Real cards hurt the casual experience

Whenever someone asks about budget deck building, someone usually chimes in with the suggestion that they should just pay for real cards. This is harmful to the casual experience. By "casual experience" I mean casual games you might play with a group of friends, or random games you might play at a convention or LGS.

People like the adage of "I want to play against your deck, not your wallet". It feels fair that everyone at the table should have access to the same card pool and deck building opportunities as anyone else, but the meta that this results in is incredible.

First, there are cards that are clearly overpowered that are kept from the broader community because of their lack of affordable reprints. So many casual games pre-ban were protected from a Dockside Extortionist defined meta because people didn't want to pay the money for that card. Almost every deck would probably be better if it ran the one ring. Is the game better if everyone has a copy of the one ring in every deck? I think so.

Second, it exacerbates a meta's arms race towards cedh. Without natural barriers to doing the highest power thing, the only thing preventing a slide to cedh is social agreements not to make things too powerful, and skill in deck building. No budget restrictions helps level the skill playing field and make for more enjoyable games in mixed skill metas. Casual games are best when they are not pure wallet contests.

Third, it decreases restrictions that lower creativity. Budget deck building compels people to make due with the materials available to them to field a deck that is just not good enough to win. Cards that are strictly worse or functionally strictly worse than other cards have no reason to be run if you can just print the strictly better card on demand. My [[Rielle]] deck would love a [[Lion's Eye Diamond]]. I can't afford one, so I would proxy one instead.

Finally, it increases the challenge of deck building. A person using an online tool to build a deck can easily expand cards from their consideration if they are not worried about being too expensive for their budget. Price being no object means that the optimal deck building move is to pour over card searches looking for only the any variation of both the best and fun versions of the effects you want.

Play real cards if you want to. It's not always inappropriate to do so, but it's also not free of consequences to your casual meta. Letting go of a budget restriction can go a long way to mitigating some of these downsides.