Discussion Forum

Most people eventually come to the conclusion that buying singles is the best way to go. Buying a Booster Box or Fat Pack is useful though and can provide you with trades and expand your collection when you're new. When I started out we where in a group of 4 players who each bought a booster box (36 boosters) almost every set. That gave us a very rich pool of cards to trade between us and to join the occasional tournament without falling short of cards.

Personally I would stay away from anything that is not a Fatpack/boosters or singles. With the exception of some of the better products wizards prints like thos Duel decks with planeswalkers, the Premium Deck Series: Fire & Lightning was good etc... Ofcourse when buying these special products you need to have some idea what the long term value is.
Never buy Event decks.

Best thing to do if you have absolutely no cards is to buy a few booster boxes, create a deck you like and then buy singles to complete it. You could just buy a deck but that leaves you with no additional cards to make variations or build on new ideas. You need some sort of cards pool to keep things creative.

The absolute best thing to do is buy the collection of someone who stopped playing, preferably a tournament player. This is very tricky though. Many have already sold their best cards and just sell the crap as a whole. Then there are those that ask way to much for non competitive cards because they just take the shop value of every card in their collection which is rediculous.
If you take this route you need the advise/help of an experienced player.

I've been pretty deep into MTG since Kamigawa, and i've ended up with almost 200K cards....Untill about 8 months ago thats all i did was buy people's collections, or just get FatPacks. Then i realized that with the internet, I can spend half as much and get EXACTLY what i want. I build my decks here on MTGvault, print out proxies to test to make sure it works how i want and of course edit it when it doesnt. After that i just throw away the Proxies, and go to tcgplayer.com and order the cards to make the deck. At first it seemed more expensive, but then i started looking at how much i used to spend to get somewhat what i wanted, and quickly realized i could get exactly what i wanted for less. I'll never go back to just randomly collecting...i mean it was fun while it lasted but it was so frustrating to be that limited.

Thanks for the input. I have started to buy singles to complete my decks that I have made but I found that alot of my decks are shrot some cards. I also consulted some friends\players and they suggested the same as Seth, buy a booster box. Especially since I am a new player a core m13 booster box would be best just to get those core cards I am missing (for instance I have no o-rings). Thanks again for the advice.

For experienced players singles are the best option but you need to start somewhere to build up that experience first. In the beginning opening a box and having that kind of veriaty in cards available is pretty nice.

What you don't want to be doing is open a few boosters, make a crappy deck and get your ass kicked by experienced players with optimized decks. The absolute ideal situation IMO is you and a friend each open a box of the same set and build decks from those boxes only and duel eachother. That keeps the game balanced and you'll learn to build decks and add stuff to counter eachothers strategies.

Another great way to collect that I forgot to mention is to draft. This is however very competitive and skill based and you'll loose a lot, you must be able to take that. On the other hand you'll learn to build decks at an accelerated rate because you'll build a lot (drafting = building) and you'll learn a lot from your opponents. And you'll have the benefit of collecting at the same time.

I do however advise, if you want to try draft, to seek out games where people keep what they draft. Most draft games redividing rares at the end of the draft among the players where the winner picks the first rare and so on. If you're still new you'll end up with the worst rares which sucks. It's better to keep what you draft that way you have fun and even if you loose you can still end up with good rares.