But however it seems to make sense that card lots are desperate last-ditch attempts to sell cards that no one wanted to buy. If they could sell these cards individually for more money, why wouldn't they?
So, if Valakut comes in as Mountain #6+, it will trigger. And, if two Valakuts come in at the same time, as mountains #6+, it will trigger two times, because two mountains came in, and two Valakuts are on the field.
Is that right? If so, I think I get it. If not...bugger. >_<
At this point, you control two copies of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and also two Mountains just entered the battlefield. Therefore, each Valakut will trigger for each Mountain: 2x2 for a total of four triggers.
Think about it this way: everything that is supposed to come into the battlefield will do so, take a moment to stop and take a breathe, now that everything is in play evaluate which triggers should go on the stack.
I don't shuffle my cards to gain any sort of advantage. I don't do it to try to distract you or to prevent you from noticing what cards I've topdecked. I just do it because I do.
For example, I noticed that I was "clicking" my pen constantly while I was reading your post. And as I'm typing I'm response, I'm chewing on the pen. Is it annoying? Probably.
Am I doing it because I'm trying to annoy you? No.
Will I stop because it annoys you? Probably not.
Is it because I'm trying to make up for a lack of skill in another department? No.
I'm sorry that you think your opponent does it to psyche you out. But the truth of the matter is, it's not about you; don't flatter yourself. Your opponent isn't even thinking about you when he's flicking his cards: he's thinking about the game state. He likely does not even realize he's doing it.
Not every action is directed at you. Next, you'll start claiming that I'm blinking abnormally fast to gain a psychological advantage. Whether or not I shuffle my cards and how fast I blink has nothing to do with my opponent. That's just who I am and what I do.
Clicking a pen, shaking one of your legs while you're seated, drumming your fingers against your desk. All habits that might get under your skin. But none of these are done with the primary intent to annoy you.
Can you be more specific on how you intend to achieve this?
As far as I can tell, this combo does not allow you to look at the order of your entire library, shortcut or no shortcut.
I presume that you mean you want to continuously sacrifice Kitchen Finks to Viscera Seer's ability. Since you are scrying 1, you will repeatedly look at the first card over and over again if you do not intend to move that card to the bottom.
I agree with xburritox here: talking to the tournament organizer and head judge is your best bet. I also tend to agree with you that there's a good chance that the event will start at least five (probably more) minutes late.
As far as your question about registering a sealed pool, the answer is yes and no. Yes, you do register a sealed pool but not yours. The cards you open will not be the cards you use. Instead, you pass your pool to someone else. Your pool will be something that someone else opened and registered. This is done so that you aren't tempted to sneak in good cards into the pool: someone else already wrote your pool down!
A small percentage of people do actually end up getting their own pool returned back to them for deck construction: I've heard it said that the probability that you end up with your own pool is about 5-10%, which is about the same probability that you will end up playing against the person who ultimately gets your pool (if you don't).
This equal percentage is such that it discourages you from sabotaging the pool to hurt other players: you might get your own pool back. (Of course, regardless of any percentage play, Cheating is Cheating and will be punished properly.)
It's a habit, yes. Is it a bad habit? Probably. Is it out of nervousness? Absolutely not.
When I do this at an FNM, it's not because I'm nervous: it's because I just do it. When I idly do this at home sitting in front of the TV, it's not because I'm nervous.
The most analogous example I've heard is a poker player who shuffles his chips.
I also resent this being called an intimidation tactic. Again, I'm not trying to scare my TV or living room couch when I do this at home.
People try to overthink it, but the pure reason is that it actually takes effort to concentrate on doing nothing. When I'm busy thinking about something else, my hands just naturally gravitate to this behavior.
The emphasis on FNM is about teaching new players the correct way to play, rather than punishing those who don't know the rule. In fact, it's suggested that the judges "deviate like hell" from the Infraction Penalty Guide to cut players some slack. You won't get disqualified or banned for accidentally playing wrong. Hopefully, no one is going to yell at you.
However, people use this leniency in rules as an opportunity to cheat.
For example, some people might show up at FNM's with their deck sleeved in two different colored sleeves. Granted, the truth might be that there is no true pattern as to which cards are in what color sleeve, but this is still an obvious no-no regardless of how lax the rules are. It might be okay at your kitchen table that half of your deck is in blue sleeves and the other half is in gray sleeves, but not at a real tournament.
Your kitchen table might allow rules that allow you to peek at the top card of your library before deciding that you need to mulligan. If you drew an opening hand with one land in it, you can't check the top of your library before deciding to keep or ship.
Your kitchen table might have rules that allow you to play two lands per turn in the beginning of the game to speed up the game. Again, something like this would not be allowed.
Also, check the format of the tournament. If it's a Standard tournament, make sure that your deck adheres to the rules of Standard Deck Construction. If you accidentally have Remove Soul in your deck, the judge will make corrections to your deck because it's not Standard legal: depending on your judge, he might replace it with a basic land or he might be nice enough to replace it with an Essence Scatter.
If your deck has five copies of Hero's Downfall in your deck by accident, the judge will make a necessary correction to your deck (likely by having you replace the extra Hero's Downfall with a basic land). However if you've stuffed your deck with five copies of Hero's Downfall in an attempt to cheat, hoping no one will notice, then the punishments will be severe: Cheating is not tolerated at any level.
Long story short: You still have to follow the most basic and obvious rules of the game. But an accident or mistake won't be harshly punished.
re: the 13 illegal cards -- I bet there will be cards that break the Golden Rule of card ownership.
Yup, I bet this is what we're dealing with.
You thought Control Magic was Dumb - 5UU
Sorcery
Gain control of target permanent. This effect doesn't end at end of game.
Also maybe a Condemn that puts the card on the bottom of YOUR library
Hate to beat a dead horse here, but I agree that the banned cards somehow break the rules of ordinary tournament Magic.
Multi-player games have a tendency to appeal to the casual crowd, where exact rules don't exist but are rather replaced by rules meant to be interpreted by the group as a whole. For example, cards such as Fat Ass. If you have food in your mouth and you're in the process of chewing, but you happen to be "in between" bites as we go to damage, are you still chewing? These rules would certainly not exist in tournament Magic, but the casual crowd tends to like silliness rather than order.
Granted, I don't think a card as ridiculous as Fat Ass would be in this set, but why not something like Gus, Bursting Beebles, Booster Tutor, or Mana Screw? How about cards that change team alignment? 4 on 4 now becomes 5 on 3. Or teams trade certain players (and the permanents they control). Of course, it does say that this game can be played as a free for all, so I guess that eliminates the team thing.
Of course, I still like the Control Magic example from Uber Moogle.
So I'm headed a PTQ today and it will be the first time I've played with paper cards in over a year.
The last time I had played in a tournament, we had "lapsing triggers". From what I understand, these things don't exist anymore but the concept is still the same? Is this correct? I tried reading the IPG, but I'd rather someone who is familiar with it just explain it to me in a way that I can understand.
Are all of the following sentences true?
I'm not allowed to intentionally skip a trigger that I know about (i.e., didn't forget about).
If my opponent skips a trigger, I can either choose to not say anything about it (if it's explicitly beneficial to him, Thassa, God of the Sea's trigger) or I can insist this trigger goes on the stack (if it's potentially harmful to him, Pain Seer's trigger).
All changes in life total need to be verbally announced.
After my opponent sacrifices a creature to tap my Demon, do players get priority before attackers are declared?
In other words, after my Demon is tapped, can I use Triton Tactics to untap my Demon and attack with it anyway?
Alternatively, if I want to animate Mutavault and attack with it, can I wait to see if my Demon gets tapped before I invest the mana to animate it? Or does it need to be done with Demon's trigger on the stack?
A lot of things in Magic are a constant. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that they've finally found this semblance of balance in the game so they know they're in the right place and don't want to leave it. During Magic's early days, Richard Garfield thought that Healing Salve, Ancestral Recall, Dark Ritual, Lightning Bolt and Giant Growth were pretty much equal and made these cards in a cycle: you get three of something for one mana. As it turns out, drawing three cards is much better than preventing three damage.
The second reason is that there are a finite number of things that a spell can do. Let's talk removal spells: you can either remove it by burning it (Lightning Bolt), killing it one-for-one (Terror), bouncing it to the owner's hand (Unsummon), putting it back in the owner's library (Azorious Charm, Condemn), hiding it under an enchantment (Oblivion Ring, Banisher Priest) or by killing all the creatures (Wrath of God, Slagstorm). That's it, there's not much else you can do to a creature. As long as removal spells exist in Magic (forever), they're going to be some version of this list above.
Wrath of God isn't the only effect that you see copied over and over again.
They also like to reprint cards with a slight change in it and change the cost slightly to account.
Day of Judgment used to cost 2WW but they made it a little harder to cast by changing it to 1WWU for Supreme Verdict being un-counterable. Damnation is a direct copy of Wrath of God because of the color shifting thing, but Mutilate wipes the board in the typical black fashion (reducing toughness) for the same cost.
Oblivion Ring used to cost 2W but they made it a little harder to cast by changing it to 1WU and adding the "all other permanents with the same name" part of it to Detention Sphere.
Cancel used to cost 1UU but they are many variations of it. Dismal Failure costs one more mana and forces a discard. Last Word costs one more mana and can't be countered. Double Negative requires red to cast it but counters two spells.
Pyroclasm used to cost 1R but when the mirran vs phyrexian thing was an angle they changed it to Whipflare. When the Faerie deck was becoming a problem, they made Volcanic Fallout one more mana for instant speed and un counterable.
A store that has 65 people at this week's FNM is probably not going to have 25 people at next week's FNM. By gauging their attendance in previous weeks, the store should have a ballpark idea of the attendance at the upcoming week's event. And since the attendance is roughly similar each week, the number of winners is roughly similar each week as well.
This actually holds up pretty well with the way Swiss pairings work.
Pair ups, pair downs, and unintentional draws are bound to happen that screw up the math on a second-order scale, but the approximation is this:
after one round, approximately 50% of the players will be 1-0 and approximately 50% of the players will be 0-1
after two rounds, approximately 25% of the players will be 2-0
after three rounds, approximately 13% of the players will be 3-0
after four rounds, approximately 7% of the players will be 4-0
Consider how the store decides to charge for the event and how they choose to offer prize support. Usually, it goes something like this for a Constructed FNM: each player pays $5 to enter and that contributes two packs to the prize pool. For example, if 43 people enter, the store will collect $215 in entry fees and will owe a total of 86 packs back to the prize pool (divided among the winners as they see fit).
According to my (very rough) math, you can expect three players to 4-0 after four rounds. If you choose to split the 86 packs of prize evenly among these three players, you can safely advertise ahead of time that you'll pay out 28 packs to each 4-0 player. (That leaves 84 packs distributed and 2 packs of extra profit for the store.)
So will this advertisement of paying 28 packs for every 4-0 player stand up even if the attendance changes?
Suppose that there's an unusually high turnout. Suppose there's 100 players today. Is the store in jeopardy of losing money because of this higher turnout? No, they will pay more packs as prize support but they will also collect more money in entry fees.
100 players means they collect $500 and therefore are willing to hand out 200 packs in prize support. Again, you expect 7% of players to be 4-0, so you expect 7 or so players to be 4-0. Pay them each 28 packs x 7 players = 196 packs, right around their anticipated number of 200 packs.
TL;DR- More players means the store has to give out more prizes, but it also means they collect more money in entry fees so they can afford to hand out more prizes. It all evens out.
I remember your original post about getting better at Magic and I'm glad that you've heeded my advice to learn an actual format. Legacy isn't where to start though.
The cost of decks is expensive so usually Legacy players are more serious players. That being said, you are already putting yourself in a disadvantaged situation: a new player shouldn't jump into a format with only serious players.
Legacy decks are so expensive so there are fewer Legacy players around, and as a result fewer Legacy events to attend. FNM won't even allow the Legacy format, so won't find a good place to put your learned skills to the test.
Legacy also allows for a larger card pool which means that you need to know what a bunch of other cards do. Repeating a point I made in my last thread, the point is to start to be able to anticipate what your opponent will do: you need to anticipate what your opponent's next play is, that could be any one of over 10,000 cards (though not every card in the history of Magic is Legacy-playable, yadda yadda).
Karakas was first printed in 1994, Force of Will was first printed in 1996, Wasteland was first printed in 1997, Mother of Runes was first printed in 1999, Æther Vial was first printed in 2004, and Tarmogoyf was first printed in 2007. And you need to know all of them. And all the cards in between. You also need to know how all the mechanics in the history of Magic interact with each other.
Also, older Magic cards weren't as eloquently written and have rather confusing text. Read Ice Cauldron and tell me what that card does. Is Chains of Mephistopheles even in English?
Cards like Mindbreak Trap have effects that are so narrowly useful that you can't replicate a similar effect in today's Standard.
There's also no reason to limit yourself to mono-white. As Encendei points out, the deck he posted does is mostly white and embodies the traditional strategy of a white weenie deck.
Encendi's deck used to be Standard-legal some time ago (ps- I really miss SOM/ISD Standard) so it's an appropriate size card pool to try to remember. (The fact that this is now a defunct format will make it impossible for you to find someone else with another deck stuck in the same format.) The interactions are more rudimentary: Champion of the Parish is played first (if you have the option) so that all other humans that come into play after it will give the +1/+1 counter. Fiend Hunter is a great card because it gives +1/+1 counters to your Champion of the Parish while eliminating their best creature, all in one card. And so on.
Geist of Saint Traft is a bit expensive at $16 per card, but it's a far cry from the cost of the Legacy decks: chances are you don't want to pay $100 per Karakas and $90 per Wasteland just as a learning exercise.
Honestly, your best bet is the current Standard format or a Limited format (booster draft).
You really have to go to ebay for this kind of stuff. It's not like the big websites have tons of these cards in stock and are prepared to sell them, so the value of these cards is really quite fluid. It really depends on how much people are willing to pay to buy these cards (and not so much how much potential sellers are asking for the card).
There's one recent ebay auction where a foil Russian Omniscience sold for 125 USD and that auction had 11 bids, so you can bet there's a good deal of interest for that.
For foil Korean Enter the Infinite, two copies of this card sold in recent history on ebay: one at 78 USD and another at 100 USD.
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But however it seems to make sense that card lots are desperate last-ditch attempts to sell cards that no one wanted to buy. If they could sell these cards individually for more money, why wouldn't they?
At this point, you control two copies of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and also two Mountains just entered the battlefield. Therefore, each Valakut will trigger for each Mountain: 2x2 for a total of four triggers.
Think about it this way: everything that is supposed to come into the battlefield will do so, take a moment to stop and take a breathe, now that everything is in play evaluate which triggers should go on the stack.
You can not spells while declaring blockers, so the play you describe doesn't work.
For example, I noticed that I was "clicking" my pen constantly while I was reading your post. And as I'm typing I'm response, I'm chewing on the pen. Is it annoying? Probably.
Am I doing it because I'm trying to annoy you? No.
Will I stop because it annoys you? Probably not.
Is it because I'm trying to make up for a lack of skill in another department? No.
I'm sorry that you think your opponent does it to psyche you out. But the truth of the matter is, it's not about you; don't flatter yourself. Your opponent isn't even thinking about you when he's flicking his cards: he's thinking about the game state. He likely does not even realize he's doing it.
Not every action is directed at you. Next, you'll start claiming that I'm blinking abnormally fast to gain a psychological advantage. Whether or not I shuffle my cards and how fast I blink has nothing to do with my opponent. That's just who I am and what I do.
Clicking a pen, shaking one of your legs while you're seated, drumming your fingers against your desk. All habits that might get under your skin. But none of these are done with the primary intent to annoy you.
As far as I can tell, this combo does not allow you to look at the order of your entire library, shortcut or no shortcut.
I presume that you mean you want to continuously sacrifice Kitchen Finks to Viscera Seer's ability. Since you are scrying 1, you will repeatedly look at the first card over and over again if you do not intend to move that card to the bottom.
As far as your question about registering a sealed pool, the answer is yes and no. Yes, you do register a sealed pool but not yours. The cards you open will not be the cards you use. Instead, you pass your pool to someone else. Your pool will be something that someone else opened and registered. This is done so that you aren't tempted to sneak in good cards into the pool: someone else already wrote your pool down!
A small percentage of people do actually end up getting their own pool returned back to them for deck construction: I've heard it said that the probability that you end up with your own pool is about 5-10%, which is about the same probability that you will end up playing against the person who ultimately gets your pool (if you don't).
This equal percentage is such that it discourages you from sabotaging the pool to hurt other players: you might get your own pool back. (Of course, regardless of any percentage play, Cheating is Cheating and will be punished properly.)
It's a habit, yes. Is it a bad habit? Probably. Is it out of nervousness? Absolutely not.
When I do this at an FNM, it's not because I'm nervous: it's because I just do it. When I idly do this at home sitting in front of the TV, it's not because I'm nervous.
The most analogous example I've heard is a poker player who shuffles his chips.
I also resent this being called an intimidation tactic. Again, I'm not trying to scare my TV or living room couch when I do this at home.
People try to overthink it, but the pure reason is that it actually takes effort to concentrate on doing nothing. When I'm busy thinking about something else, my hands just naturally gravitate to this behavior.
However, people use this leniency in rules as an opportunity to cheat.
For example, some people might show up at FNM's with their deck sleeved in two different colored sleeves. Granted, the truth might be that there is no true pattern as to which cards are in what color sleeve, but this is still an obvious no-no regardless of how lax the rules are. It might be okay at your kitchen table that half of your deck is in blue sleeves and the other half is in gray sleeves, but not at a real tournament.
Your kitchen table might allow rules that allow you to peek at the top card of your library before deciding that you need to mulligan. If you drew an opening hand with one land in it, you can't check the top of your library before deciding to keep or ship.
Your kitchen table might have rules that allow you to play two lands per turn in the beginning of the game to speed up the game. Again, something like this would not be allowed.
Also, check the format of the tournament. If it's a Standard tournament, make sure that your deck adheres to the rules of Standard Deck Construction. If you accidentally have Remove Soul in your deck, the judge will make corrections to your deck because it's not Standard legal: depending on your judge, he might replace it with a basic land or he might be nice enough to replace it with an Essence Scatter.
If your deck has five copies of Hero's Downfall in your deck by accident, the judge will make a necessary correction to your deck (likely by having you replace the extra Hero's Downfall with a basic land). However if you've stuffed your deck with five copies of Hero's Downfall in an attempt to cheat, hoping no one will notice, then the punishments will be severe: Cheating is not tolerated at any level.
Long story short: You still have to follow the most basic and obvious rules of the game. But an accident or mistake won't be harshly punished.
Hate to beat a dead horse here, but I agree that the banned cards somehow break the rules of ordinary tournament Magic.
Multi-player games have a tendency to appeal to the casual crowd, where exact rules don't exist but are rather replaced by rules meant to be interpreted by the group as a whole. For example, cards such as Fat Ass. If you have food in your mouth and you're in the process of chewing, but you happen to be "in between" bites as we go to damage, are you still chewing? These rules would certainly not exist in tournament Magic, but the casual crowd tends to like silliness rather than order.
Granted, I don't think a card as ridiculous as Fat Ass would be in this set, but why not something like Gus, Bursting Beebles, Booster Tutor, or Mana Screw? How about cards that change team alignment? 4 on 4 now becomes 5 on 3. Or teams trade certain players (and the permanents they control). Of course, it does say that this game can be played as a free for all, so I guess that eliminates the team thing.
Of course, I still like the Control Magic example from Uber Moogle.
The last time I had played in a tournament, we had "lapsing triggers". From what I understand, these things don't exist anymore but the concept is still the same? Is this correct? I tried reading the IPG, but I'd rather someone who is familiar with it just explain it to me in a way that I can understand.
Are all of the following sentences true?
Anything else I'm forgetting?
After my opponent sacrifices a creature to tap my Demon, do players get priority before attackers are declared?
In other words, after my Demon is tapped, can I use Triton Tactics to untap my Demon and attack with it anyway?
Alternatively, if I want to animate Mutavault and attack with it, can I wait to see if my Demon gets tapped before I invest the mana to animate it? Or does it need to be done with Demon's trigger on the stack?
The second reason is that there are a finite number of things that a spell can do. Let's talk removal spells: you can either remove it by burning it (Lightning Bolt), killing it one-for-one (Terror), bouncing it to the owner's hand (Unsummon), putting it back in the owner's library (Azorious Charm, Condemn), hiding it under an enchantment (Oblivion Ring, Banisher Priest) or by killing all the creatures (Wrath of God, Slagstorm). That's it, there's not much else you can do to a creature. As long as removal spells exist in Magic (forever), they're going to be some version of this list above.
Wrath of God isn't the only effect that you see copied over and over again.
For example,
As TvashTar pointed out, there are always "Wrath"-like spells at 6 or 7 mana that aren't supposed to affect Standard (perhaps Block, perhaps Limited, perhaps Casual): Austere Command, Martial Coup, Mass Calcify, Fated Retribution, Phyrexian Rebirth.
They also like to reprint cards with a slight change in it and change the cost slightly to account.
I could go on forever and ever.
TL;DR- Ideas in Magic tend to repeat themselves because they've run out of ways to make things different. Expect that to be the same.
A store that has 65 people at this week's FNM is probably not going to have 25 people at next week's FNM. By gauging their attendance in previous weeks, the store should have a ballpark idea of the attendance at the upcoming week's event. And since the attendance is roughly similar each week, the number of winners is roughly similar each week as well.
This actually holds up pretty well with the way Swiss pairings work.
Pair ups, pair downs, and unintentional draws are bound to happen that screw up the math on a second-order scale, but the approximation is this:
Consider how the store decides to charge for the event and how they choose to offer prize support. Usually, it goes something like this for a Constructed FNM: each player pays $5 to enter and that contributes two packs to the prize pool. For example, if 43 people enter, the store will collect $215 in entry fees and will owe a total of 86 packs back to the prize pool (divided among the winners as they see fit).
According to my (very rough) math, you can expect three players to 4-0 after four rounds. If you choose to split the 86 packs of prize evenly among these three players, you can safely advertise ahead of time that you'll pay out 28 packs to each 4-0 player. (That leaves 84 packs distributed and 2 packs of extra profit for the store.)
So will this advertisement of paying 28 packs for every 4-0 player stand up even if the attendance changes?
Suppose that there's an unusually high turnout. Suppose there's 100 players today. Is the store in jeopardy of losing money because of this higher turnout? No, they will pay more packs as prize support but they will also collect more money in entry fees.
100 players means they collect $500 and therefore are willing to hand out 200 packs in prize support. Again, you expect 7% of players to be 4-0, so you expect 7 or so players to be 4-0. Pay them each 28 packs x 7 players = 196 packs, right around their anticipated number of 200 packs.
TL;DR- More players means the store has to give out more prizes, but it also means they collect more money in entry fees so they can afford to hand out more prizes. It all evens out.
The cost of decks is expensive so usually Legacy players are more serious players. That being said, you are already putting yourself in a disadvantaged situation: a new player shouldn't jump into a format with only serious players.
Legacy decks are so expensive so there are fewer Legacy players around, and as a result fewer Legacy events to attend. FNM won't even allow the Legacy format, so won't find a good place to put your learned skills to the test.
Legacy also allows for a larger card pool which means that you need to know what a bunch of other cards do. Repeating a point I made in my last thread, the point is to start to be able to anticipate what your opponent will do: you need to anticipate what your opponent's next play is, that could be any one of over 10,000 cards (though not every card in the history of Magic is Legacy-playable, yadda yadda).
Karakas was first printed in 1994, Force of Will was first printed in 1996, Wasteland was first printed in 1997, Mother of Runes was first printed in 1999, Æther Vial was first printed in 2004, and Tarmogoyf was first printed in 2007. And you need to know all of them. And all the cards in between. You also need to know how all the mechanics in the history of Magic interact with each other.
Also, older Magic cards weren't as eloquently written and have rather confusing text. Read Ice Cauldron and tell me what that card does. Is Chains of Mephistopheles even in English?
Cards like Mindbreak Trap have effects that are so narrowly useful that you can't replicate a similar effect in today's Standard.
There's also no reason to limit yourself to mono-white. As Encendei points out, the deck he posted does is mostly white and embodies the traditional strategy of a white weenie deck.
Encendi's deck used to be Standard-legal some time ago (ps- I really miss SOM/ISD Standard) so it's an appropriate size card pool to try to remember. (The fact that this is now a defunct format will make it impossible for you to find someone else with another deck stuck in the same format.) The interactions are more rudimentary: Champion of the Parish is played first (if you have the option) so that all other humans that come into play after it will give the +1/+1 counter. Fiend Hunter is a great card because it gives +1/+1 counters to your Champion of the Parish while eliminating their best creature, all in one card. And so on.
Geist of Saint Traft is a bit expensive at $16 per card, but it's a far cry from the cost of the Legacy decks: chances are you don't want to pay $100 per Karakas and $90 per Wasteland just as a learning exercise.
Honestly, your best bet is the current Standard format or a Limited format (booster draft).
There's one recent ebay auction where a foil Russian Omniscience sold for 125 USD and that auction had 11 bids, so you can bet there's a good deal of interest for that.
For foil Korean Enter the Infinite, two copies of this card sold in recent history on ebay: one at 78 USD and another at 100 USD.