Inspired by the hidden gem Foster (which would later be reprinted in a Commander deck), this series looks at the cheaper side of Magic. The goal of this series of articles is to find a slate of cards for your deck-building needs that all clock in at $1 or less here at CoolStuffInc.com. These cards are easy to acquire, and they all bring some strong game. I have fourteen cards below to consider for your deck-building fun.

Vile Consumption — If you are playing a U/B deck that is light on the creatures, give Vile Consumption a serious looksee. It has a very interesting points. First of all, all creatures cost 1 life a turn to stick around, so decks that spew out a lot of chaff, such as token decks, are going to be on the wrong side of this card. In Commander, people may feel comfortable upkeeping creatures that they really shouldn’t and thus losing more life than they expect. Meanwhile, you won’t care as much about paying to keep a key one or two creatures on the battlefield. This is the perfect card for several different archetypes that use your colors but have few creatures at any given point in time (reanimation and control spring to mind).

I’m sorry; did you say that you wanted a decklist? Okay!

Here’s a proof of concept decklist using Vile Consumption in a Dimir-based control deck.

Vile Dimir ? Casual | Abe Sargent

• Creatures (8)
• 2 Graveblade Marauder
• 2 Guiltfeeder
• 4 Shadowmage Infiltrator

• Spells (26)
• 2 Capsize
• 2 Dismiss
• 2 Dissipate
• 2 Recoil
• 2 Spite // Malice
• 4 Counterspell
• 4 Fact or Fiction
• 4 Silence the Believers
• 2 Vile Consumption
• 2 Dimir Signet

• Lands (26)
• 9 Island
• 9 Swamp
• 4 Creeping Tar Pit
• 4 Dimir Aqueduct

Buy This Deck

The goal with this deck is to grab control of the board and then to use the Guiltfeeder and Graveblade Marauder to win. We have Shadowmage Infiltrators for card-draw and then some Creeping Tar Pits as a different option. With counters and removal, and even a touch of bounce, this deck seeks to control things until it’s ready to win the game. You can see how Vile Consumption slides in nicely.

Now, I can’t do that for every card here, obviously, but it gives you a chance to see how each of these cards can really play well in decks you already have built!

Reprocess — Black likes to trade one resource for another, and nothing is better than converting permanents you don’t need into cards in the hand, right? Right! Many black cards make tokens. Sacrificing a Sengir Autocrat and its Serf tokens becomes a palette of card-draw, and it only grows from there! You can churn things into cards with this good ol’ thing. When you play it, don’t forget to sacrifice all of your extra lands (if you have eight lands in play and your deck really only needs five, in addition to the six or seven nonlands you sacrifice, also sacrifice three lands to increase your chance of drawing enough lands to replace them—plus business cards, too).

Safeguard — Just invest 3 mana to prevent the combat damage a creature will do. It’s like Kor Haven, but repeatable, and you can use it to save opposing players from damage in order to keep them alive to use them as a resource.

Righteous War — There are several decks that can really benefit from the Righteous War. It’s a great tool in a deck built around black damage-dealing cards like Pestilence and Withering Wisps. It can protect any commander you have that is both white and black. As users of Animar, Soul of Elements will tell you, the vast majority of targeted removal is either white or black—protection from both is very hard to crack. It makes a leader like Teysa, Envoy of Ghosts even harder to deal with while amping up the nasty level of something fast and powerful like Zurgo Helmsmasher. This is a card with some surprising levels of depth.

Pyromancy — I’ve mentioned this before, and I still don’t understand how this card is a bulk rare. It’s too good in too many shells! If you like dealing damage and you draw stuff you want in your graveyard (in a shell like reamination or ramp), you have a great engine. Wed it to things like the Eldrazi.

Reparations — Forget using something to give yourself or your creatures shroud and hexproof to keep them running—just draw cards anytime anyone tries to target you or yours instead! (You can draw the card and then counter the spell that targets it.) You like drawing cards, right?

Workhorse — I still find a lot of deck projects in which Workhorse is a really good card. A full two decks in my 100 Combo Decks project here were built around it. It’s always been a great way of using and abusing a variety of decks. A simple Doubling Season gives you 8 mana when you play it (for 6 mana), and you can recur that over and over again. From Recurring Nightmare to Krark-Clan Ironworks, there are a lot of great ways to harness the power of a Workhorse.

Ornate Kanzashi — In these days, we now know how good the new red mechanic of exiling a card and being able to play it until the end of the turn can be. We’ve seen it on Chandra, Pyromaster and Commune with Lava. One of the issues is that people often don’t want to exile their own stuff in case they can’t immediately play the card in question. Did we forget about this admittedly forgettable card from Kamigawa block? Just pay 2 mana and exile a card from the top of an opponent’s deck. Want to cast it? You can! The cost is colorless and cheap enough to be used in a variety of decks, and the card is beyond bulk and easily acquirable. (This is also an answer to opponents’ cards that stack the top of their decks with something good.)

Etherium-Horn Sorcerer — Speaking about getting spells for free, cascade has always been used to give some spells and creatures the extra gas they need to really jack up the power of cards in your deck. This guy has a few things going for it. First, it can cascade anything of 5 or fewer mana, giving you the ability to find a really good free card. Second, it can self-bounce to protect it or to cast and cascade yet again. Finally, it’s an artifact creature, in case you care, and a Minotaur, in case you care. (Both have uses in Izzet decks.) This is a great support card that you can pick up on the cheap for a lot of value.

Ohran Viper — Green doesn’t always have card-draw on creatures that evoke the classic Ophidian. Getting a cheap body that has a variant of deathtouch doesn’t suck. There was a time it was so hotly desired that it was worth serious cash. You can pick them up quite cheaply today. And they still draw you cards.

Kuldotha Phoenix — There are a number of artifact decks that include red in their colors. The Phoenix’s metalcraft ability to self-recur only uses colorless mana, so it’s easier to use in multicolored builds—such as Commander! The ability to bring back a dead Phoenix after it dies by recurring it gives your deck some useful survivability. That’s vital to long-term success at the kitchen table. Whether your board is cleared due to mass removal, blocking, or whatever, you can bring it back during your upkeep in order to keep on playing the game. It’s a strong card that’s pretty cheap, too.

Jaya Ballard, Task Mage — Ever since Jaya was printed, she has brought three interesting options to folks. You can discard a card from your hand to Incinerate, Inferno, or Active Volcano. So if you want to blow up blue stuff, shoot things for damage, or clear the board out, Jaya Ballard scales well because she is useful in many scenarios. In fact, her three abilities seem to presage the Planeswalkers later on. As any user of a ’Walker knows there’s a lot of value in the sheer flexibility of having multiple abilities available to be used turn after turn. Jaya Ballard requires mana and a discard, but you can activate any ability immediately without worrying about counters. So take Jaya for a spin.

Dark Impostor — There are a lot of advantages for a card like Dark Impostor. You can churn 6 mana into it as you have and then exile creatures. Considering how many black decks are built around making a ton of mana via cards like Cabal Coffers and Caged Sun, it seems to be a really nasty card to spin mana into creature removal. The fact that it exiles the creatures is even better—it’s permanent. The exiled creatures also make the Impostor bigger and bigger. And then you gain activated abilities of exiled targets, too, so this is the gift that keeps on going. Consider Commander: In this format, you can play less mana to exile a creature than a person will spend replaying it (after the Commander tax grows big enough, even Isamaru, Hound of Konda will eventually become too expensive).

Today, I looked at fourteen cards that are all a buck or less at CoolStuffInc.com and that fit a variety of colors, archetypes, and needs. I hope you found one or three cards in here to push your own decks!