Dollar Menu Dynamite

It can be easy to convince yourself nowadays that Magic has become a pay-to-win game. If two players sit down for the average game, victory will inevitably go towards whomever's deck is crammed with the most (purposefully) overpowered mythic rares, right? Well, if the dreaded sligh can upset the tournament scene with its bargain-bin bad boys, there's no reason you can't do the same in your playgroup. While everyone's knocking themselves out trying to get their hands on Hero of Bladehold and Karn Liberated, cards that have long since rotated out of Standard of course drop in price since their demand has plummeted. They may not have any place in organized events, but you can save your hard-earned pennies if you show up to your casual games with some of these underrated gems.

In keeping with a catchy name, all of the cards suggested here can be had for $1 or less (at the time of writing! Maybe my wisdom will pass down and some of these will become hot commodities, who knows.) They may not be the flashiest cards around, but it's hard to get more bang for your buck at a kitchen table game of Magic. I'd buy that for a dollar!

Soltari Guerrillas: This murder machine is essentially 4 mana for an unblockable 3/2, but instead of damaging your opponent, it can Lightning Bolt one of his creatures every turn. A great many creatures can be felled by 3 damage, giving you a free kill every turn, but there's no need to give up if your opponent starts dropping some huge fatties. You can pump the Guerrillas's power to throw around more damage, or give them Deathtouch to take out anything. They can deal damage to a creature that's blocking, working together with your other attacker to bring them down. Give the Guerillas First Strike and they can actually take out a creature before it has time to hit something it is blocking - and if your blocked creature had Trample, well, it can then send all that damage straight at your opponent! Keep in mind that the Guerrillas ability redirects its damage, so it is still dealing combat damage - meaning it will still get counters from Banshee's Blade or Umezawa's Jitte. The real secret tech? Soltari Guerrillas's oracle text leaves it with a zero-mana activated ability that targets, usable at will. It will only damage the last creature you pick, but you can pick a target as many times as you please and at any time, even if it's not your turn. Combine it with Cowardice or Horobi, Death's Wail to completely wipe your opponent's board!

Maddening Imp: The Imp isn't the first card to force your opponent's creatures to attack or die, but it's perhaps unique in affecting even creatures with summoning sickness (and efficient in affecting all of his creatures at once!) If your opponent ever plays a creature without Haste in his precombat main phase, the Imp can kill it off while forcing the old hands into combat. Of course, he can avoid this by playing creatures postcombat... but that doesn't mean they're safe. Simply tap or pacify any creatures and they'll be dead by turn's end. Force your opponent's nonthreatening creatures to charge headlong into your Souls of the Faultless and Soul Collector, or a Wall of Frost which will ensure their doom next turn. Looking to clear creatures out in a hurry? Use the Imp after playing Moment of Silence for a one-mana Plague Wind.

Phyrexian Portal: "Do I put both the good cards in one pile, or do I separate them?" "Let's see... do I pick the one-card pile or the nine-card pile?" If you love playing Let's Make a Deal, this is the artifact for you. The Portal can give you great cards if you read your opponent's psychology right and pick the better pile. It's a card that tests the nerves and minds of both players and truly rewards the one who can outthink his opponent.

Lim-Dûl's Vault: If there's one thing that every Magic player wants to do, it's stack his deck. For two mana and a piddling investment in life, you have an instant that lets you dig as deep as you want until you have exactly the top five cards that you want! Even better, the Vault's search mechanic is a game-within-a-game that gets your brain going. Will you keep searching for your kill card by losing life or will you be happy with the five solid cards you just drew? 

Trade Routes: This draw engine of yesteryear lets you cycle your excess lands for only one mana a pop, helping you dig into some needed answers in the lategame. No lands in hand? Hey, it also lets you bounce one back to your hand and discard that to draw something new. There's no need to view these two versatile abilities in a vacuum, though. You can bounce lands to save them from destruction, yank manlands out of combat, guarantee landfall every turn or just fill up your hand for various effects (Thoughts of Ruin seems the most rude!) Likewise you can create discard triggers, fill up your graveyard for Threshold or set up cards like Terravore, Harvest Wurm and Worm Harvest (hey, how about that?) Speaking of filling your graveyard, Dakmor Salvage lets you pay 1 to mill two cards on demand, allowing you to dump everything else while you're at it. The card-filtering of Trade Routes has many applications but is innocuous in its subtle nature, allowing it to often fly under the radar.

Foster: A four-mana enchantment from the oft-underrated Mercadian Masques, the humble Foster lets you pay one mana whenever one of your creatures dies to dig down until you find a replacement, put that in your hand and dump the rest in your graveyard. This is already a handy effect, ensuring you always have a creature to replace anyone killed and even potentially netting card advantage. Filling up your graveyard need not be just a side-effect, however - in a deck light on creature cards, you can quickly set up all sorts of tricks including Dredge, Flashback, Threshold or a creative reanimator build.
Remember that you don't just have to trigger off creatures who die to combat or removal: Foster can piggyback off of your own sacrifice outlets for additional value as well as creatures who have Echo or Fading. Consider Ashnod's Altar, which can pay for Foster's trigger and still have a mana leftover to put towards the creature it finds you. Note also that Foster lacks the critical "nontoken" clause, meaning you can trade in some hapless saproling token for a real creature card in your hand! Don't want to play the lottery with what you get? No sweat, you can guarantee what Foster digs up by slapping a critter on top of your library with Haunted Crossroads - even the creature that triggered Foster, if you do it in response!

Riptide Shapeshifter: This card is highly versatile and deceptively powerful, but it requires a special way of looking at your deck as what may well be the first "anti-tribal" card. The Shapeshifter can grab anything you want from your deck and put it into play, but in order for it to be at all reliable, you need your toolbox to not have any overlaps. Consider Praetor, Elephant, Djinn, Gorgon, Eldrazi and Avatar as examples of disparate creature types that are easy to have as one-offs. The Shapeshifter is somewhat mana-intensive to play and use, but being able to do so at instant speed means you can catch a foe unaware with what you can do in response to his play.

Pyromancy: Don't have the nine mana to nail your foe with a Searing Wind? With this other four-mana enchantment, you don't need to: just throw it at his face instead! Pyromancy turns all of your high-costed fatties into massive direct damage spells, but no matter how much damage you get out of it, the cost of entry is always fixed at a reasonable 3 colorless. Since you plan on discarding overcosted bombs anyways, Pyromancy can also set up some reanimation. There's no better follow-up to blasting your for for 16 damage than bringing back Draco with Shallow Grave, huh?

Tortured Existence: Do you remember the sheer power and versatility of the classic Nightmare-Survival decks? This common counterpart comes surprisingly close in one little card. Any creature you draw can be traded out for the best creature in your graveyard - for one measly mana! Early on, you can swap your mana-greedy fatties for littler ones you can actually afford to play; in the lategame, any tiny utility creatures you topdeck can be swapped out for some big bruiser. You can re-use comes-into-play abilities again and again, especially if the creatures have Echo or Evoke and helpfully plop themselves back in the graveyard. Tortured Existence also provides a cheap discard outlet, earning you card advantage with Squee, the incarnations or any creatures with Madness. Tortured Existence is criminally underplayed considering it's arguably the most powerful common engine card the game has ever seen!

Preferred Selection: Can't afford the hefty pricetag on Sylvan Library or Sensei's Divining Top? Missed out on grabbing Mirri's Guile before it started climbing up in price? This is the next-best thing for green, basically doubling your chances of drawing something helpful each turn. Plus, unlike its more expensive counterparts, this lets you ditch unwanted cards to the bottom of your library rather than having to keep picking through them each time you draw.

It can be hard to keep on top of the cutting edge of power creep, with new chase cards being printed all the time. Magic is a game of many moving parts, however, so sometimes all it takes to defeat your opponents is an unfamiliar card or a strategy that comes at them from an unfamiliar angle. With the ten cards listed here, you can bring something powerful to the table that doesn't cost more than the table itself. Besides, you can stoop to the level of your friends and bowl them over with the latest net tech, but it's far more satisfying to flatten their cutting edge strategy with some forgotten power cards that cost less than four gumballs.