How to buy a Magic deck online — the cheapest way

By the ScryPrice team · Updated July 15, 2026

Buying a whole Magic deck online is easy. Buying it cheap is where most players quietly overpay. The difference isn't which cards you pick. It's how shipping stacks up once your list is scattered across a dozen sellers.

The mistake that costs you the most: paying shipping per seller

Here's the problem. You search a card, see its cheapest listing, and grab it. Do that for all 60 or 100 cards and your order ends up split across a dozen sellers. Most marketplaces charge shipping per seller, so the math gets ugly fast.

The cheapest cart is almost never the sum of each card's cheapest price. It's the one with the lowest total: card price plus shipping, added up. Paying a few cents more per single to keep everything under one seller can wipe out three separate shipping charges. That's the whole game. Eyeballing individual listings loses it for you.

How to buy a Magic deck online, step by step

1. Get your decklist in text form. One card per line, quantity first, like "4 Lightning Bolt." Export from your deckbuilder or paste it in.
2. Drop the whole list into a price optimizer. Use ScryPrice and paste all of it at once. No account, no signup. It matches every line against 170,000+ indexed cards using Scryfall and MTGJSON data.
3. Set your minimum condition. Pick a floor across the five grades (NM, LP, MP, HP, DMG). Played copies of most staples are fine and noticeably cheaper. NM-only is a premium you rarely need for a deck you're actually shuffling up.
4. Optionally allow cheaper printings. Turn on printing substitution and it can swap in any printing of the same card. Same card, legal in play, lower price. Handy for lands and commons where the art doesn't matter.
5. Let it solve for the cheapest split. ScryPrice compares live prices across TCGplayer, Card Kingdom, and ManaPool, then works out which combination of stores gives the lowest total once shipping is baked in.
6. Click the cart links and check out. You get a ready-to-buy cart link for each store in the winning split, plus per-card links if you want to swap anything. Copy once, click through, pay.

Buying singles vs a pre-built deck: which is cheaper?

Buying singles is almost always cheaper than a sealed pre-built product. You pay only for the cards you need, and you can shop each one across stores instead of eating one seller's bundled markup. Pre-cons and starter decks buy you convenience, and you pay for that convenience.

The one place singles lose ground is shipping. Buy 40 cards from 40 sellers and repeated per-seller postage can erase the savings. That's exactly the problem a consolidating optimizer exists to solve: it keeps the singles pricing advantage while trimming shipping down to the fewest carts.

How the shipping actually works

You can't optimize what you can't see, so here are the shipping rules the tool works around:

Watch the leverage here. Say a TCGplayer cart lands at $32. Adding one more single, or bumping a card up a condition tier, pushes it past $35 and flips shipping from about $5.49 to free. That's the kind of threshold math a solver catches and you won't. For ManaPool, the tool runs ManaPool's own optimizer to get the real consolidated total, since it bundles sellers into one shipment.

Want the deeper mechanics? How ScryPrice finds you the cheapest cart walks through the consolidation logic in full.

What card condition should you buy?

For a deck you actually shuffle up and play, Lightly Played or Moderately Played copies of most staples are indistinguishable in a sleeve and cost a good bit less. Set your minimum condition floor across the five grades (NM, LP, MP, HP, DMG) and let the price decide from there down.

Save Near Mint for cards you care about cosmetically, like commanders, foils, and showpieces. On lands, commons, and filler, a played grade plus a cheaper printing is where the quiet savings hide.

What a deck should roughly cost

Prices move constantly, so treat these as ballpark ranges, not quotes. They help you sanity-check whether a build is in budget before you buy:

• Pauper: roughly $30-60
• Commander / EDH: anywhere from $30 to $200+ depending on how spicy the list is
• Standard: around $100-250
• Pioneer: roughly $150-400
• Modern: $200-600+

For a full breakdown by format and where the money goes, see how much it costs to build a Magic deck. Building Commander specifically? The Commander deck price calculator is tuned for 100-card singleton lists.

Where's the cheapest place to buy Magic singles?

There's no permanent winner. TCGplayer, Card Kingdom, and ManaPool each price cards their own way, and the cheapest source shifts card by card and day by day. That's the whole reason to compare live instead of defaulting to your favorite store.

If your list leans heavily toward one marketplace, TCGplayer vs Card Kingdom breaks down when each tends to win. For the wider strategy across formats and stores, the cheapest way to buy a Magic deck ties it together.

Is it safe to buy Magic cards online?

Yes. Buying through established marketplaces like TCGplayer, Card Kingdom, and ManaPool is standard for players, with the usual buyer protections and seller ratings. You check out on each store's own site, so your card details go to the retailer, not to a price tool.

ScryPrice never processes payments or holds your cart. It finds the cheapest split and hands you the links. On TCGplayer, favoring Direct or higher-rated sellers keeps condition and shipping reliable.

Ways to shave the total down further

• Loosen condition on cheap cards. A played common plays exactly like a Near Mint one once it's in a sleeve. Save NM for the cards you'll actually show off.
• Allow cheaper printings on the filler. Reprinted staples and lands are often a few cents cheaper in an older set.
• Hit a free-shipping threshold on purpose. Buying two decks, or restocking a pile of staples, can clear the $35 or $99 lines in one order.
• Price it before you commit. Run the list through an MTG deck price calculator first, see the optimized total, then trim the priciest staples or drop a condition tier and re-run. Takes seconds.

It never changes which option ranks cheapest. The solver optimizes for your total, full stop.