Budget Magic: $30 (Zero Rare) Caves | Standard
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic. Sadly, Standard keeps getting more expensive. Right now, a Standard deck will cost you somewhere between $200 and $600, and this is likely to get even worse once we start getting Universes Beyond sets along with their inflated prices in Standard. As such, we're heading to Standard today to play one of the cheapest decks ever featured on Budget Magic: a build of Caves that has zero rares or mythics and costs just $30 to build in paper! Even better, I think the deck might actually be pretty competitive, and it should survive rotation this summer, giving you a super-cheap and fun option for Standard not just for the short term but until January 2027, when the following rotation hits! Can a zero-rare deck compete in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: $30 Caves
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, Caves felt surprisingly strong! We went 6-2 with the deck, good for a 75% win rate. While our sample size of matches isn't massive, a 75% win rate is great, not just for a budget deck but for any deck! While the deck looks a bit weird on paper, it plays very smoothly.
A couple of quick notes on the deck. The Cave-focused mana base is weird. We're a four-color deck with zero dual lands, which is pretty scary. As a result, Forgotten Monument is by far our most important Cave since if we can find a single copy, we'll have perfect mana by turning all of our other Caves into City of Brasses. Keep this in mind as you choose which hands to keep. We do need to mulligan occasionally to find a hand that offers functional mana.
As far as the rest of our Caves, some—like Captivating Cave and Promising Vein—mostly are in our deck just because they have the Cave type and we're unlikely to activate them often. (I don't think I've ever sacrificed a Captivating Cave to add two +1/+1 counters to something.) On the other hand, Cavernous Maw is super powerful—a 3/3 creatureland that only costs two mana to activate is way above the curve, and it often helps us close out the game. We also occasionally activate the discover lands in the late game if we have nothing better to do or are desperately digging for removal or a sweeper.
Why play a bunch of Caves? We have huge Cave payoffs in our deck. Bat Colony is pretty absurd, basically being Spectral Procession with upside, assuming we can cast it with all Cave mana, which is what our deck is designed to do. For three mana, we get three 1/1 fliers, and then we even get to buff our creatures as we play future Caves. Meanwhile, Calamitous Cave-In gives us an above-the-curve sweeper, and Gargantuan Leech offers a massive lifelinker for as little as one mana to help close out the game.
Somewhat counterintuitively, our finisher is actually Imodane's Recruiter. When I think of Imodane's Recruiter, I think aggro, like Boros Convoke, which our deck very much is not. We're not curving out with one-drops and quickly flooding the board with creatures. Instead, Imodane's Recruiter is a late-game play in our deck. Once we get a bunch of mana, we can often cast multiple Gargantuan Leeches and perhaps a Bat Colony or two all in one turn, follow up with a Imodane's Recruiter to give our team a buff and haste, and kill our opponent with one attack by surprise! This also helps us avoid sweepers and wraths, which is another huge upside of the Imodane's Recruiter plan.
While we have a bunch of removal, including eight main-deck artifact- and enchantment-removal spells in Cathar Commando and Tear Asunder, which has felt great in the current meta, the last card I wanted to mention is Up the Beanstalk. While I'm very much over the enchantment, and I wouldn't mind seeing it banned this summer, I will say that using Up the Beanstalk to make a $30 / zero-rare deck work is probably the best use case for the card. While seeing Zur Overlords generate an endless stream of value is annoying, somehow, in this deck where we're drawing cards off Gargantuan Leech, Up the Beanstalk seems like the good guy, as odd as that sounds.
So, should you play $30 Caves in Standard? If you are looking for a super-cheap budget deck that is actually good enough to win an FNM or rank up on Arena, I think the answer is pretty clearly yes! The deck is about as cheap as a deck can be, and it's also oddly competitive. Plus, as I mentioned before, the core pieces of the deck will stick around until 2027, so your $30 investment today will last for a long, long time! If you want to play some Standard, either in paper or on Magic Arena, without breaking the bank, I think this deck is the current best option in Standard!
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
