I haven't blamed WOTC for anything, I merely pointed out that running the sales of the PACKS longer and releasing more of the power cards as promos would increase their availability. I am married with two kids and am an IT pro, so busy schedule is an understatement, so I do agree that time is a factor as well. Also, as I stated previously I never said that Leg or Ext or Std was less expensive, that was inferred by other posters but definitely not my position. MTG in general can be expensive, but its easier to acquire the standard cards as they are on sale much much longer in pack form and thus have a larger supply in the aftermarket. It is ridiculous to even try and compare the number of FoW in the system to the number of (insert standard pre-mythic rare). The one fact that remains and has yet to be disputed/discredited is simply this: If there were more of these cards in the market place they would be cheaper, which in turn would allow more players to own them, which in turn would cause more events to fire. This is a game, one to which playing is the enjoyment.
Note: the deck can go off earlier than turn 3 with very specific hands. Turn 3 is usually the most common earliest turn to go off. It is extremely hard to do before.
On an aside, which deck would you like to see me do next:
Standard Grand Architect
Legacy Hypergenesis
Also if you have any suggestions for decks please post them, thanks!
I'm one of those guys who pretty much has the collection to play classic, but rarely does.
Personally, I find Legacy more appealing than Classic. Having said that, I honestly don't play classic because like Whiffy said, TIME.
I'm married, got 3 kids and a busy work schedule, not to mention how busy running the kids around to baseball and Karate keep me.
When there is free time for magic, it is either spent at the local shop playing FNMs or it is spent playing Legacy.
If I have lots of free time to grind out events, then I'd probably be playing in classic ones as well as Legacy ones.
Older formats attract older players with either more experience or more bankroll and because of that most of these players fall into the same category as I do. We have more responsibilities in the real world.
Also, this time of year as the weather warms up, Magic always takes a back seat for people. It isn't uncommon for event numbers to dwindle down this time of year, especially if you are from the North and you've been stuck indoors all winter.
As far as price goes......if you are playing any type of competitive format then arguing over cost is a moot point.
Block decks while cheaper than classic or legacy ones are still costly. Running 4 koths alone will drop you about $100.
I'm not a fanboy of WOTC, but blaming them for lack of competitive singles in the market is silly. THEY SELL PACKS. If players don't buy them then how can it possibly be their fault. This subject has been beat to death, having limited print runs didn't hurt the players because when they did have mirage in the store no one was buying them, just like no one would be buying Urza boosters in a year from the store if they were there.
I've visited 10 paper stores in the past few months and very few of them carry old boosters, so why would we expect anything different if MTGO is supposed to mirror the paper world.
There are plenty of MED1,2,3,4 boosters and other sets already in the system. Most people don't go to Fastbot or Heath and buy a bunch of old boosters to crack them. If you want to fault WOTC, blame them for lack of events. Even there, they have had plenty of nix tix events.
Investing in classic/legacy staples holds value, legacy deck now runs 1000 for example, in 5 months it will still hold value whereas that 500 standard deck will cost another 500 in a year.
Heh perhaps so...or perhaps they did their homework. I suspect you faced a combination of old school vets and newer school sharks who study up on formats they know are coming. (UD was in beta for a while so not a surprise if some beta testers studied the way the set works (Not that you can really do that effectively in the beta the way it is designed currently.)
I built a tribal wars Necrotic Shamans deck when it first came out using Ooze fueled off of Fauna Shamans ditching Triskelion and other activation centric creatures to create various board control situations. It was meh. I did not see the Pila Pala/Abberation Combo which amazes me. So elegantly simple. Nice decks. Looks like the meta is shifted again.
I was careless to use the word "new." UD is not of course new to magic, but rather is new to Magic online. There may be people who were able to draft this set a lot in the real world, but I was only able to draft this once in the real world (about 11 years ago?) and can't say I remember a lot from that experience. MTGO has introduced a much higher amount of drafting to the world of magic than existed previously, and one would expect many of the drafters online to be relatively new to triple UD. However, it appears that all of that relatively small crowd of people who played triple UD drafts in the real world 11-12 years ago were playing against me in MTGO.
I think has made the best point. Perception. Perception is a huge factor, along with cost. The simple fact I am trying to make on cost is that for a new player, or a recently registered player(one that isn't wealthy) to start in classic/legacy/extended(standard thanks to JMS, but soon he'll be gone, thankfully) is very expensive. I keep seeing these posts of "if $10 is your budget you are so close..." that sounds true, but isn't really. You have to extrapolate that $10 per card times 4 for a playset then multiply that by the number of slots you need for the deck. Take a moment and price out an entire deck minus basic lands and any card under $1 and see what you come up with, for the competitive Classic/Leg/Ext decks it's going to be hundreds. Sure, you can use the "one time investment/upgrade a partial deck" theory, but that doesn't play out so well for people who have few cards. Look, the whole point to my post was to give an answer to the question posed "what could WotC do..." I was not comparing the expense of Classic to Standard, etc. The statement I made holds true for all formats, but more so for Classic as those cards are less readily available. Age of the card does not matter, length of sale from the Store does/number of events for each set does/ incentives to play said events does. I do not believe there are thousands of players with playsets of all the power cards just sitting on them, but even if there are, how can anyone argue that if there are twice as many or more of these cards in the system there wouldn't be more events firing? I just don't think they can separate their collector/salesmen side from the player side.
First of all, I really enjoy you articles. Keep up the great work.
I like that you mentioned cards you didn't add to the deck, because they are not fun to play against.
A card I would consider in this deck is Gilded Drake. It is so great with all the blink effects (it works not with Momentary Blink and Ghostway), especially Venser.
You also learn names of players that are more likely to be cut-throat; there are 3-4 that share a similar play-time to myself that I try and avoid. Sometimes they'll bring something fun but 9 times out of 10 it's something like Arcum, Teeg or Azusa ramp.
Leviathan: Why no Trinket Mage? It would tutor for a few of your artifacts, and I'd also consider adding a Brittle Effigy as another tutor target - it works almost as well as Duplicant (for one less!).
As a budget player your decks are *always* out of my price range, but I certainly enjoy seeing how you build decks.
Yeah, yeah things work much more smoothly when everyone is on the same footing but with newer players or people who haven't seen a particular deckstyle before you do have to be vocal. Otherwise, people may assume you have a different agenda.
I guess I just had to rant after a day of tough gaming (I was home sick with nothing else to do). I think the thing that upset me was the feeling like there weren't any multiplayer politics to mitigate a strong deck. As for my part I need to be more vocal with the other players when I see a threat. Like mentioning to the player with the Strip Mine on the table that he probably needs to take out Urborg or Cabal Coffers before things get out of control. I assume that everyone knows how certain decks play but if players are new to the format this may not be the case.
I built the necortic ooze deck and its fantastic. Though I replaced Whip Sergeant with Akki Drill Sergeant due to them being functionally identical and the Akki being black bordered...lol but the deck works great...on a good draw. The counter deck looks fun with arboria but i might need to look at it a bit more to understand the combo. I get it is make lots of tokens but it seems slow to me.
Nothing new about UD. There are tons of people who still remember it from the first time around. Though, if EVERY opponent you faced was well versed, that does seem a little anomolous.
Interesting deck, and exactly the sort of reason commander is so much fun. There are a ton of things you can do in this format that on the surface seem broken but balance out in multiplayer with politics and intelligent play. Rasputin seems a tad unfair, bringing into play superdrazi and whatnot but he isn't broken the way some commanders are. Especially if your ops catch on quickly and limit your options.
Well I enjoyed our game last night immensely. First commander game in a while for me, and I was fairly uncertain of the power level of my deck but that game just seemed like a classic fun game with one really aggresive guy and another threatening aggression and then quickly (not really, as it took 2+ hours! :p) it was over.
In fact I suspect if WOTC managed to flood the market enough to kill the high end prices, there would be a lot more sky is falling stuff and people quitting and general gripes about the loss of $$. For example my own collection took a major hit when WotC killed Old Extended. I just so happened to be most invested in those sets because of when I got back into magic. I didn't take it personally but I know tons of people who were hurt far worse who did.
I don't know if there is a sane solution to the dilemma of high prices in classic/legacy/standard. Without those high end cards too, a lot of lower end cards would be pricier. I do know I can't afford to compete in the high end tourneys, and when I have had the tickets/credits I've spent them on low end cheap cards that are more fun than good. I think this is what happens with many people. They see the collectively high end of those formats and opt out into niche formats where the relative cost of cards is affordable.
I wish I had the wherewithall to pay bills, etc AND buy Fows for resale etc but that just isn't in the cards. Pun intended. It is No one's fault/responsibility but my own that it is so. People wish to be focused on more competitive aspects of the game will manage somehow without breaking the bank.
Oh and by the way this is not a new situation with the prices. It is how high end formats have always been. I just think the perceptions have changed because the addition of mythics into the mix dramatized the gap more clearly.
Note that none of the cards cited as barriers to entry to Classic are "new" cards online. Force of Will, LED, Tutors - they have all been around for years. There have generally been enough players to fire events in classic regularly up until this point, despite the rarity and price of these cards. In fact, more have entered the system over time as nix tix draft weeks occurred, etc.
So if there are enough playsets of cards and there were enough players to fire events in the past, what has happened? Maybe some folks have quit and sold out, and the new owners of these cards are not confident enough yet to play in events. Maybe other folks have gotten burnt out or dislike the current meta without power and kept their collection and aren't playing. Maybe folks just are angry at WotC for stringing them along for years regarding power and have finally put their cards down until power arrives. Maybe the classic card base is being eroded by the legacy players, in that many legacy players are buying up FoW and LED for Legacy decks, but aren't playing classic because they only play legacy and aren't interested in classic. Everytime a classic player sells out and a legacy player buys in, that shrinks the classic playerbase further. Maybe it is that time vault/key or workshop stax is in the format now and that has turned off some previously avid classic players.
Maybe it is a combination of all of the above, spring weather, etc.
Yeah, I sort of pick the more interesting games with stuff that is different or unusual. I guess I could have done a report about the game where I was knocked out first by Zur, but that wouldn't have been as interesting.
I think Glissa is really popular right now, which leads to the play you're talking about. I know that I recently put together a Sisters of Stone Death deck based around a basilisk/gorgon theme. I realized quickly that I really needed more ramp if I ever wanted to cast the Sisters, and the deck quickly became exactly what you are talking about. Of course, I didn't have any huge finishers, so I had to add Genesis Wave and Exsanguinate. It seemed like a cool idea at first, but it sort of became cookie cutter during the quest to make it more competitive.
And I think that's really what the issue is online right now. If you play pick up games, like most people do, you don't have established playgroups so power levels are always uncertain. People want to be competitive, so you try and bring your best. I know that I do that to a certain extent. And cards like Primeval Titan certainly help you win. It's a tough line to straddle, but most people would rather be on the winning side I think. And that's why you see the plays you are talking about.
Classic will never be as popular as Legacy for the same reason why cas/cas Legacy will never be as popular as Classic: the perception of power levels and "fairness". As Tom Lapille said on this podcast a few weeks ago, Classic is a "joke", meaning extremely broken capable of a first turn Blightsteel Colossus. Does it always, no, but it is capable of it. I think people prefer the "fairness" of Legacy and the volume of deck choices. True, Classic is not as narrow as a lot of critics claim, but it certainly isn't as wide open as Legacy. I think these things give Classic a narrower appeal.
Regarding events firing, I think they need to streamline them into fixed times. I would probably attempt to be active in events if they were at set times (other than 2 a.m.) in which I (and my family) can get into a routine where such and such a time each week is my Magic time. Classic events didn't just die, they petered out. There was a time when events were nearly firing and only a handful of people were needed. As these events fired less and less, people stopped even trying.
Re: cost. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Seriously if your budget is $10 per card, you are so so so close to building a competitive, no, tier 1, Shop deck. Sphere of Resistance and Mishra's Workshop are just over $10, and the rest of the deck is relatively cheap. The whole creature base is a couple bucks. The only really expensive card is Wasteland.
I don't have Force of Will. I still love Classic. What I get tired of is perception = reality. Mishra's Workshop in paper is a triple digit card. Online, we can play with these amazing cards for a fraction of that!! And people still have the balls to call it expensive. With Master's Edition 4, Classic is at its arguably cheapest it has ever been. As someone said above, no competitive format is cheap. Classic, compared to the other tier one decks in the other formats, is cheap.
The last time this deck was Standard legal, a friend of mine got a turn one win on the play at Regionals.
Did you show a picture of your Trantula because he is better looking that your wife or dog :-)
I haven't blamed WOTC for anything, I merely pointed out that running the sales of the PACKS longer and releasing more of the power cards as promos would increase their availability. I am married with two kids and am an IT pro, so busy schedule is an understatement, so I do agree that time is a factor as well. Also, as I stated previously I never said that Leg or Ext or Std was less expensive, that was inferred by other posters but definitely not my position. MTG in general can be expensive, but its easier to acquire the standard cards as they are on sale much much longer in pack form and thus have a larger supply in the aftermarket. It is ridiculous to even try and compare the number of FoW in the system to the number of (insert standard pre-mythic rare). The one fact that remains and has yet to be disputed/discredited is simply this: If there were more of these cards in the market place they would be cheaper, which in turn would allow more players to own them, which in turn would cause more events to fire. This is a game, one to which playing is the enjoyment.
Note: the deck can go off earlier than turn 3 with very specific hands. Turn 3 is usually the most common earliest turn to go off. It is extremely hard to do before.
On an aside, which deck would you like to see me do next:
Standard Grand Architect
Legacy Hypergenesis
Also if you have any suggestions for decks please post them, thanks!
I guess I should put my 2 cents in.
I'm one of those guys who pretty much has the collection to play classic, but rarely does.
Personally, I find Legacy more appealing than Classic. Having said that, I honestly don't play classic because like Whiffy said, TIME.
I'm married, got 3 kids and a busy work schedule, not to mention how busy running the kids around to baseball and Karate keep me.
When there is free time for magic, it is either spent at the local shop playing FNMs or it is spent playing Legacy.
If I have lots of free time to grind out events, then I'd probably be playing in classic ones as well as Legacy ones.
Older formats attract older players with either more experience or more bankroll and because of that most of these players fall into the same category as I do. We have more responsibilities in the real world.
Also, this time of year as the weather warms up, Magic always takes a back seat for people. It isn't uncommon for event numbers to dwindle down this time of year, especially if you are from the North and you've been stuck indoors all winter.
As far as price goes......if you are playing any type of competitive format then arguing over cost is a moot point.
Block decks while cheaper than classic or legacy ones are still costly. Running 4 koths alone will drop you about $100.
I'm not a fanboy of WOTC, but blaming them for lack of competitive singles in the market is silly. THEY SELL PACKS. If players don't buy them then how can it possibly be their fault. This subject has been beat to death, having limited print runs didn't hurt the players because when they did have mirage in the store no one was buying them, just like no one would be buying Urza boosters in a year from the store if they were there.
I've visited 10 paper stores in the past few months and very few of them carry old boosters, so why would we expect anything different if MTGO is supposed to mirror the paper world.
There are plenty of MED1,2,3,4 boosters and other sets already in the system. Most people don't go to Fastbot or Heath and buy a bunch of old boosters to crack them. If you want to fault WOTC, blame them for lack of events. Even there, they have had plenty of nix tix events.
Investing in classic/legacy staples holds value, legacy deck now runs 1000 for example, in 5 months it will still hold value whereas that 500 standard deck will cost another 500 in a year.
Ok, I'm done, sorry for rambling.
Heh perhaps so...or perhaps they did their homework. I suspect you faced a combination of old school vets and newer school sharks who study up on formats they know are coming. (UD was in beta for a while so not a surprise if some beta testers studied the way the set works (Not that you can really do that effectively in the beta the way it is designed currently.)
I built a tribal wars Necrotic Shamans deck when it first came out using Ooze fueled off of Fauna Shamans ditching Triskelion and other activation centric creatures to create various board control situations. It was meh. I did not see the Pila Pala/Abberation Combo which amazes me. So elegantly simple. Nice decks. Looks like the meta is shifted again.
I was careless to use the word "new." UD is not of course new to magic, but rather is new to Magic online. There may be people who were able to draft this set a lot in the real world, but I was only able to draft this once in the real world (about 11 years ago?) and can't say I remember a lot from that experience. MTGO has introduced a much higher amount of drafting to the world of magic than existed previously, and one would expect many of the drafters online to be relatively new to triple UD. However, it appears that all of that relatively small crowd of people who played triple UD drafts in the real world 11-12 years ago were playing against me in MTGO.
I think has made the best point. Perception. Perception is a huge factor, along with cost. The simple fact I am trying to make on cost is that for a new player, or a recently registered player(one that isn't wealthy) to start in classic/legacy/extended(standard thanks to JMS, but soon he'll be gone, thankfully) is very expensive. I keep seeing these posts of "if $10 is your budget you are so close..." that sounds true, but isn't really. You have to extrapolate that $10 per card times 4 for a playset then multiply that by the number of slots you need for the deck. Take a moment and price out an entire deck minus basic lands and any card under $1 and see what you come up with, for the competitive Classic/Leg/Ext decks it's going to be hundreds. Sure, you can use the "one time investment/upgrade a partial deck" theory, but that doesn't play out so well for people who have few cards. Look, the whole point to my post was to give an answer to the question posed "what could WotC do..." I was not comparing the expense of Classic to Standard, etc. The statement I made holds true for all formats, but more so for Classic as those cards are less readily available. Age of the card does not matter, length of sale from the Store does/number of events for each set does/ incentives to play said events does. I do not believe there are thousands of players with playsets of all the power cards just sitting on them, but even if there are, how can anyone argue that if there are twice as many or more of these cards in the system there wouldn't be more events firing? I just don't think they can separate their collector/salesmen side from the player side.
That necrotic ooze deck looks like a lot of fun.
First of all, I really enjoy you articles. Keep up the great work.
I like that you mentioned cards you didn't add to the deck, because they are not fun to play against.
A card I would consider in this deck is Gilded Drake. It is so great with all the blink effects (it works not with Momentary Blink and Ghostway), especially Venser.
it could also be that the mjority of classic invested players are family men and cant sit down for 2.5-3 hours to event.
You also learn names of players that are more likely to be cut-throat; there are 3-4 that share a similar play-time to myself that I try and avoid. Sometimes they'll bring something fun but 9 times out of 10 it's something like Arcum, Teeg or Azusa ramp.
Leviathan: Why no Trinket Mage? It would tutor for a few of your artifacts, and I'd also consider adding a Brittle Effigy as another tutor target - it works almost as well as Duplicant (for one less!).
As a budget player your decks are *always* out of my price range, but I certainly enjoy seeing how you build decks.
Cheers,
Archorian
Mutagenic Growth is gonna be nuts, fun having 8 to play with
Yeah, yeah things work much more smoothly when everyone is on the same footing but with newer players or people who haven't seen a particular deckstyle before you do have to be vocal. Otherwise, people may assume you have a different agenda.
I guess I just had to rant after a day of tough gaming (I was home sick with nothing else to do). I think the thing that upset me was the feeling like there weren't any multiplayer politics to mitigate a strong deck. As for my part I need to be more vocal with the other players when I see a threat. Like mentioning to the player with the Strip Mine on the table that he probably needs to take out Urborg or Cabal Coffers before things get out of control. I assume that everyone knows how certain decks play but if players are new to the format this may not be the case.
I built the necortic ooze deck and its fantastic. Though I replaced Whip Sergeant with Akki Drill Sergeant due to them being functionally identical and the Akki being black bordered...lol but the deck works great...on a good draw. The counter deck looks fun with arboria but i might need to look at it a bit more to understand the combo. I get it is make lots of tokens but it seems slow to me.
Nothing new about UD. There are tons of people who still remember it from the first time around. Though, if EVERY opponent you faced was well versed, that does seem a little anomolous.
In the first game you could have gotten alot more value out of your brainstorm by using the fetchland on turn 2 instead of turn 1.
Other than that, nice article!
Interesting deck, and exactly the sort of reason commander is so much fun. There are a ton of things you can do in this format that on the surface seem broken but balance out in multiplayer with politics and intelligent play. Rasputin seems a tad unfair, bringing into play superdrazi and whatnot but he isn't broken the way some commanders are. Especially if your ops catch on quickly and limit your options.
Well I enjoyed our game last night immensely. First commander game in a while for me, and I was fairly uncertain of the power level of my deck but that game just seemed like a classic fun game with one really aggresive guy and another threatening aggression and then quickly (not really, as it took 2+ hours! :p) it was over.
Thanks for the invite. :)
In fact I suspect if WOTC managed to flood the market enough to kill the high end prices, there would be a lot more sky is falling stuff and people quitting and general gripes about the loss of $$. For example my own collection took a major hit when WotC killed Old Extended. I just so happened to be most invested in those sets because of when I got back into magic. I didn't take it personally but I know tons of people who were hurt far worse who did.
I don't know if there is a sane solution to the dilemma of high prices in classic/legacy/standard. Without those high end cards too, a lot of lower end cards would be pricier. I do know I can't afford to compete in the high end tourneys, and when I have had the tickets/credits I've spent them on low end cheap cards that are more fun than good. I think this is what happens with many people. They see the collectively high end of those formats and opt out into niche formats where the relative cost of cards is affordable.
I wish I had the wherewithall to pay bills, etc AND buy Fows for resale etc but that just isn't in the cards. Pun intended. It is No one's fault/responsibility but my own that it is so. People wish to be focused on more competitive aspects of the game will manage somehow without breaking the bank.
Oh and by the way this is not a new situation with the prices. It is how high end formats have always been. I just think the perceptions have changed because the addition of mythics into the mix dramatized the gap more clearly.
Note that none of the cards cited as barriers to entry to Classic are "new" cards online. Force of Will, LED, Tutors - they have all been around for years. There have generally been enough players to fire events in classic regularly up until this point, despite the rarity and price of these cards. In fact, more have entered the system over time as nix tix draft weeks occurred, etc.
So if there are enough playsets of cards and there were enough players to fire events in the past, what has happened? Maybe some folks have quit and sold out, and the new owners of these cards are not confident enough yet to play in events. Maybe other folks have gotten burnt out or dislike the current meta without power and kept their collection and aren't playing. Maybe folks just are angry at WotC for stringing them along for years regarding power and have finally put their cards down until power arrives. Maybe the classic card base is being eroded by the legacy players, in that many legacy players are buying up FoW and LED for Legacy decks, but aren't playing classic because they only play legacy and aren't interested in classic. Everytime a classic player sells out and a legacy player buys in, that shrinks the classic playerbase further. Maybe it is that time vault/key or workshop stax is in the format now and that has turned off some previously avid classic players.
Maybe it is a combination of all of the above, spring weather, etc.
Yeah, I sort of pick the more interesting games with stuff that is different or unusual. I guess I could have done a report about the game where I was knocked out first by Zur, but that wouldn't have been as interesting.
I think Glissa is really popular right now, which leads to the play you're talking about. I know that I recently put together a Sisters of Stone Death deck based around a basilisk/gorgon theme. I realized quickly that I really needed more ramp if I ever wanted to cast the Sisters, and the deck quickly became exactly what you are talking about. Of course, I didn't have any huge finishers, so I had to add Genesis Wave and Exsanguinate. It seemed like a cool idea at first, but it sort of became cookie cutter during the quest to make it more competitive.
And I think that's really what the issue is online right now. If you play pick up games, like most people do, you don't have established playgroups so power levels are always uncertain. People want to be competitive, so you try and bring your best. I know that I do that to a certain extent. And cards like Primeval Titan certainly help you win. It's a tough line to straddle, but most people would rather be on the winning side I think. And that's why you see the plays you are talking about.
Classic will never be as popular as Legacy for the same reason why cas/cas Legacy will never be as popular as Classic: the perception of power levels and "fairness". As Tom Lapille said on this podcast a few weeks ago, Classic is a "joke", meaning extremely broken capable of a first turn Blightsteel Colossus. Does it always, no, but it is capable of it. I think people prefer the "fairness" of Legacy and the volume of deck choices. True, Classic is not as narrow as a lot of critics claim, but it certainly isn't as wide open as Legacy. I think these things give Classic a narrower appeal.
Regarding events firing, I think they need to streamline them into fixed times. I would probably attempt to be active in events if they were at set times (other than 2 a.m.) in which I (and my family) can get into a routine where such and such a time each week is my Magic time. Classic events didn't just die, they petered out. There was a time when events were nearly firing and only a handful of people were needed. As these events fired less and less, people stopped even trying.
Re: cost. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Seriously if your budget is $10 per card, you are so so so close to building a competitive, no, tier 1, Shop deck. Sphere of Resistance and Mishra's Workshop are just over $10, and the rest of the deck is relatively cheap. The whole creature base is a couple bucks. The only really expensive card is Wasteland.
I don't have Force of Will. I still love Classic. What I get tired of is perception = reality. Mishra's Workshop in paper is a triple digit card. Online, we can play with these amazing cards for a fraction of that!! And people still have the balls to call it expensive. With Master's Edition 4, Classic is at its arguably cheapest it has ever been. As someone said above, no competitive format is cheap. Classic, compared to the other tier one decks in the other formats, is cheap.