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Splinter Twin ain't budget any more, bro.  At 9 bucks a pop, you're better off just getting the fetchlands.

Been brainstorming what combo goes where... please help me and tell me what your thoughts are

Twin – mono white, RUG, Kudoth, Eld Green, elves?,

IT’S A Trap – Valakut, vengevine, boros, RUG (?),

Straight burn – Vamps, Cawblade. BUG, Elves, Aggro infect, B/U infect control, UW control, Pyro

With every article of yours I read, I always wonder if you have any idea about what it means to do a budget deckbuilding article. I don't want to just come on here and flame, as I hate when people do that. So I'd honestly just like to put a few questions forth.

In terms of budget, it seems you have no system like people that have come before you. It also feels like you don't check prices. In this article alone you told people to play the Splinter twin combo out of the sideboard, but Splinter Twin is now 9/10 dollars a pop due to an increase in demand for this card. Did you bother to look up prices prior to writing this article? I Edit at a Finanial website, and I know I would never let my writers talk about cards this far off base when it came to prices, but my website has different priorities than this. As far as I'm concerned though, a 9 dollar card does not fall into budget range. As someone else before me said, you'd be better off getting the fetches for the deck than getting splinter twins unless you already had them.

And this isn't the first time pricing has been an issue for your budget articles. You write about pauper on occasion, but it is very clear you don't bother to check and see how much these cards are on mtgo, the format where these are played. Many staple commons in the pauper format are 5-10 dollar cards because of limited supply and huge demand, and building a pauper deck does not immediatly make the deck a budget choice. It's become a competetive enough format that card prices are rising to meet demand and decks are becoming over what I would perceive as the threshold for a budget deck. You cannot assume that this format is cheap because its all commons, write an article and not worry about pricing. Your intended audience doesn't have the ability to dump 50-80 dollars on a deck like the pauper storm deck you built a few weeks ago. Unless I misunterstood where you were getting all of your singles from. When talking about an mtgo only format, you should stick to tix pricing, and doing a search for pauper cards will show you just how expensive they are anymore.

My other large concern is that you don't really encourage deckbuilding so much as say, "Here's a deck, give it a shot". For me, watching a deck evolve over time through trial and error was always the draw to this style of article. It taught players how to build decks instead of giving them decks to try out, and that was beneficial to players who didn't have a budget as well as those that did. You do revisit decks on occasion, but its often just to add new cards into them when a new set releases or to update the deck when the format it was in rotates. This isn't instructing anyone on how to build so much as to give them a deck and let them fumble their own way through it. Showing slow progression of a deck into a cohesive whole can help people who are new to the game to get a better understanding of how to put something together. As it stands, there is a bar to entry that your readers have to meet. They need to be able to play at a certain level to get any kind of help from this deck, and they need to be willing to copy someones 75, which I always felt wasn't the intended audience of an article like this.

As for your game analysis, you typically do somewhere between 1 and 3 games, with little to no changes to your original deck design. I could understand if your goal was to let your readers evolve the deck their own way, but you often finish with a statement like "This deck is good against such and such decks in the metagame, and therefore is a good call for your local fnm". This may be true, but most people that are reading this article probably don't have the time to test the deck themself (And would therefore benefit from a greater number of varied mathcup analysis) or don't care about playing in a competetive environment. You mash you deck up against standard top tier, and always seem to win the majority of your games. It just feels like we don't see enough trial and error and just get the all upside view of your deckbuilding.

I may be completely off base, but that's why I put up this post. I'd rather talk about what I see as the problems then get on here and rant. If I can be proven wrong, then that's fine with me. I more want to start a discussion than anything.

"It just isn't possible to play games with cards that don't exist."

What, is your printer out of ink?
Seriously, you're the budget writer... you can play with proxies...