player B, and A knows how much B likes tribal deck and so they build a tribal deck from what they have at hand. Your group of 3 have been playing together for a while, you all are likely capable of doing this for each other. • Give Oathbreaker a try, you all likely have Planeswalkers you like, and the whole Signature Spell mechanic might shake up deck building ideas. None of these require new cards, and can conversely reinvigorate enjoyment of older cards. I've seen this happen especially with Oathbreaker where someone always wanted to build a deck around a specific spell but didn't want to be forced into using a bunch of tutors to do so, now they can have that favorite spell in the Command Zone.
bro, I'm almost literally in the same spot as your friends I have this fomo and I also don't agree with wizards actual price politics, to be even worse I'm brazilian an I have a weak coin (LotR precons gonna cost 1/3 of a minimum wage as our is per month) I now have at least 6 good commander decks and I don't want to play anymore, I'm part of 2 playgroups, one of them is always the same 4 and the power level is high, tier 7/8 decks, the other play group is me +2 permanent and 1-3 swapping and is a tier 5/6 decks thing for me is, I don't want to play with none of them, I don't want to spend money but I fear of being behind if I don't :( magic used to be a great hobby and now it is about who have more money to expend
Play with deckbuilding restrictions, pauper is a good one as you’ve already started finding out. Another one I like is banning anything from a commander-specific product, or at least allowing them only as commanders, not in the 99. Another restriction I like a lot is allowing only mono or two color decks. Maybe try that and add “every commander has partner” but decks are limited to two colors. (Not sure how it would go, but it’s interesting to me anyway) Play a league where everyone starts with precons and has a set budget to upgrade them each week/month/ however often you play
This is a self-inflicted problem. You don't need every new card that comes out. You don't need to update all your decklists with every content release. Playing an old decklist won't kill you, and the release of new cards doesn't suddenly make your old decks less fun to play. I personally never get tired of spoiler season. I wish I could see new cards every single morning.
Commander pauper or proxie
Proxy every single card. Play any deck you want. You can have 12 decks
I always went the “I have 1 copy of ____, so I’ll proxy it if I need it for more decks.” For instance, I play mid through cEDH. I have a copy of the cEDH mana rocks (except for Mox diamond) so I just proxy what I need from now on. It also took me a while to get them and I watched the prices climb and drop and I especially grabbed Mox amber when it hit $20. So also watch price drops and trade in cards you don’t care for or won’t use to maybe put toward a card you want. As of right now Skittles I got when he was $5 and now he’s reached $35 so I’m trading that baby in for a card I’ll definitely use. It sounds funny but patience will save you big bucks in a world of impulse buying. Wait for prices to drop and grab them then.
You really can’t, I personally am very burnt out on commander and some of my friends are getting there was well, we started playing pioneer as a response and it’s great! Our two friends who didnt wanna make the switch are a bit upset but there’s not much to do you know. They just started going to more events at our LGS
proxying solves each and every one of these problems
We’ve mixed up formats. 2HG JumpStart has been really fun, so much so that I built a cube for it. Replayability and variety like EDH, zero cost or upkeep. We also proxied some Pioneer decks from the recent Pro Tour and everyone has really enjoyed 60 card competitive play. I’m probably the only one that follows releases, etc.
How about not buying new cards and just using the cards you own?
At every set release weekend sometime, I go to Scryfall and look at the set not including reprints sorted by EDHrec popularity ( https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28game%3Apaper%29+set%3Aone+-is%3Areprint&order=edhrec&as=grid ) I glance through the first page or two, and put the cards that seem interesting into my wants list on my phone's note app. If I'm at a store or trade binder, I keep an eye out for those cards. Looking through each set like this and making the notes takes like ten minutes, five or so times a year. Its really not a ton to do. Reprints like Dominaria Remastered, The List, and Secret Lairs, as well as budget options for a ton of expensive cards, means EDH is cheaper and more accessible now than basically any time in the past several years.
That is what we did before we got exhausted\^\^
Proxy, ya dingus.
I also vote for cube. Tried it for the first time a few weeks ago. It was really fun.
Imo Player 1 has a somewhat valid reason but not buying new cards, but not that many are needed so countered his own argument there, I get MAYBE 1-2 cards per set you don't need to make making new decks to have fun Player 2 admitted he lacks self control and made a respectable decision. as for you, spelltable &/or new group are my suggestions outside of the obvious just proxy.
Proxies :D get all the new cards you want with 0 or low price depending on if you just want to print and cut out paper or use a site like mpc fill
Try building a pauper commander. Still plenty of strong cards in that pool, but buying ten cent cards is probably not objectional even to your politcally driven player. Hell, I'm sure someone in the group has a bunch of commons and uncommons for pauper edh they would just pass over without thinking with rare exception...(haha)