7 Awesome Budget Modern Decks to Try Out Now

Last updated on February 12, 2026

Grapeshot | Illustration by Clint Cearley

Modern’s been on a bit of a bumpy ride over the past decade. What was originally viewed as the feeder format where Standard cards got a second chance post-rotation has become a bit of an entirely different beast altogether. Each subsequent Modern Horizons set, as well as straight-to-Modern releases like Lord of the Rings, have warped the format into something almost unrecognizable from what it was when Modern was in its prime.

That’s not to say that there isn’t any fun to have in the format, just that the Horizons-heavy Modern of today has evolved into a format that’s mostly driven by just a few key set releases. If you embrace it for what it is, it’s just as fun and engaging as any format.

Modern can also be just as expensive as any given format, especially given how pricey Horizons staples can be. That said, you can approach any format on a budget if you’re willing to make a few concessions, and here we’ll explore some competitive options that’ll cost you less than $100.

How Can I Buy a Full Deck for Under $100?

Conjured Currency | Illustration by Steve Argyle

Top-tier competitive decks are out of the question unless you’re able (and willing) to spend a good deal more money than this, but who said you have to be doing the most competitive thing possible to have fun and enjoy playing Magic? There are a few easy ways to avoid paying so much up front to enjoy Modern.

Mana Bases

Most of the top Modern decks are expensive because of their lands. Even after a few more rounds of reprints, fetch lands still cost a lot of money, around $100 per playset. Not to mention that you also need shock lands, triomes, and sometimes even lands like Cavern of Souls that really do a number on your bank balance.

All of these expenses add up very quickly. You can avoid this by looking at mono-color decks or decks that use color combos with much cheaper dual lands available.

If you want to understand the fundamentals of Modern deck construction, Reid Duke covers this in depth in his course on Modern for Spikes Academy.

Heavy Hitters

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Chalice of the Void, Wrenn and Six, Force of Negation, and Solitude are some of the most expensive cards around. Some of these would go over your budget if you included just a single copy. A lot of the top decks revolve around these cards, so you can’t just take the top builds and expect to find suitable replacements on a budget.

But what you can do is look at decks that are centered around cheap cards. There are plenty of great cards out there for a few bucks that are good enough to build around.

Cheap Deck Cores

As a follow-up on both of these points, there are some very powerful Modern decks that are actually very cheap to build but have a single expensive playset or an expensive mana base. A good strategy to get into Modern can be to invest in the basic core of a deck, fill the gaps in with more affordable options, and then buy the more expensive pieces over time. Another tip is that Modern and Pioneer share lots of staples, so sometimes you’ll be able to carry your Pioneer deck into Modern with a few changes, or at least some staples like Fatal Push, Thoughtseize, and Monastery Swiftspear.

A few of the options I give here go with this strategy, and it’s one I’ve used many times when looking to get a new deck.

Redundancy

If you have a bit more money and want to look at getting something more expensive, a great way to approach this (or any other) format is to look at staples that overlap across multiple decks. If you buy a set of Solitudes, you can play them in a wide variety of Modern decks and they’re usually a welcome addition to any white deck you build in the format.

You can generally end up with multiple decks without spending much more than you spent for just the one if you look at cards that overlap across a number of decks.

Sideboards

I tend to look at Constructed decks as being just 60 cards and ignore the sideboard. It’s a bad habit that stuck with me from my days as a teenager playing Yu-Gi-Oh!, where many players didn’t bother with it or had no idea how to do it. But sideboards aren’t necessary to get started with a Constructed deck, and many of them can be built on the cheap for every deck.

Soul-Guide Lantern and Lantern of the Lost serve as perfectly fine graveyard hate for any deck. I’m going to skip sideboards on most of these decks since that’s a step that can be added later based on what decks you come up against in your local metagame.

Soul Sisters

Soul Warden | Illustration by Randy Gallegos

Themes, Strategy, and Budget

I’ve been playing Magic since a little before the start of the Modern format. I have fond memories of playing with Soul Sisters and getting horrifically crushed by it.

The name comes from Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant, two virtually identical versions of the same card. The idea is not to gain as much life as possible but to benefit from gaining life several times, triggering Voice of the Blessed and Essence Channeler each time. The standard payoff is Ajani's Pridemate, but they've iterated on this classic card plenty of times with equally cheap versions.

The printing of Voice of the Blessed in Crimson Vow gave the deck some more power, and Righteous Valkyrie from Kaldheim pushed it even further. Even newer additions like Essence Channeler help form a solid core for the deck, allowing you to turn your Soul Sisters into potent attackers in their own right.

Finally, though a slightly more expensive card, Heliod, Sun-Crowned is perfect for a deck that aims to gain life several times in a single turn. You do have to make a few decisions to make this work, but a version of this is very achievable on a budget.

Soul Sisters comes in at just under $100. It’s by no means perfect but it’s very functional.

Deck Upgrades

There are a few nice additions that you can make with a higher budget, too. More copies of Heliod, Sun-Crowned would be my first stop since they can also be used to build the infinite combo decks that combine Heliod with Spike Feeder or Walking Ballista.

Auriok Champion is a much more powerful soul sister than Lunarch Veteran since protection from red and black makes it immune to almost all of the removal in the format. Giver of Runes and Ranger-Captain of Eos are nice options used by many white decks in the format to help protect you against heavy disruption.

Finally, Skyclave Apparition would be a very welcome inclusion as one of the best removal spells white has access to, and you might even have it in your collection already.

The core of this deck is essentially a classic white weenie deck. Being mono-white, a natural progression is to eventually convert it into one of the best mono-white decks in Modern: Death and Taxes.

“8-Whack”

The Rack | Illustration by Nic Klein

I found this decklist in the Top 8 of a Magic Online event in late 2021 from user davidbrito, and we've since made some minor changes to it:

Themes, Strategy, and Budget

A pretty cheap deck featuring everyone’s favorite tribe of annoying little red creatures is 8-Whack. The name is a pun on the popular mono-black deck “8-Rack” that wins by combining discard spells with eight combined copies of The Rack and Shrieking Affliction.

In this version of deck you have eight Bushwhackers (four copies each of Goblin Bushwhacker and Reckless Bushwhacker) which each pump your horde of goblins and give them all haste. The majority of the cards in 8-Whack are commons and uncommons, so you even have room in your $100 budget for a few nice rares.

Clocking in at just under $90, this deck gives you a lot of bang for your buck. The game plan is very simple: Play goblins and attack with them.

Your eight Bushwhackers give you great ways to push a board of goblins through defenses and Castle Embereth even gives you a similar effect on a land.

Perhaps the biggest payoffs are Battle Cry Goblin from Forgotten Realms and Rundvelt Hordemaster from Dominaria United. The former can be four more Bushwhackers later in the game, albeit for twice the mana, and when you draw and play it early it can act as one of the decks' only ways to gain free card advantage. The Hordemaster is a goblin lord that keeps the action flowing as individual goblins get picked off, which will happen a lot.

Boros Burn

Lightning Bolt | Illustration by Christopher Moeller

Take a look at the following decklist that topped a Modern Challenge in the hands of jamiieJR in late 2021:

Themes, Strategy, and Budget

This can be a very good place to start if you’re getting into Modern, and it even lets you do so while buying two of Modern’s biggest staple cards: Lightning Bolt, and to a lesser extent these days, Goblin Guide, which both overlap with Burn.

Boros Burn has been a mainstay of Modern for pretty much as long as I can remember and it’s still one of the top decks of the format. This exact Boros Burn list could set you back over $500, but around $400 of that is in the mana base alone.

You already have Bolts and Guides if you grabbed 8-Whack. Eidolon of the Great Revel is the next big purchase, but the main deck is very cheap to put together other than that.

You could even just build it without the white to get you started and then slowly build up to getting the Boros () dual lands necessary to make the deck work. You could even use different duals that you already own, like Needleverge Pathway or Battlefield Forge, until you get the better ones.

Red Deck Wins Variation

This is a mono-red variation on an even smaller budget. It was able to 5-0 a Modern League in the hands of DemianDesposito10 in July, 2023. Red Deck Wins is an archetype that combines burn spells with efficient haste creatures. This decklist is playing Monastery Swiftspear, Goblin Guide, and Kavaron Harrier, which can pack a punch early and backs up the aggression with burn spells like Shard Volley, Lightning Bolt, and Skullcrack. We also have creatures like Keldon Marauders which usually deals 2 damage to an opponent by itself and Imodane's Recruiter as an upgrade to the old Bolt Hound the deck used to play.

As with almost all burn decks and cheap decks, redundancy is key. There are some differences between Rift Bolt, Lava Spike, and Skewer the Critics, but they can all deal 3 damage to an opponent while costing a single mana to cast. This decklist can be built for around $70 or 35 Tix on MTGO.

Mono-Green Stompy

Dungrove Elder | Illustration by Matt Stewart

Mono-Green “Stompy” is exactly what it sounds like. It usually relies on green creatures with hefty mana requirements but pushed statlines, and a few key protection spells and pump spells.

This Mono Green Stompy deck doesn’t even break the $50 mark, meaning you’d even have room to make a strong sideboard out of whatever you wanted.

Aggro decks will always struggle with card advantage and having a 2-drop be able to draw you extra cards while also providing two pips for devotion and being a 3/3 is an incredible little package, making Werewolf Pack Leader a key part of this deck. It’s literally everything this deck could have ever wanted in a 2-drop.

But you won’t find any other Modern decks that overlap with this, since most decks can't cast creatures like Steel Leaf Champion or Old-Growth Troll, and probably wouldn't want to if they could. So there isn’t a clear upgrade path like with the others. If you play a bit of Standard or Draft, though, you may already have some Pack Leaders and Keen-Eyed Curators laying around, and the rest of the deck is extremely cheap from there.

HollowVine

Vengevine | Illustration by Raymond Swanland

This list went 5-0 in a Modern League in the hands of contagion13 in late 2021:

When Hollow One was first printed back in Hour of Devastation, it took Modern by storm. The deck that formed around it was powerful, resilient, and downright nasty to play against. Nowadays, the deck has drifted into the background, and the unbanning of Faithless Looting wasn't enough to bring it back in full force.

What caught my eye is that it’s a mono-red deck that only uses non-red lands to give you outs to hard casting cards like Vengevine. This means that with an all-mountain mana base, the deck can perform just as smoothly in the vast majority of games that it plays.

The land base isn’t necessary to make the main deck tick. If you ignore that and just play 17 Mountains, the remaining HollowVine main deck only costs you around $80. Wonder used to raise the price of this deck a fair bit, but it's only a dollar or two nowadays.

Leyline of the Void used to be a big money card too, and combined with Blood Moon the sideboard alone would be a bit costly. But the Leyline's been reprinted into the earth, and Blood Moon's easily replaceable with Magus of the Moon, so the sideboard's not as troublesome anymore.

The strategy behind this deck is fairly simple: It’s all about discarding cards. If you resolve a Burning Inquiry or a Goblin Lore, you’ve discarded enough cards to make a single Hollow One cost 0 mana. Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar is also castable for just a single mana, and Blazing Rootwalla casts itself for free if you happened to discard it.

With all of this combined, you can easily flood the board with cheap or free creatures and any Vengevines you discarded along the way also jump into the fray. If it all starts going wrong, Ox of Agonas is available to help get you back into the game and start it all over again.

This deck has to be my number one pick for most annoying deck to play against. It looks like it would be weak to graveyard hate but then it just throws a bunch of creatures out of the hand and runs over you. Removal doesn’t work because it just has too many threats and you don’t usually have enough time to build up to a sweeper, of which you run scarily few since they’re just not that good in Modern.

Storm

Desperate Ritual | Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

This list comes from MTGO user fsst who secured multiple 5-0 league finishes with this list in late 2021:

Storm has to be the most infamous combo deck in Magic’s history. It’s one of MTG’s most broken mechanics, and one that keeps sneaking its way back into new releases despite giving its name to The Storm Scale that Mark Rosewater uses to determine whether a mechanic is too good to be reprinted in Standard. This classic deck has had many different versions over the years and formats, but it’s a straightforward Izzet () deck that combo kills using Grapeshot in Modern.

Storm decks are very difficult to get the hang of and have been the bane of my Magic career for years. The basic idea is that you want to use your first couple turns to sculpt your hand for a good combo turn using the blue draw spells. To combo off, you realistically need to have one of the seven cost reducer creatures in your hand, which turn all of your red ritual spells into red Dark Rituals.

Having cast a bunch of these, Past in Flames lets you cast them all again, along with the blue spells that you used to set up. Gifts Ungiven looking for Past in Flames guarantees access to the card given that it has flashback and always goes to your hand or graveyard. There’s one copy of Grapeshot to win the game with.

While a storm count of 20 sounds daunting, you can use Remand to return the original Grapeshot to your hand while the storm copies resolve and then recast it, getting you twice the amount of damage. Wish is also here to help you grab a storm spell from your sideboard, or to wish for whatever other card you might need.

This entire Storm deck will set you back around $450 to $500, but I wouldn’t be talking about it if it wasn’t budget in some way. The main deck spells alone cost just $84. Some amount of the sideboard is necessary for Wish, but they’re also all relatively cheap cards except for Blood Moon.

It’s the mana base that gets tricky. While using fetches and shocks is the most ideal mana base for the deck, it’s by no means necessary. Cheaper dual land alternatives like Shivan Reef or Riverglide Pathway work just fine. You may even have some of these already.

Deck Upgrades

Ruby Medallion and Ral, Monsoon Mage are great replacements for the other cost reduction creatures, but they're each individually more than a few bucks, with the Medallion approaching $10 a copy. The Medallion lends its name to the more recent “Ruby Storm” decks of Modern, which operate in much the same way as the archetype's always worked, just with tweaks for more recent cards.

Another rare version of the deck is “Twiddle Storm”, which focuses on Lotus Field and tons of ways to untap the land for extra mana, which in turn helps you cast the flurry of spells needed for a lethal Grapeshot.

Enchantress

Sythis, Harvest's Hand | Illustration by Ryan Yee

Perhaps one of the coolest archetypes to have come out of Modern Horizons 2, Enchantress is a fan favorite that’s periodically appeared in Legacy for decades. The idea in that format is that you can draw several cards every time you cast an enchantment spell thanks to Argothian Enchantress and Enchantress's Presence. You just need to use your newfound wealth to win a game somehow.

We don’t have Argothian Enchantress in Modern, but we do have Sythis, Harvest's Hand, which is even better in some ways since it’s an enchantment itself.

This deck tends to be Naya colors (), mainly green and white and splashing red for Blood Moon. As I mentioned already, this card is too expensive to include in your $100 budget, so this is a pure Selesnya () Enchantress deck.

This pile of 40 Enchantress cards only costs you a little under $70. An ideal mana base is a little pricey, but you can get away with the budget one presented here. Branchloft Pathways and Sunpetal Groves are fairly cheap and fit into this budget. If your budget can stretch a bit further, you can get some Temple Gardens and a fetch or two.

The only important thing to note with the land base is that you need to use Snow-Covered Forests and Snow-Covered Plains to make On Thin Ice work.

You also need a good number of forests for Utopia Sprawl. Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth will go a long way towards helping that.

The game plan of the deck is fairly simple: Every one of these 40 spells is an enchantment, meaning you should be triggering your enchantresses very often. Sanctum Weaver also gives you a ton of mana to cast all the cards you’re drawing.

Sterling Grove helps you protect your enchantments from nasty removal spells and Solitary Confinement doesn’t even have a downside with all the extra cards you’re drawing.

Once you’re stable, you can go in for the kill by making loads of spirits using Hallowed Haunting or turning your lands into giant threats with Destiny Spinner.

Honorable Mention: Bogles

Slippery Bogle | Illustration Jesper Ejsing

There were two enchantment-based decks I could have talked about, the other being Bogles. This build uses Slippery Bogle and Gladecover Scout along with a huge pile of aura spells to make massive hexproof threats that are very difficult to deal with.

Former big-money card Daybreak Coronet is now only a few dollars, and the deck's also branched out into blue to use Curious Obsession and Staggering Insight among others. This development makes it very difficult for me to suggest a version that would work while compromising on the mana base, so I decided to just give it an honorable mention here.

I also think Enchantress is a lot more fun to play. Who doesn’t like drawing about 20 extra cards in a game? And it’s definitely the deck I’d choose out of the two.

Blue and Black Decks

One final note is about blue and black. I gave you seven possible routes to go down if you want to get started in Modern and stuck to the fairly arbitrary limit of $100, but that placed a lot of pressure on the colors I can pick. Blue and black have been pretty much off the table for a variety of reasons.

Blue Doesn’t Like to Be Alone

Force of Negation | Illustration by Paul Scott Canavan

Blue may be the best color in Magic’s history, but it’s not a great color for a mono-color build. At least in this format. Blue works best when paired with other colors in Modern, which is something I’ve mostly avoided doing since mana bases will break the budget.

A lot of the best blue cards in Modern are also prohibitively expensive. Cards like Force of Negation and Subtlety just can’t fit into most budget decks realistically.

I did manage to fit in Storm as a blue deck because blue’s cantrip and draw spells tend to be very cheap, making Storm a perfect choice for a budget blue deck. Other possible options for blue included Illusion tribal, Merfolk, or even a personal favorite of mine: Ninja Faeries. But you need to run something expensive to make any of these good enough to compete and I couldn’t fit that in.

Black is Expensive

Thoughtseize | Illustration James Ryman

Black has a lot of the same problems. I could have put together a simple mono-black aggro deck, but you have to ask: “How will it compete against other Modern decks? In particular, how does it fair against disruption?”

White has lots of fairly resilient creatures, green can protect its creatures with Tyvar's Stand, and red can start chucking burn spells at your opponent and can play haste creatures to get damage through. But what does black do? The answer is simple, but not cheap: It uses Thoughtseize. It's one of the best black cards ever printed and is pretty vital in making sure that you can withstand the onslaught you face against powerful decks in the format. It’s also around $50 for a set, which eats up half the budget.

If I were to suggest you build an aggressive zombie or vampire deck in mono-black, Thoughtseize would basically be necessary and then there’s no room for cards you really want in those decks. It’s true that you could get away with Inquisition of Kozilek as a cheaper alternative, but it’s just not going to cut it with cards like Solitude, Murktide Regent, and Supreme Verdict in the format.

Wrap Up

Dramatic Finale | Illustration by Steve Argyle

There was a time when I couldn’t stand playing Modern, but now it’s one of my favorite formats. There’s such a wonderful diversity of decks and styles to play, and if you’re reading this thinking you’d like to get started in the format, then that’s awesome. I know it can be daunting to start when you’re on the outside looking in, and it's certainly a different playing field post Horizons sets than it used to be, but it won’t be long before you’re in there and hooked!

I want to thank everyone who’s read this piece and anything else I’ve written here on Draftsim. This has been a great experience to share my knowledge with you all and I’m looking forward to what I can bring you in 2022. If you're looking for more Draftsim content, make sure to find us over on Twitter or on Discord.

I’ll see you in the next one!