The Ultimate Guide to Value Vintage in MTG

Myth Realized | Illustration by Jason Rainville

Value Vintage, like Commander, Tiny Leaders, Cube, and many other formats, is a community created MTG Constructed variant. Value Vintage is a 60-card 1v1 format in which you can play whatever you want, as long as your whole deck costs less than $30. This format aims to bring fresh air to the Constructed scene for players often priced out of normal Vintage. Today, let’s learn everything about Value Vintage and its growing community.

What Is Value Vintage?

Balance | Illustration by Kev Walker

Value Vintage is a community-built Constructed format that started in Cincinatti, Ohio, with its origins tracing back to 2016. In this format, you can play every card that’s legal in the Vintage format, except that your deck, including the mainboard and sideboard, can’t cost more than $30.

You also need to follow the Vintage Restricted list, so you can’t play four Channels even though the card fits the format budget. It’s basically a format filled with wildly different Constructed decks that look like they came from someone’s alternative Cube. Value Vintage offers a format where you can play rares, mythics, dual lands, sweepers, planeswalkers, and more, as long as they fit into your budget. And when you can spend an average of $0.40 per card, every penny counts.

Who Is Value Vintage For?

First and foremost, Value Vintage is a format that helps players who want to get into Constructed without spending a lot of money on a single deck. It’s an Eternal format, so decks should be viable for a while, and you can adapt old decks from formats like Modern and Pioneer.

Pauper, a Constructed format where you can only play commons, used to fill this hyper-budget space since it started as a cheap Constructed format with a slowly-changing metagame. That said, some cards are really expensive as they have been printed just once—Pauper had an Oubliette problem for a long time. Also, the power level of common cards has erupted in more recent years. As a result, Value Vintage decks are cheaper than Pauper decks, which often cost $50-100. Another small advantage of Value Vintage is that you can play with cards that don’t exist in Pauper, like planeswalkers and sweepers.

The $30 cap is a brewer’s paradise because it incentivizes you to try and build different decks, experimenting with new cards instead of the tried-and-true staples. As much as I like the idea of Premodern, some old cards are expensive and hard to acquire. Some Vintage Value decks are amalgams of Standard and Pioneer decks, while others look like a 2014-2017 Modern deck. And the meta-warping cards that plague most Constructed formats are often priced out of Value Vintage. Sure, you can play four copies of Stormchaser's Talent, but that’s almost your whole budget for a playset of one card.

Value Vintage-Legal Sets

All sets in MTG are legal in Value Vintage. But what about those Commander sets and Conspiracy sets, you might ask? They’re also legal. Outside of the banned list and the restricted list, all cards are legal.

Value Vintage Rules

Value Vintage has the same rules as the Vintage 60-card constructed format. Aside from the budget restriction, it’s the same: You have a 60-card deck and a 15-card sideboard, and between the two, you can’t have more than 4 copies of the same card. Furthermore, there’s the Vintage restricted list, and you can’t play more than one copy of each of those cards. Players start at 20 life, draw 7 cards, mulligan rules are the classic 1v1 rules… you get the idea.

Does the $30 Limit Apply to the Sideboard?

It does. The $30 limit applies to your main deck and sideboard altogether.

What About Cards That Have Cheap and Expensive Versions?

The value of the card is determined by the “Current cheapest, English language, tournament legal printing of the cards contained in a player's deck, according to those cards' current TCGplayer market price.” You can put your $50 version of a card in your deck, as long as the cheapest English version fits within your budget. If a card like Demonic Tutor has a version that’s listed as $0.10 online, which is clearly a mistake, then common sense is applied.

Here’s a quick tip from the Value Vintage community: You can create a decklist on moxfield.com and update all versions to the cheapest available:

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Value Vintage Restricted List

First, we have to differentiate between restricted and banned. Banned means you can’t play the card at all. Restricted means that you can play one copy of the card. Vintage is famous for having no banned cards (except for structurally banned cards like ante), just a restricted list to keep the format from getting too crazy.

• Ancestral Recall
• Balance
• Black Lotus
• Brainstorm
• Chalice of the Void
• Channel
• Demonic Consultation
• Demonic Tutor
• Dig Through Time
• Flash
• Gitaxian Probe
• Golgari Grave-Troll
• Gush
• Imperial Seal
• Karn, the Great Creator
• Library of Alexandria
• Lion's Eye Diamond
• Lodestone Golem
• Lotus Petal
• Mana Crypt
• Mana Vault
• Memory Jar
• Mental Misstep
• Merchant Scroll
• Mind's Desire
• Monastery Mentor
• Mox Emerald
• Mox Jet
• Mox Pearl
• Mox Ruby
• Mox Sapphire
• Mystic Forge
• Mystical Tutor
• Narset, Parter of Veils
• Necropotence
• Sol Ring
• Strip Mine
• Thorn of Amethyst
• Time Vault
• Time Walk
• Timetwister
• Tinker
• Tolarian Academy
• Treasure Cruise
• Trinisphere
• Urza's Saga
• Vampiric Tutor
• Vexing Bauble
• Wheel of Fortune
• Windfall
• Yawgmoth's Will

Cards That Are Banned in Value Vintage

• 46 Cards that reference “Stickers“
• 28 Cards that reference “Attraction“
• 25 Cards with the Card type “Conspiracy”
• 9 Cards that reference “Playing for Ante”
• Cards whose art, text, name, or combination thereof are racially or culturally offensive are banned in all formats.
• Chaos Orb
• Falling Star
• Shahrazad

Where to Play Value Vintage

Value Vintage can be played on MTGO and in real life. It doesn’t make any sense on MTG Arena because the economy works differently there, plus a large portion of the card pool simply doesn’t exist there. That said, people organize to play Pauper on MTGA, so I wouldn’t count Arena out.

Value Vintage Decks

Now that we’ve covered the format, let’s talk about some of the decks we can play. These decklists came from Value Vintage events, so they’re at least competitive.

Red Cycling Aggro (Hollow One)

Hollow One | Illustration by Anthony Palumbo

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Almost every format has explored Hollow One; you can often cast this 4/4 for or even .

This is a very linear deck centered on discarding for value. Cards like Marauding Mako, Flameblade Adept, and Hobgoblin, Mantled Marauder benefit from discard, while Ox of Agonas and Detective's Phoenix recur themselves. Street Wraith can be discarded for 0 mana. The reprint of the obscure Portal Three Kingdoms card Control of the Court makes this an interesting and valid inclusion in the deck.

Mono-Black Initiative

Vicious Battlerager | Illustration by Cristi Balanescu

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This black deck uses efficient creatures like Deep-Cavern Bat and Caustic Bronco to apply early pressure backed by good interaction. Hymn to Tourach is a strong discard card, and in the 4-drop slot, four cards grant us the initiative, a broken mechanic for 1v1 games. The deck also plays accelerants like Sol Ring and Dark Ritual to get to the initiative as quickly as possible.

Blue-Green Nadu

Nadu, Winged Wisdom | Illustration by Daren Bader

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Yes, Nadu, Winged Wisdom is back, with the same Shuko interaction that made the card be banned in the first place. The core of this deck is to have Nadu in play so that you can target your own creatures with Shuko, a free-to-equip equipment. For each viable target, you’ll draw two cards and put extra lands into play. One way this deck wins is by milling yourself with Cephalid Illusionist and having Laboratory Maniac in play. These are both wizards, so you can tutor them via wizardscycling on Step Through.

Blue-Red Spellslinger

Bedlam Reveler | Illustration by Jama Jurabaev

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This is your typical UR Tolarian Terror + Bedlam Reveler deck with a cardpool close to what you'd expect in formats like Standard or Pioneer. What caught my attention was Sailors' Bane, a Commander Masters card that maybe some Peasant cubers have played once or twice. It’s basically a slightly larger and harder-to-deal with Tolarian Terror. Thing in the Ice also makes an appearance alongside many 1-mana cantrips to fuel the graveyard interactions.

WU Standstill Control

Standstill | Illustration by Heather Hudson

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Just so I cover all sides of the archetype spectrum, here’s WU Standstill. It’s a control deck that casts Standstill to force your opponents to stop playing cards unless they want to refill your hand. This deck usually wins via win conditions that don’t need to be cast. For example, cycling Shark Typhoon or eternalizing Timeless Dragon don't break your Standstill. The same goes for a large Myth Realized attacking as a creature. Another interesting inclusion in this deck is Prairie Dog, a card that benefits from having your namesake enchantment in play because you’re not playing spells, growing the squirrel.

Other Decklists

There are many other viable decks I haven’t even touched on. Graveyard decks with Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, Izzet Arclight Phoenix, Death and Taxes, Boros energy decks with Modern Horizons 3 cards, black sacrifice aristocrats decks, and much more. Right now, the format is ripe for testing, and the metagame keeps evolving.

Getting Started with Value Vintage

The best way to get started with Value Vintage is to see decks that are performing well in the format and trying them out in the queues. An interesting suggestion is the WU spirits deck that sees some play in Pioneer, as it’s very similar to a good Value Vintage deck. These cards got much cheaper after Innistrad Remastered reprinted the most expensive ones.

Many format staples are playable because they have been banned everywhere else, including Dig Through Time, Fury (which used to be a $30+ card before bannings), and Hymn to Tourach. Cards that were big in their Standard formats but didn’t make the jump into other formats, like Evolved Sleeper and Brazen Borrower, are also cheap and playable. You can check the whole list of format staples and their card prices here.

Plus, here’s a schedule for upcoming events. If there’s something near you, you might as well check that out. MTGO Value Vintage events are always a good option to test the waters.

Value Vintage Communities

The main website for Value Vintage is VVMTG.com, which is the place to get all the information on the format, the metagame, next events, the banned and restricted list, and more.

This is the $30 Value Vintage Discord Server where people can discuss the format, decklists, metagame, and how to grow the Value Vintage scene.

The subreddit r/valuevintage has lots of specific information on the format. It’s a small subreddit, so the main MTG subreddit r/magicTCG ends up receiving format-specific discussion, too.

Specific YouTubers like @forkpapi and @kindamtg are often playing or discussing the format.

Wrap Up

Prairie Dog | Illustration by Kevin Sidharta

I didn’t know what Value Vintage was until recently, but now I’m interested. MTG formats are at their best when they first start growing, or when WotC doesn’t ruin them with power creep cards or Masters/Horizons. Having formats that we can construct cheap decks for is always good, and when even Pauper decks can reach $70-100 consistently, it’s nice to have another budget format. And if your Eternal staples get banned and their price tanks as a result, they might become viable in Value Vintage.

What do you think about the format? Did anything catch your interest? Let me know in the comments section below, or lets discuss this over in the Draftsim Discord. Check out The Daily Upkeep newsletter for all the latest MTG news.

Thanks for reading, and see you guys around!