Magic: The Price of Cards

The internet is starting to fill up with M12 standard deck lists. Until some major events happen there's no knowing what's actually ok and what's complete jank but seeing a bunch of decklists at least gets the brain churning again. I keep seeing decks and thinking 'wow, that's awesome!' and I'm sure a lot of that stuff just doesn't work well enough. (I have a feeling the birthing pod deck from last week might be one of those.) 

I saw one deck today that seemed really awesome. Lots of planeswalkers coupled with an armageddon + wrath combination card! If you stay alive long enough you basically reset the game with you having planeswalkers and them having nothing at all. Super cool! Super powerful! tcgplayer.com has some sort of database querying going on where it pulls up prices for each of the cards in the deck, and that's where I found this particular deck. I don't really have any cards, either online or offline, and my go to for borrowing cards also stopped playing. So to really practice up I'm probably going to have to buy the deck online and in card form. The 'high' price for this deck? $679.22. What!?! Double that and I'd need to come third to break even. I can probably resell the cards after the event for a reasonable fraction of the price (except the Noble Hierarch's I had to buy 2 years ago say I'm too lazy to do so) but that's still an awful lot. I wish there was a deck rental service...

To be clear, I want to win and I am certainly willing to pay what it costs to have the best deck for me. If Jace wasn't banned and I needed 4 to compete I'd buy 4 of them. But this format is pretty wide open and the planeswalker deck mentioned above might not even be a top tier deck. It certainly isn't the clear best. I think I can safely fail to practice with it, pick a cheaper but still awesome option, and be satisfied.

I also stumbled into a comparatively cheap deck that seemed pretty sweet. It runs 11 creatures and 21 pieces of equipment. One of the creatures is Kemba, who gives you a 2/2 during your upkeep for each equipment card on her. Most of the price of this deck is lands which rate to be useful in the future assuming I start actually playing again. It may 'just' put dudes into play and attack with them, but at least it can put lots of dudes into play at once. I'll take any chance to bust out the Bob Probert card as a token!