Budget Alternatives to Commander Staples

we're here to give you budget alternatives for some of Commander's most expensive Staples I'm Mia and I like walking around Walmart really late at night I'm Bey I like mini M&M's better than regular M&M's we're the nitpicking nerds sponsored by Card Kingdom you know they're like the mini M&M's of sponsors pretty much the best thing you can get because you can do everything there Buy sell check out our page soon you you can pre-order they have all the products you'll ever need supplies too go check them out we love them so much definitely a lot better than using a th000 you know purchases of four cards just get all the cards on the same site save a million dollars on shipping that is the correct estimated cost saved a million doll also sponsored by Dragon shield probably because they have the best sleeves in the Multiverse good sleeves and you can actually save 5% when you try to buy sleeves if you use code nerds at checkout that's very simple stuff and MOX Field's in the video as a sponsor somewhere but you don't know where so we got some budget Replacements that serve a similar function as a lot of the most expensive like 30 plus dollar Staples that you're going to see in Commander so for each card we're going to kind of look at the the staple itself and say like why is it good what can we replicate from this card how can we get similar effects for like a tenth of the price I think in Commander there are a lot of net decks and lists where a lot of these cards end up because they are very good at what they do however we don't always have the money to buy six copies of this card so if you have more budget Alternatives it's going to be a little bit better plus it's going to make your decks a little bit more unique than the average deck you find online exactly so let's just get into the first one one of the most repeat offenders for like expensive Staples that I you know try not to buy at ristic study it's like $50 right now as Commander gets more and more popular the stons for this thing just keep going up it's tuna blue for an enchantment whenever an opponent casts a spell you draw a card unless they pay one it's one of the best card drawing spells of all time in Commander it sits on the board and if someone doesn't answer it that person is way more likely to win just due to to the advantage that the card brings yeah you play it you pay the Mana value and then it generates consistent Advantage without you having to do anything you just set it and forget it and now your opponents are going to be forced to like note that this exists and play around it and figure some stuff out so let's see what we can do on a budget our first one is ghostly piler it's 50 cents and it um when it becomes untapped you can pay two and draw a card whenever an opponent cast a spell from anywhere other than their hand you draw a card and then you can discard a card to make it unblockable this turn so the discarding kind of fuels the like first ability where you can untap it to draw card um mostly though what we're getting is the second ability where whenever an opponent casts uh their Commander or a card from Exile or a card with flashback from their graveyard or whatever we get to draw a card and we don't have to pay anything into this I think it triggers a lot more than people would realize cuz even if they have their commanders out there are a lot more of those flashback rebound you know casting from Exile like with Prosper effects that we utilize to get advantage in Commander that I think this will trigger a lot more than people think yeah and we're paying what is this 100 one 100th of the price is that what that is it is a lot less and it's great to see because we do love building budget decks but also it's really hard to justify buying a copy of ristic study for every deck that needs blue I don't even think a deck with ristic study in it can be considered budget because that's already more than I've spent on a budget deck $50 is ridiculous uh okay the next card is Insight this is an enchantment for three that says whenever an opponent casts a green spell you draw a card so this is a one card that I have never heard of in my entire life before doing research for this video and I think in certain metas this could kind of slap there's a lot of like manad dorks that will come down really cheaply where you can draw a bunch of cards in a single turn a lot of the Decks that just share multiple colors you might be able to get a lot of cards out of this in every turnaround considering that you know there are those multi- pip spells that you can grab the little guys that come down you know I think that in general you're going to get a fair amount of cards with this and it's a lot lot less threatening on the board than ristic study so it might be less susceptible to spot removal yeah I mean this confirms that our ghostly p is one 100 of the price because this is 150th of the price 2% of the price and you can actually it is an enchantment so it's like that same level of difficult to remove it sticks out it's the same exact Mana value you just don't draw a card whenever they cast any spell but the upside of I guess Ghostly piler and insight is that the card draw is not optional whenever they do thing whenever they cast something from like their command zone or whenever they cast The Green SP you just get a card there's no way for them to stop you sometimes with RIS set you're like I really hope I draw cards off of it but they're just going to go pay one pay one pay one and then you kind of feel sad this is kind of guaranteed card draw just you know off of slightly more specific spells even though it is a little bit more specific I really do like this I want to try it in more decks especially if I do know the meta because there are a lot of decks like your spella deck where a lot of things come down very quickly even though this is cast if you're playing playing against someone who gets down a lot of mands really quickly and can rebuild the board or has to do with a lot of like bouncing stuff back to their hand like in simic for instance you might be able to get a lot of triggers off this yeah next up we're going to crank up the budget just a little bit and we're going to pay $7 for Mystic rora this is now when they cast non creatures they have to pay four Mana or you draw and that's cumulative upkeep realistically no one's ever going to pay for this this one is like impossible you know people say do you pay the one cuz it's a real question do you pay the four no one's going to do that that's like half my turn or all my turn so you're going to get a lot more cards off of this but it's fleeting you can't pay no one's really going to pay cumulative upkeep like four for their Mystic rora so it'll stay out for like one two or three turns you get your cards off of it and then it's gone so it kind of removes itself people tend to play around this very very specifically considering that in the beginning of the game if you play this turn one they're not going to drop their soul rings they're not going to drop their Arcane signant or if they do you're going to profit off it and the rest of the table will not be happy with them that's exactly true so Mr camora definitely the best of these substitutes clearly they're played alongside risk City all the time so this is the best substitute but we had to mention it it is a little pricey at seven the next one is also a little pricey at seven but it's a creature it's nezahal Primal tide their non-creatures draw you cards and you can discard three cards to basically protect this for a turn um this is another thing that you can just sort of set down it requires zero Mana investment honestly when I was talking about what risk was doing you know coming down for a zero Mana investment the one that violates that little thing is Mystic rora which is the best one but still yeah this you don't have to pay any extra Mana into it it just draws cards whenever things happen and you can help like dominate the game get your cards and it's not optional I really like nezahal I have it in my card drawing based deck I think it's super cool the fact that you can flicker it and it's just damage on the board or a blocker it's chunky it's like a seven seven next is a staple in every red deck or at least it seems like every red deck online it's doc side extortionist $90 right now when a red it comes down and you make a treasure for each artifact or enchantment your opponent's control and if they have a lot of Treasures or something that's going to add up yeah this is the best Mana positive ritual whatever you want to call it in the entire format it's probably the number one best red card in the format maybe Jessica's will but this is I would say this is better it's $90 so like just absolutely ridiculous uh price tag on this card so we're going to try to replicate it it is strong because it is like Mana positive the Turn You cast it um it generates treasures and it like creates a lot of permanence also artifact permanence so we're going to see what we can get out of that the first budget replacement we have is brass's Bounty at $1 it's seven Mana sorcery so not exactly two Mana but you make a treasure for each land you control so it is a scalable a oneshot burst of treasures based on you know how long the game has progressed I like this because it depends on you there's a lot of times where docside will come down and your opponents will have Treasures or something and they'll sacrifice them in response so you don't get the treasures from it but this is really nice because it depends on the amount of lands you have and people really can't do anything to respond to that yeah choose your own destiny you you decide how good this card is and it is not really castable for the first like four turns of the game but once you play it you can like keep those Treasures until the next turn and then you have like double Mana kind of like a weird say pseudo time walk but yeah brass's Bounty obviously it's not as good but it is $89 cheaper and does do something similar it is one shot here's a bunch of treasures we also have manag geyser which is not Treasures but it's $3 and it makes a red Mana for each tap land your opponent's control this is typically way more Mana than you're going to get from Doc side but it's obviously five Mana instead of two and you only can use it right now it's like use it or lose it especially if you get one opponent who's been ramping all game they've been throwing big Haymakers left and right and then it's like oh you have 15 lands tapped right now well I'm going to love that because I'm going to throw out something super awesome yeah usually I think manag geyser feels like you're getting about 15 Mana minimum like five five and five from your opponent that is not unre reasonable and you like you said it could be 15 from one person and then 10 and 10 and so you just get like 30 Mana this is good for when you want to fire off giant X spells or just ridiculous hay makers take a really long turn um you can Loop dox side with like flickering and stuff but that's also kind of true of manag geyser if you copy it or you recur it you can actually go infinite with like a reiterate in a manag geyser so that's kind of got some of the same like combo potential and it is a bajillion Mana I'd really rather have this in my deck and dock side at times because if you care about number of sorceries too it can really matter I love this with like crackle of power I think that's really juicy or if you're playing racus you could have this with torment of Hellfire too and that's just going to be game over yeah we'll move on to the next one it's Cavern whoree Dragon at $13 a little price here but again nowhere even approaching 90 uh this is a n Mana 66 that costs less based on the number of artifacts and opponent controls and then it's got flying trample haste when it hits somebody you get a treasure for each artifact they control so this is actually pretty similar in that it cares about how many artifacts your opponents have and the more artifacts they have the better this is and the more Treasures you get and it could even cost two Mana if they've got seven artifacts which is not the it's not impossible I've seen people with seven artifacts especially if it's treasure or food or artifact lands or something that means that this costs red red and if you're just going to smack somebody uh and it survives that's also repeatable so we're now at a point where like hey on certain board States this could even be better than docine it's not a better card in a vacuum but on a budget I think this is probably the closest one for one you can make you're going to have to aim it at the right opponent of course but it does come with haste evasion and trample so even if they have just like a one- one thopter which a lot of the artifact decks often do you're still going to be able to get in for a bunch of damage and get the Mana back that you probably spent to cast it our last budget replacement for doite was actually the inspiration for this entire video I was like oh Jessica's Wills really expensive it's like 30 bucks let's make a video about you know budget Alternatives let's go back to that but it's actually only $15 now cuz it got reprinted so I guess it's going to serve as a a budget option instead of a card to actually replace this is going to make a bunch of Mana based on someone's hand size it does also draw you cards basically it's just a Mana positive thing that is very good that I would recommend playing certainly I would buy five Jessica's Wheels before I bought one doite and you're still have money to spare Jessica's will is really great it's three mana and it's does a little bit of everything it helps you with card advantage and it helps you with Mana but just remember that it does Target a player so if they have hex proof or something or they can cast something that gives them hex proof at instant speed you won't be able to get that effect yeah but it is a huge burst of red mana and it gives you more than what you put in but only for the term next is a card that I think you were not going to expect on this list it's jeweled Lotus it's $120 what that's a lot of money but I think we've got four cards here that are actually pretty good budget replacement so what je Lotus does is it comes down for extremely cheap actually as cheap as a spell can be which is zero and it puts you AE on Mana at a little temporary boost so we're going to try to replicate that the thing that I really want to copy off Jew Lotus is the cheapness of it I don't want to just say cut Jewel Lotus for Arcane s because they both make Mana it's like yeah but that's not why Jewel Lotus is so good and that's not an honest thing to do is to just say play Arcane sign instead of ju we've got some cheaper options the first one is Spring Leaf drum this is 80 cents and this is the only Mana rock as far as I can tell besides soul ring that is one mana and it's one mana and you can tap it right away for one Mana so as long as your deck has a lot of creatures I think this is actually really good and it'll help accelerate you on the early turns into bigger plays this is also just to point out the worst you know this is the least close to jeel Lotus that we have so far this was reprinted recently in the brothers War which is what's making it so cheap I know Bey recently bought a ton because he's been putting it in a lot more decks recently I think it's a budget staple at this point I pretty much play it in every deck I can as long as you have creatures you're good to go it's going to accelerate you it's going to be like Mana neutral to turn you play it um the rest of these are not uh going to be permanent that stay in play they're all going to go away let's start with lotus Bloom it's $160 it's got suspend three so you can't cast it it has no Mana value you suspend three for zero three turns later you get Black Lotus so you're getting a better card but you have to wait three turns that's a lot it is a lot of turns to wait but it will give you that Mana boost you just can't do it on turn one or two you know turn four or five maybe then you can play like eight Mana worth of things there are also more suspense synergies now that Doctor Who came out so it is possible that if you have enough Mana you could get this pretty quickly yeah and there are some cards that say oh you know cast a a spell from your hand for free that lets you just put this out or it is an artifact so you can just reanimate it from the graveyard somehow with with certain things there's a lot to play around with this card it can definitely work in some decks but I think if you really want that Mana burst save $119 and wait three extra turns it's it's it's a little bit slow totally but it is that Mana boost can you also play this in Cascade because that's where you're playing like the inevitable betrayals and and the profane tutors so that you can just negate that entire suspend Clause to begin with yeah if your deck can do that I think this is a definitely a good replace for Jewel Lotus uh the next one you probably haven't even heard of this one it's jeweled amulet $2.30 it's zero Mana you can pay one and tap it to put a counter on it and you know the type of mana and who cares and then you p and you tap it and remove the counter from it to add the Mana of whatever type you made to put the counter on it um this is a zero Mana rock that you can play early so we played on turn one then we use our one land to charge this up and now on turn two we can cast a three drop cuz we go up on Mana it's like it's like a weird piece of fast Mana but you have to like put a Mana into it to get a Mana out of it I still think it's actually good to accelerate from if you're one of those Decks that want to just have a really ridiculous turn five and you want to play like seven Mana worth of things or you've got some kind of you know ridiculous carard draw Commander that you need to get out as soon as possible this helps with that this is like a little Bank where you're storing your Mana early to take it out later this might also be interesting if you have proliferation strategies considering that it says that you can only put charge counters on with the one and tap ability if there's already no counters on it but if you can put counters on other ways then you don't even have to pay into that yeah and it's it's one of those rocks like the rest of these on the list that come down before Arcane s they can come down before that so you feel like you're actually doing things with your early game that other people can't do and you're accelerating past that because you can do any four of these cards you know suspend them or play them and then play Arcane again on turn two and then turn three or four you're going to go off to the race and I think that's pretty important that's a pretty important aspect of jeel lotus plus not being constrained by just only being able to cast your commander with that Mana is a nice upside yeah uh lastly we have Lotus pedal it's $19 honestly that's what one sixth of the price and it just is one third of dual Lotus but you can sacrifice it uh and you can cast any spell with it I think Lotus pedal's great I think if your commander draws cards at all Lotus pedal should probably be in your deck like from a power perspective it's close to fast Mana it's really close if not just is plus if you can cast stuff from your graveyard you can just have it for free I know that's why Bez loves having the bobles and then just this in the faster decks yeah this is great if you have a three Mana Commander this is one of those things that helps you get it out on turn two especially if you're not green it's pretty hard to do you know if you've got like a three drop blue Commander Lotus pedal here you go this works with any commander that draws you a card or makes you the Monarch or whatever you need to play this card especially if you're going for that power Spike you know when you start playing things like juel lotus lotus pedal should probably also be in your deck it's also a tiny bit lower in price right now because it was a promo like pretty recently yeah it was like a a convention promo so let's go to our next card what do we got it is demonic tutor $40 right now that is way higher than I'd like to pay for it one in a black and you search your library for a card and you put it into your hand and then Shuffle it's one of the best tutors because it goes straight to your hand and not the top of your library like a lot of other tutors do yeah it's ridiculous the Mana investment just two Mana for your best card in any situation is like unmatched but what this does is it grabs your best card for any scenario unrestricted and it puts it in your hand so it lets you you know recover from being behind by getting a board wipe push the advantage when you're ahead find you a Bolis of Citadel or an ad nauseum or whatever when you're looking for card Advantage so demonic tutor we're going to try to see if we can for a reasonable price get the best card in Our Deck you know in our hand uh the first one we have is hoarding brood Lord $150 it's 8 Mana but it's a creature and it's a 76 and it has convoke so you can cast this for pretty cheap if you use your creatures to throw out the Mana for it and when it enters you tutor it goes to Exile and the tutor spell actually also has convoke so kind of a couple upsides here like we can mix and match how we want to pay it and the card is protected from our hand it's not in our hand and the card is cheaper to cast basically because that's convoke the Exile part is really nice there's been times where people have forced me to wheel with like a windfall but that card is feel safe because it's an exile the Koke is not bad I haven't really been able to use it in the Decks that I run hoarding brood Lord but I do like having the option if I do have a lot of like little like tokens out for some reason yeah hoarding brood Lord I think is so much better than Run scard demon I not going to put runes scard demon on this list even if I had three more slots it still wouldn't be on here but I think hoing BR Lord's amazing it's actually castable you can get it down for like four Mana reasonably and four Mana for a tutor is a lot but we get bonuses it's not not just diabolic tutor which is also none on this list it's also a bad card you pay rout you know four Mana you get a 76 flyer and the card's protected and it has convoke itself so it can potentially be cast right away when a normal tutor couldn't do that for you hoarding brood Lord definitely a card to consider it's it gives you a lot of options and I wish more people would be playing with it I love this card yeah what do we got next next is beseech the queen at $360 you can either pay six or black black black two Mana for every black Mana that you don't pay you search your library for a card with a man value less than or equal to the number of lands you control reveal it put it into your hand and then Shuffle unfortunately you don't get the option of keeping it secret like demonic tutor does but you can just get it for three black Mana if you are in like mono black or you can get three black easily right yeah three black for a tutor is not bad um once you get past seven lands this is just a three Mana tutor it has there's no restriction cuz I don't have cards that cost 12 in my deck I'm not going to go find those this is really really close during the early turns of the game you might be searching for you know a wrath or Mana production to to further your game plan and that's actually still just makes this card castable on turn three or four I can go get damnation or toxic Del or manac crypt or whatever I'm trying to get just on turn three and that's pretty much the same thing as demonic tutor and then later I'm getting any card in my deck cuz I know have eight lands up three is not bad considering it is you can get some spicy pulls from an OP agent for instance your soul ring even yeah even if you just fire it off on turn three you're saying yeah yeah you can and you could fire it off even sooner if you do have like the rocks talking about earlier next up is dark petition it's a five Mana sorcery you search for a card put it into your hand then shovel that rate is very very bad but if you have spell Mastery you get to add three black Mana right away which now puts you at exactly demonic tutor rates it even maybe has a little bit of an upside because you're getting three black out of it but you only put two black into it so it could in some scenarios color fix you a little bit and it's only $4 this card's amazing it's not hard to get those instant and sorceries into your graveyard by the time you have five black Mana spend you have a kill spell here or you can have the ability to Mill cuz you are in Black so I think it is very reasonable to say that you're getting a tutor for two black Mana yeah last one is diabolic intent at $10 now this is the same Mana value and the same effect but the only extra little wrinkle is you have to sacrifice a creature so this in some cases is just better than demonic tutor there's a lot of times that I have you know you have both in a deck obviously but you cast diabolic intent you're like Yeah I wanted to sacrifice creature I wanted the dice trigger thanks there's also other ways to get creatures like if someone generous gifts your enchantment you already have that creature lying around you go oh well I might as well use it for utility anyways yeah sorry little elephant you're about to go find me my basa Citadel and I know we were doing four cards for each of these but I did have a fifth suggestion for swapping out demonic tutor you can go to moxfield docomo a super secret version of the website that you've never seen before one that lets you create and edit your decks I do love moxfield especially when I'm tutoring actually because if you see me on my phone during a game it's usually cuz I have a tutor in hand I'm trying to see the best targets for it moxfield is really great for that because you can search by Mana value or type of like card that you're able to look for or just in general just see what you have just the ability to pull out my phone instead of having everybody wait for me you know I can pull out my phone during someone else's turn scroll real quick see the cards in my deck go oh yeah I'll go get this thing next turn it actually saves a lot of time and we're going to go to par lives the next really expensive card $30 despite the reprint yikers this is a token doer so if you would make one or more tokens instead you make twice that many that is a pretty powerful effect this is a card that tokenex love what it usually does is either double the amount of stupid useless tokens you have to eventually make it into a useful amount of a lot of dummies or copy like really important tokens and give you a second one when that's sort of hard to do there can be a lot of ETB triggers that you're looking for or or you're just looking for a bunch of treasures and parallel lives is great for that but we do have some budget Alternatives one of them is paragen took at 60s tun a green for a two three if one or more tokens would be created under your control those tokens plus an additional food are created instead and you can draw a card if you sack three foods which you're going to be able to sacrifice because you will have those tokens yeah this is uh it might look like a food card but it's actually just a token card in general if you want a critical mass of just stuff a lot of token decks do this just poops out tokens you know you make one token here one token here there's a trigger make a token token on your turn token on your turn that's like five foods you know every one of those individual triggers for tokens one or more tokens gives you foods and then you can start cashing them in for cards or just use the fact that they're a token for some other strategy it's got that same vibe to it and uh did you know that it's less expensive I think a lot of things are less expensive than parallel lives but I really do like the fact that it does have the stapled on effect of drawing cards and then you're going to be using these food to I don't know maybe actually gain life from them or just have stuff on the board it's a really good effect and just you in the end you will have a lot of tokens yeah next up is Primal Vigor $6 this is a weird one potentially could backfire but it is obviously much cheaper it's five mana and if any player would put plus one counters or create tokens they double it so hopefully you are making the most tokens at the player at the table if you are then it's going to be amazing for you if something goes wrong and you get board wiped and somebody fires off a I don't know scoot swarm uh-oh that that will be rough you have to play this one very carefully but if you play it in the right meta you can just take over the game as quickly as like pretty much possible you're going to have a whole mob in the end and they're going to have what like maybe four treasures instead of two right yeah so the downside is real you know this could help opponents out very tangibly but the upside is you save $24 you spend one more mana and you for you at least get the exact same effect so that's I think pretty noteworthy but we're going to go to the next one it's aa's Chariot $6 three green 44 vehicle ETB you get two two two cats and when it attacks you can create a token that's a copy of Target token you control now this is what I was get hinting at of copying important tokens that are like harder to make I really like this I remember when it was big in a certain 60 card format but I think it's super cool because you're already making the tokens when it etvs and it just creates copies of tokens so if you do have another way to copy tokens like how you Brut clad or something like that you could get some really interesting ones I also just think that Vehicles should have more time in the sun yeah vehicles are sweet you know if you eternalize a Timeless witness you can make a copy of it with the seet Chariot I think the fact that it gives you two tokens up front and then the vehicle is sort of like this bonus thing that you get to keep totally helps these decks develop in the early game and it sets you up for like oh okay great you know I got a free attack on turn five I'll just crew with my cats make an extra cat that's totally something you can do and it's like well if I'm in the late game and I have a a not legendary token of my commander I'm going to copy it and then I get the ETB again and it's like that has the upside that parall lives can also have this just fuels itself too because you can have the four4 blocker because it comes with the two two two cats I think that's really interesting because there are some really awesome Vehicles like shuai for instance you can't crew that immediately even though it comes down for the same amount of Mana yeah what's our last uh token doubler thing our last one is Second Harvest at $9 you're just going to double the tokens that you already have on the board not great in an empty board but if you already have a stacked board you're just gonna be just rolling in it basically yeah and this does have a little bit of upside over parallel lives parallel lives you have to play before you make tokens but Second Harvest you have to play after you make tokens so it's a little bit of like give and take of when the cards are playable some token decks probably want both of these but this can overwhelm people end step boom clone all my tokens even if I'm using the budget stuff like pran Tok I clone all my foods and it just kind of makes this gigantic board State um and it definitely pays you off for playing tokens and it feels good to be paid off cuz I'm like I want tokens I want to double tokens this is a budging way to do that I think magic players just love seeing the word double on cards too it's just an explosion of permanence the next card is crater H behemoth at $30 eight Mana but it gives an overrun effect to all of your creatures and that's a lot of power in a short amount of time yeah crater H Behemoth well worth playing in your commander decks it's like the easiest way to win games in green it's probably one of the cards in the format that has won the most games by itself 30 bucks a bit much we've got some pretty cost efficient options here for you though we got Endra 4 Runners 80 cents 8 Mana 77 and your creatures get not plus X Plus X plus two plus two and they gain vigilance also and they gain trample so it does turn a big army into this Force but you're not going to kill a table you have to do some math you probably kill one or two people I play this in my budget yo deck and it's super nice because I'm doubling that trigger but if you can also just flicker it you can just keep getting that plus two plus two stacking the vigilance totally we also have Return of the wild speaker at 80 cents as well it either gives your creatures plus three plus three that are not humans or draws equal to the biggest power of nonhumans you control so it's a little bit modal and it's cheaper than greater H at five Mana obviously it's cheaper at 80 cents but it's also an instant so you can just attack with all your dudes they won't know what's going on they make the blocks and then you blow them out deal a bunch of damage to their face and probably kill all their creatures in combat too this is awesome because if you have something against you like delayed blast Fireball you can save it defensively too to give your team just a little bit of extra stat if you need it that's true cuz usually what you do is you go all right I'm I have this five Mana I'm going to use it to draw cards I'll hold it up until my turn and if something like that did happen you can go whoop save some of my dudes Kamal is another great one at $3.50 basically it's an overrun type effect but you can also pay Mana into it to make your lands creatures so if you don't have much of a board State going on he like creates dudes out of thin areas like come on land come on Forest Mountain get over here we're we're attacking come on come Cala is Beefy and he just brings a lot of power to your board in general it's also repeatable I think that this is a really good fissure but if you can get out a little bit early too you can just chip away at people even if you just have a few creatures yeah but we get to go to my personal favorite replacement for Crater ho because it does a very similar thing of just create so much power that you might not have to do math it's overwhelming Stampede at $4 your dudes get plus X Plus X where X is the biggest single dude you have if you have one 88 or you have a che you have a commander that gets reduced like a galta or something there's plenty of those in green this just becomes create 100 power and then from that point the game is over you're killing at least 2 and a half people plus it's five Mana so it does come down earlier than crater hoof 2 yeah it's cheaper if you can play like other spells or even just if you're in a late game play a giant thing don't have to attack with it then play overwhelming stamped to get the extra boost I think these cards do a pretty good job of accomplishing that all right it's late in the game I need to send it home I need trample so that my creatures being seven power or five power spill over and just finish people off most metas do end in combat damage and trample is a great way to push that through but we're going to move on to something a little bit more serious than cards every day there are cats out there that aren't getting the education that they need to succeed in life they are going without treats scratches and belly rups some of them don't even know how to play Magic the Gathering but all hope is not lost for as little as $2 a month you can support nitpicking nerds on patreon and get these cats the help that they need your small donation will change the lives of these helpless animals go to [Music] moving stuff I think it really is it breaks my heart every time yeah I mean we're going to have to go to our next card but I'm going to they're going to be in my thoughts we're going to go to Archangel of th at $35 this is a LIF linking flyer that when you gain life puts plus one plus1 counters on all your creatures this is a sick payoff this card is super expensive because it's really cool it's an angel it's an old Mythic that hasn't been reprinted in a while and there's a lot of demand for it but what it does is turns your life gain deck and your life gain triggers into a way to win the game to grow creatures I like this because it doesn't say once per turn it doesn't say only on your turn you can just get it for as many triggers as you get and that means just pumping your team up so high because that's what your deck is revolving around to do people also like this card for combos because it can combo with some things and if I'm thinking combo let's talk about helot suncrown he's $14 so he's less than half the price he's whenever you gain life you put a plus and plus one counter on a creature or enchantment you control and you can actually pay one in a white to give something LifeLink so this does have combos you can throw off a walking ballista or a trellion or something like that but what it does is it gives you bigger creatures when you gain life and this is actually really hard to interact with as an indestructible enchantment most of the time and it can even throw some LifeLink on if you need this comes down quicker than Archangel too so this could be a really good early game play and you could just start acre Advantage yeah it won't grow your entire team like an overrun but it will grow a single creature many many times especially with soul wardens or stuff or you can spread out the counters and then you know it'll be a similar effect we have to wait a little longer and I think that's okay next up we got cleric class $1.79 it says you gain extra life then it levels up and now when you gain life you put counter on target creature and the maximum level is you reanimate something and gain life equal to its uh something I think the classes are really slept on this like Barbarian class wizard class those are really good they come down for really cheap and leveling them up is at your discretion so if you do have the Mana that's great but if you don't and you want to play something else it'll just be there and just statically giving you the effect yeah this has a lot of what Archangel wants it has that combo potential where you can still throw a spike feeder with this and you just gain infinite life you can still do that and it also has a little extra where it says now you gain more life which is kind of similar to how the angel has LifeLink and the last mode just gives you a full freaking card by reanimating your best thing gaining you more life plus under $2 that's such a good deal yeah I like this one a lot more than helot even though helot does have extra other combos with it what is our next card our next card is Nikos Paragon at 70 cents whenever you gain life you put that many one one counters on each creature you control but only once per turn I think that's a little bit limiting but for 70 cents instead of $35 I I'm happy to take that in my budget decks yeah we can throw down nickos Paragon maybe we you know when it enters we gain life equal to its power or its toughness or something and then when that happens giant overrun this could gain this could put more counters on creatures than Archangel because Archangel only ever puts one so if you even gain three life that's more than an archangel trigger that's like pretty sick you can attack and just totally kill people with that the only thing is it's once per turn however this does also work on opponent's turn so if Nick those Paragon stays in play even a soul Warden will still trigger and put a counter on your dudes that is really good to consider or if you have instance and you have some sort of extort that can also be an option yeah next is kind of a weird one this is alenda hierophant at $2.30 it's a flyer whenever you gain life you put a counter on it and when it dies you get X11 Vamps with LifeLink where a is its power so we have that similar gain life put counters on it does only put it on itself but that actually kind of still equates to an overrun because when this dies if it had 10 counters on it you get 10 one ones with LifeLink God I love Alinda so much I play her in Edgar she's super cool and then people are just struggling like oh well I can't do a board wipe now because then you'll have a board but I don't have an exile spell in my hand this is just an mono white version of that I think it's really cool I think people should play this card more and you should try it out in your deck time to move on to a blue card this is really expensive it's a sakashima of a thousand faces at $33 from Commander Legends it feels like Commander Legends came out last week it did not this is a clone with partner but it clones only your own things and it says the legend rule doesn't apply to your things so the purpose this serves is to create extra legendaries that you really aren't supposed to have and it can function in the command Zone but I don't really see that too much especially since it's not like you're going to partner sakashima with oh molda it's like it can only partner with the you know mediocre one or two color commanders you're not really trying to clone those you're trying to clone other weird stuff other Legends in your deck yeah if it's Commander it's usually with crar to have that combo but in the 99 I think that's where I see it most you can get it as a secret layer right now but if you want to get it from the commander Legends like I think they're both like you know bare minimum of 30 bucks so so what are our Replacements one of our Replacements is Alton soldier at $4 for blue blue you can have an ETB as a copy of a creature on the battlefield except it's not legendary and then it also has Myriad and it's an artifact this is one of those Doctor Who cards that definitely slipped under the radar for all of us including Bey and I right so this not only does what sakashima wants in that you're creating an extra copy of a legendary creature it just loses the legendary part you get the extra text box of your favorite Legend but it does the extra work for you of saying no no no here's more of them if you give this haste or you just untap with it and attack with it now you've got three of that text box probably four cuz you also cloned something and that's just like exactly where this deck wants I me that's exactly what sakashima players would want Myriad is super cool too so I do like the fact that if you attack it and you can do something with your commander at instant speed you can just get so much value in that combat step yeah what's next next is quantum misalignment another Doctor Who card at $4.50 for in a blue you create a token that's a copy of a Target creature you control except it's not legendary but it has rebound so that you can get two copies of a legendary creature that you have so in theory you could have three commanders yes so this card I like at the rate that it is cuz it's five Mana for two copies over two turns and it seems like this would have a downside over sakushima because it says create a token that's a copy of Target so by killing the creature you want to clone in response it Fizzles it but a little secret about sakashima of a th faces if somebody puts sakashima of a th000 faces on the stack and they have a board state that I can visually see I know what they're going to clone and I can kill it in response to nullify both of them and then they're going to go well guess I have a sad robot it's like basically sakashima also telegraphs what it wants to clone so you can still kill it in response so I don't think you lose out on much with Quantum misalignment unless you actually just have one creature and then maybe you should you know maybe don't do that yeah maybe maybe play something else next is spark double at $5.50 and Beezy has a grudge with this card it's four Mana you create a copy of a creature you control but it gets a plus one plus one counter on it and it's not legendary to me it's basically the same thing as sakashima it doesn't give you the legend rule Clause but it doesn't matter because spark Double's not legendary so if you clone spark double that's also not legendary and you can just keep going from there uh this is the same kind of clunky where it can only clone your things and you know it's pretty telegraphed but this is like about as close of an effect as you can get if you were thinking about sakashima and you don't care that it's legendary itself forget it play spark double the $5.50 price tag is way better but I do have a grudge and that I do think this card is like massively overplayed do you want to explain it not really let's go to mirror boox $2.30 this is your way to have the legend rule not apply it doesn't do the cloning thing but it certainly does the legend rule thing so then from there you can spam the same creature if you want and then they even get bigger yeah you do get a little bit of the buff but that's not why people are playing this plus it's only three Mana to come down that's really not bad and you can get it down pretty quickly all right time to move on to the next expensive staple we're going to crack this one wide open it's old naone at $35 77 flamper whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a player you you get that many Treasures so you play Old naone attack if you deal 14 damage right away with creatures you get 14 Treasures you can spend it you can save it you know really all the things you can do with regular money it doesn't it doesn't matter that old naw bone hits or doesn't hit or attacks or doesn't attack because it counts for all of your creatures so if you have a lot of tramplers on the board already or you just have like a mess of creatures that are like one ones and you can get through with a bunch of them you're still getting that many Treasures when it comes down and honestly these Replacements are so good and so close to Old naone that I legitimately am not going to buy any more old na bones cuz I can just use this the first one sakiko mother of Summer 50 cents whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a player add that much green Mana until end of turn you don't lose this Mana as steps and phases end this is about as close as you could possibly get all you have to do is use the Mana right away which I don't think green decks have too much of a problem with and it's literally the same card except it's cheaper to cast obviously you don't want to be playing this if you're in like a three four or five color deck if you can't utilize that specifically green Mana but in monog green decks this is going to be awesome you can throw down three Haymakers in a single turn yeah if you even see like an old nbone commander deck that you were thinking about building just Swap this out and all of a sudden it's a budget proof the next one is Nature's will at $1 whenever one or more creatures you control deal combat damage to a player tap all lands they control and untap all land you control so it's like a little bit of a double duty type of deal this car does a lot of weird things first of all let's just say I play Nature's will you know the turn I would have played all noo and I play this instead and I attack with one or two things great I untap all my lands that's you know let's assume it's like seven or eight I get that same boost of mana and I can save it to cast an instant on your turn or I can just re redevelop and retap it to develop my board but what's interesting about Nature's will is that it's one or more creatures dealing combat damage to a player so you can hit all three opponents untap your Lance three times but you just have to float that Mana and then cast like a big instant plus if they're the type of deck that's like draw pass that can really screw them up later in the game if they were saving that Mana for something important that's true you even get the bonus of tapping their land so Nature's will is a pretty sweet one we also have Mark of sakiko you remember her $2 for an aura the enchanted creature has whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player add that much green until end of turn you don't lose this Mana as steps and phases in so you're going to play your big flamp play something like that some Dragon then the next turn play this on it attack with it and get a bunch of Mana right away this unlike old naone seems way easier to make your Mana back on because it's only two you do have to be careful which creature you target but in the end I think that this is a really good option because I do like the enchant creature like enchantments a lot I think they're really cool which brings us to the next one bare Umbra $4 you enchant a creature it gets plus two plus two and when it attacks untap all lands you control it's totem armor too yeah the bonus of this card is that it doesn't have to deal combat damage who cares and you're not even risking the creature when you send it in at least the first time cuz if it dies you just lose Barum which you probably want to keep but still you get to untap all your lands right away this is very often extremely Mana positive and can kind of act like old naone in basically taking an extra turn the extra stats too I think that 2 two especially if you can chip in like a few turns in advance you're getting those extra leads but that damage does add up over the long run yeah I think these cards kind of put an old nbone to shame honestly considering the budget difference uh get out of here old n who even needs you old nbone is five times more expensive than the total of all these cards put together so it's a really good deal all of these budget Alternatives but next is Enlighten tutor at $22 one white Mana for an instant you search your library for an artifact or enchantment you find it and you put it to the top of your library so this is at instant speed it's you could do it turn one but it is expensive at $22 right this is a very powerful tutor effect and the effect that we're going to look at primarily for this one is finding an enchantment and putting it either in your hand or on top basically putting it in your hand it's putting it on top at instant speed is very close so we're trying to get access to our best cards that are artifacts or enchantments and we're trying to do it for a reasonable uh price so the first replacement we have is invasion of feros a card I forgot existed 60 cents two in a white ETB search your library for an aura God or demigod put it into your hand then shovel and it becomes a weird God and it says you draw cards when other enchantments enter under your control but but basically you have to find an aura so this is not quite any enchantment but I think there's a lot of enchantments in the enchanters decks which is of course where you would want this that our auras like you can find wild growth to ramp you can find Kenra transformation or song of the dads for removal there's plenty of different options you can find bar umra you know untap all your lands so I think invasion of Theos is a pretty good enlightened tutor impression although it only gets better from here plus if you have a Voltron deck like bez's Imperial Archangel deck it can really you might have way more options than you'd think the next alternative to enlightened tutor is Moon bless cleric at $1 tuna white when it etbs you can search your library for an enchantment card reveal it and then Shuffle and put it on top we're getting that effect for a couple more Mana but you also get a body out of it so if you can flicker it you can get that effect multiple times I don't think it gets closer to a replacement for Enlighten tuner than this one again it does not find artifacts white can't really do that that's sort of a color pie break on Enlighten tutor's part so the part we can replicate is pay two more Mana but you get a creature and it just Enlighten Tut when it enters so you can flicker this or reanimate it to get it again that's really cool the only thing to note is don't get too trigger happy with flickering this cuz playing it and flickering it immediately doesn't actually do anything you only get the top card so it doesn't go into your hand just know that but that's a really good replacement honestly I would be so fine with just swapping any enlightened tutors I would buy with this thing instead especially if your games go a little bit longer than just like needing that card you know turn two draw into it next is idilic tutor at $7 it's like enlightened tutor but actually goes straight to your hand so it's a little bit better but you do have to wait a little bit longer and again it only finds enchantments this is really directly to your hand though so it it's like oh I have to spend more expensive and I can't do it instant speed but you get it right now so if it's important and you need to remove something or cast something or trigger something you can do it right away with en light tutor it's like okay I got to find a way to to draw a card so while it is slower and like clunkier it's also better for you after it resolves you feel better about it you can't have it miled away or anything yeah there's no there's no funny business but we do have one and I do mean one budget alternative for Enlighten tutor if you want to find artifacts as far as I know this is like the only other white card that even searches for artifacts it's Oswald fiddle Bender at $1.79 you can pay white and tap them and sacrifice an artifact to birthing pod another artifact so you search for an artifact that costs one plus that sacrifice things Mana value put it on the battlefield then Shuffle it's a little different but it is search for artifact put artifact out so if you've got the like prerequisite one Mana value less thing to sacrifice you get to go find your best artifact and put it into play it's a little finicky you know it's Oswald fiddle Bender he's just a weird little guy but it's pretty much the only way to get tutor artifacts in white I don't dislike that though because you could trade like Treasures or food for like soing and that's just a really good deal overall yeah you can find like you know skull clamp off of a token and then start drawing cards with it I love Oswald he's good he's just not exactly a light Tor but if you're looking for more budget replacements for those ridiculously expensive Commander Staples that were sick of buying you can check that out right here

Channel: Nitpicking Nerds

Views: 37,732

Keywords: mtg, edh, commander, nitpicking nerds

Id: -JsgURpVfdk

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024