I'm wanting to upgrade my peasant cube experience to start using rares, but since I don't play regular limited or constructed these days I'm going to need to build up my card pool, especially for more recent cards, from close to scratch.
To help me, I was thinking of making a budget card power ranking thread to come up with a list to not just help me curate a collection to draw from but make a resource that others can use. I hate generic power rankings since I don't think they offer much insight that Cube Tutor data can't provide, but something that ties finances into it in a way that makes cubing easier to get into seems useful to me. If this is successful and management is cool with it, we could make it a front page resource that gets updated once a year or so. (I'm not super tech-savvy but if possible, we could even make some kind of affiliate link in the article that people can click on that automatically fills their shopping cart with a basket of all the budget cards to help feed the hamsters that run the website.)
Ideally these cards won't just be the most powerful budget cards, but the ones that are most interesting, versatile, or have effects you can't easily replicate at common or uncommon. In other words, the most Riptide-iest cheap cards you can think of.
I'm thinking of doing two categories for each color:
- Top 10 rares/mythics per color under $1 (I'll probably only have people submit 10 cards, but I might extend the actual ranking list with honorable mentions to have 15-20 cards total)
- Top 5 cards per color between $1 and $5
We can brainstorm for about how to handle guild slots since the monocolor/artifact sections are more important anyway. I assume that budget card options are pretty consistent across countries, but if that's not the case we can figure out a workaround for non-U.S. people.
TL;DR: Let's make budget-friendly Riptide rankings for each color to help newbies build their first cubes.
What do you all think? Is this worth the effort? If so, any tweaks before we open up the floodgates to lists?