Pricing & Deck Building Methodology

Budget Bauble is an independent Magic: The Gathering fan project for finding affordable Commander decks. It generates decklists and upgrade suggestions from recorded card choices and price snapshots. Deck match describes similarity to commonly played cards; it is not a power rating or a measured win rate. Lists are generated suggestions, not playtested recommendations.

The ranking prices a full deck.

Each ranked price is a complete 100-card list: the commander plus 99 cards picked for it. Cards are scored by how much more often they appear with this commander than in its colors, weighted by how many of its decks play them. The best-scoring cards fill the Command Zone template (10 ramp, 12 card advantage, 12 targeted disruption, 6 mass disruption, 38 lands) and the rest of the deck, skipping anything above the per-card price you choose. The ranking uses 2 (dollars or euros) unless you pick another limit. The limit covers the commander too: a commander that costs more than the limit, or has no price, is left out of the ranking at that limit. Searching by name still finds it, greyed out and marked “Outside budget”. Each card is priced at its cheapest printing that can be played, so gold-bordered, oversized, and commemorative printings never set a price. Commanders with too few recorded decks to choose cards from are not ranked. A list that cannot reach 100 cards is labeled and ranked after complete decks. This is an estimate of one reasonable build, not a promise of deck strength.

Your deck total counts every copy.

The workspace includes the commander, every chosen card, and each basic land. At fewer than 100 cards, it is a running total. A complete price estimate needs exactly 100 cards, every copy priced, and fresh quotes. This first builder enforces color identity, singleton except basic lands, and the 100-card cap; it does not assess deck strength or support commander pairs.

USD or EUR, paper, nonfoil.

Switch between USD and EUR in the navigation bar. Each card uses the lowest nonfoil quote among its English, paper printings in Scryfall’s default_cards snapshot: TCGplayer prices for USD and Cardmarket prices for EUR. The two are separate market quotes, never a conversion of one another, so a card can be cheap in one and unpriced in the other. Ranked decks are built separately for each currency, so the EUR list for a commander can contain different cards than the USD list. A saved deck keeps the currency it was created in. The preview collection uses a single Scryfall printing per card.

Booster packs are priced against what they hold.

Budget Boosters lists single booster packs that cost 50 dollars or euros or less. The price is the pack’s market price: TCGplayer’s market price in USD, Cardmarket’s price trend in EUR, read once a day and dropped after 14 days without a new quote. Pack value is the average worth of the cards in one pack, from the set’s own booster printings and the odds of each slot, priced with the same site’s singles. “Average − price” subtracts the pack price from its estimated average contents value. “Average / price” expresses that comparison as a percentage. The typical value is the simulated median; half of packs fall below it. Pack value is a gross figure: every card counts at its listed price, with no selling fees or shipping, a card without a price counts as zero, and cards from other sets that a pack can hold (The List, Special Guests, bonus sheets) are not counted. The slot odds are approximations of published pack contents. For a new set whose pack contents are not listed yet, the value counts every regular printing of the main set and the row is marked estimated. Collector, set, theme, and Jumpstart boosters are not listed.

Precon upgrades price the cards you add.

Precon upgrades shows the cost of the first 10 suggested additions and of all suggested additions, each within your per-card price limit. The number of suggestions depends on the available play data, role targets, and eligible cards. These are options to review, not a guarantee of better gameplay. It is priced in two parts, spells and lands; the lands replace basics and weak lands with the ones those decks run and bring the land count to the usual one. Decks that are a precon exactly as sold are left out when counting what a commander’s decks play, since they say nothing about what players choose. Cards to add are the ones decks with the same commander play most, weighed against how often decks in the same colors play them anyway. Each replaces one of the cards those decks play least. A card without a price is never suggested. The deck value is what the cards of the list cost as singles today, which is not what the sealed deck sells for.

Unknown never means free.

Missing quotes stay missing. A plus sign indicates a known subtotal with unpriced cards. Cards remain available to explore, but an incomplete price cannot verify a budget. A quoted zero is distinct from a missing quote.

Freshness is part of the estimate.

Prices are refreshed automatically whenever Scryfall publishes a new snapshot, normally at least once a day. Quotes older than 24 hours are marked stale and excluded from budget-filtered results. Each quote keeps its snapshot time, rather than claiming the refresh time is a new quote. Prices are estimates and can change; shipping, tax, condition, and availability can change the checkout total.

Data sources

• Scryfall bulk data: card details, printings, and price snapshots. USD quotes come from TCGplayer and EUR quotes from Cardmarket.
• Commander Spellbook: known card combinations. A combo count means the list contains its pieces; it does not measure how consistently the deck can execute it.
• The Command Zone deck template: the role targets used by the template builder.