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Well, I do have a greivance. BoaB has always been one of my favorite articles to read every week. Always. I was skeptical when JvL took over but he has had some quality articles. My biggest problem is that it should be titled "Building Metagame Decks" rather than "Building on a Budget". You see when you attack the metagame by noticing trends like a prevalence of red decks or a dearth of U/b Control you will be using cheaper cards because you are using a strategy that either hasn't proven itself or hasn't had a chance to be good yet.

These "Metagame Attack" decks are cheaper because they are not tier 1. However, I believe building on a Budget should be so much more. You could feature:

-Intro Deck Evolutions (or more your style, Event Deck Evolutions)
These decks are obviously already designed to a certain degree, but they can always be improved and adjusted to attack the metagame on a budget. Telling someone to add 3 inkmoth nexi to a deck with 1 is hardly advice. Intro decks especially provide a great jumping off point into a strategy. I'd love to see at least one evolution whenever a new set comes out.


-Build decks where no single card costs more than X (where X is $5 or maybe $10). 
-Build deck where the total cost of the deck is less than Y (where Y is $25 or maybe $50).
These decks would be easy for a large portion of your audience to actually build/trade for every week and could even be the jumping off point for a tier-2 competitive deck. Even if a deck costs over $100, if no card is more than $5 it can be easy to trade for the cards to build it and play it. I'd love to see a deck with a specific monetary constraint at least once a month. 


-Pauper or Peasant Decks
To be fair, JvL has done pauper decks a couple times. But this is a great format that is, pretty much by definition, within peoples' budgets. That's what the point of the format is - within this budgetary restriction, be spikey. I'd love to see Pauper highlighted once a month.

 
-Build a deck where the highlight is a draft/sealed archtype. 
A deck like this would take a draft/sealed archtype and evolve it into something more competitive. You could even start with a real draft or sealed pool that you had! I love taking home my prerelease decks and tweaking them into something more competitive and there are tons of synergies and combos you could highlight. It also cross-pollinates into limited play. I'd love to see this when a new set comes out. 


-Build block decks or decks with specific constraints on what sets are allowed. 
Basically, restrict yourself in some way from just typing about Standard. Block decks are usually fairly budget anyway, though I'd impose an additional monetary budget since many standard decks are just block decks. But what about trying to build a deck with the last 2 sets and an M set only. Like NPH, M12, and Innistrad. What could you come up with? Obviously it won't be something to break into the PT with, but you could play your friends, take it to FNM or even encourage other people to play in your own "format". I'd love to see something like this every once in a while.


JvL you're a talented writer and an accomplished magic player. Frankly I can read about most of the decks you write about on a lot of other websites (Chapin was talking about Mono-Black Infect a couple weeks ago, for instance). I can read about Standard on a ton of other websites. I can even read about rogue Tier-2 Metagame Attack decks on a variety of websites. But most websites do not have a column dedicated to playing magic on a Budget. That's because it's an artificial constraint that almost always directly hampers your ability to be competitive. But you can still have a lot of fun with it. Please take some of my ideas into consideration. Thank you.

JVL, 

Please, please focus on the budget part of your column.   There are many resources that this and other websites have that focus on top tier competitive decks that cost $100 plus to build.  There are even several places to read about rogue decks that are less expensive, but still competitive.  This is the one place that ostensibly focuses on building inexpensive decks.

Please respect the limitations of players who choose to read a column called "Building on a Budget".  A budget is a pre-established limit of expenditures.  Even if you have to redefine what the budget is for each week, please offer decks that are accessible to players with real financial limitations.  If you can’t do that consistently, then perhaps it would be more honest to change the name of the column.

You may have “made a conscious decision to value the quality of [your] decks over their accessibility.”  I and others like me are asking you to rethink that decision.

The deck's cost is only part of the reason I dislike this article, there's also the fact that it's completely unoriginal. Everybody who runs mono-black poison is basically running exactly this list. If he wanted to make a budget version of it, go ahead, but he didn't. He just picked the cheapest deck people are actually playing already and told us "play that one."

This was an interesting article. I find it funny that you talk up the Curse as a huge tool to beat expected decks, and this deck would have a hard time beating a curse too. The strategy to bait the hero was nice to learn.

As for the budget thing, maybe the series should be called 'Competing on a Budget'.

I love BoaB cuz I can always hop on and see what cool deck I could try to put together. The problem with this week was that I'm already rolling a mono-black infect deck and I do agree that it's really good right now. But it's already a archtype.. I used to enjoy off the wall decks from this article, Beastmaster deck did really well when I played it in FNM(2nd place) but if you want to look into competive decks that are budget in comparrison or metagame choice then  I think the column would be better if a handful of ideas for the same deck were presented, like for this deck this version can do well against aggro decks and tokens but has trouble with control. The version I'm running does well against control AND aggro. If you were to post multiple ideas of the same deck then more people would benefit from the article.