What is a Budget Deck? (Chang)

A budget deck is a deck that costs less than $100. Plain and simple.

But why you should play budget and how to do so is a bit more complicated.

We all need some money...

First, card games are expensive. It's true in all cases. You're gonna have to spend a significant amount of money to play the game. And some people just can't or aren't willing to spend that much on a hobby, especially those younger players or players that don't have a steady income.

Spending $200-500 on any hobby is just ridiculous. Especially when all you're buying is glorified, shiny pieces of cardboard. Budgetfighting lets you spend a much smaller amount of money than others, while still being able to enjoy the game just as much, if not more. Imagine if you could play Overwatch for one-fourth of the price, but with slightly worse graphics. It's not like the graphics are gonna kill you, so why not just get it for cheap?

There's also a stereotype that Budget isn't Competitive. While yes, you're limited on options and the you lose access to a bunch of card quality because you are conserving budget, a well built Budget deck can compete just as much as any meta deck like, say, 72-Pillars Asmodai. Most people may hear that you're a budget player and think, "Oh wow, this is gonna be easy". And you're gonna prove them wrong.

That answers why but now the question of how.

There are three ways of building a budget deck.

1. Take a meta or expensive deck and make budget cuts
2. Find cheap RRR or RR cards, or R, U, and C cards that you can build around
3. Upgrading a Trial Deck

I prefer the second and third options, since they tend to be a lot easier to build and much more effective, but for skilled enough players and deckbuilders the first ain't to bad of an option either.

You also have to keep in mind what you're gunning for: Casual or Competitive. Obviously casual is much easier to do, since you aren't focused on winning but instead on having fun. You can leave out all the hard-to-get staples and still have a hella fun time with the game. Competitive, however, is focused on winning. It's much more difficult to do this because of all the cards that you are going to have to leave out because it's too expensive. And there are just some cards that straightup can't be left out of a deck if playing competitive. Divine Dragon Creation and Blue Dragon Shield, for example, are both staples and must runs in their respective worlds and it's really hard for competitive players to keep up without them.

About the three ways of building budget decks, I'll be putting examples of them here.

So first, making budget cuts to an expensive deck. For example's sake, I'll be using Fifth Omnis.

Your typical list looks something like this:

4x Hellfire Sword Doble
4x Fifth Omni Dragon Lord, Drum
4x Mountain Crush Gon
4x Merak "SD"
4x Flame Summoner Rando
2x Sand Staff Arkaid

4x Green Dragon Shield
4x Blue Dragon Shield
3x Dragowisdom, Knowledge of the Fifth Omni
3x Dragoguts
3x Dragodesperate
2x Dragon Change

4x Emperor Fang
2x Dragoemperor

3x Gargantua Punisher!!

Okay, so the obvious money cards in the list are BR/SECRET only Fifth Omni Drum, Merak "SD", and Blue Dragon Shield. The rest of the deck is pretty cheap R and below, so it shouldn't be too much of a worry for that. With Fifth Omni Drum, Merak "SD", and Blue Dragon Shield taken out for budget purposes you now have 12 slots to fill. There are still plenty of good Fifth Omni monsters that could replace them like Arale, Meglax, and Suu. And to replace Blue Dragon Shield there's plenty of other nulls out there like Lord's Dragon Shield and Fifth Omni Great Dragon Shield to fill its hole.

Final build with budget cuts could look something like this:

4x Hellfire Sword Doble
4x Dark Arms Suu
4x Mountain Crush Gon
3x Wind Bow Meglax
3x Flame Summoner Rando
2x Sand Staff Arkaid
2x Disintegrate Arale

4x Green Dragon Shield
4x Lord's Dragon Shield
3x Dragowisdom, Knowledge of the Fifth Omni
3x Dragoguts
3x Dragodesperate
2x Dragon Change

4x Emperor Fang
2x Dragoemperor

3x Gargantua Punisher!!

Bam. You get to play Fifth Omnis and save $250 in the process. Sure, the exact numbers could be optimized much further, but whatever. Again, I only recommend doing budget cuts after you've had some experience making your own decks and with the game in general.

Next up is finding cheap RRR and RR, or R, U, and C cards to build around. I highly prefer this method of building budget decks, because of how much freedom it grants. This method is also usually more efficient and effective than the first and third methods.


As my example here, I'll be talking about Gadolgoma, a new U from Annihilate! Great Demonic Dragon. He's both a Danger World card and a Dungeon World card, so there's multiple ways you can approach him. In Dungeon, you can support him with a few cheap Demon Lord cards like World End, which is amazing with Double Attack on Gadolgoma, and Heat Blade Joker who can give Gadolgoma more survivability. In Danger, you can throw him onto the side to make a pressure column with a huge Crit weapon like Ricedau or Dangerous Cradle and there's at least some good Duel Dragon support for him.

The last method, Upgrading a Trial Deck, works similarly to budget cuts, but instead of cutting expensive cards you remove crap for better stuff. There's an excellent page written by Blaise which you can see here. Upgrading a Trial Deck is also the most convenient way of building budget and can be a strong base for a deck for those who can't buy new cards as much or don't get the chance to go to locals as much.

Well, that's my explanation on why and how to play budget. Welcome to Budget Buddyfight!

-Robot Victor Chang