I love brewing, both literally and figuratively. I own Laughing Monk Brewing where we have a regular Wednesday Magic Night. Been a homebrewer for over 15 years, and I've been brewing decks for over 23 years.
I love budget deck brewing because back in the day, I couldn't afford awesome cards and lots of packs. I would play my friends, get beaten by their more expensive decks and then go to the game store to buy some cheap commons to brew a deck specifically to beat them.
Limitations in budget and colors generate the most creativity. I've been inspired by @thecommandersquarters to try to build some super budget decks. This really limits what you can do with a deck, but also gets you to try out cards that you normally wouldn't consider because they all have better more expensive replacements that everybody tries to use.
For a while, I was building decks using proxies for those expensive cards, so I wouldn't have to buy more than one. Soon I found that my decks were all beginning to look the same. The desire to use the most powerful cards is strong. You want to win of course.
Forcing myself to work in a budget broke me of that habit. When you work on a budget, there's just some things your deck won't be able to do, but that's ok. In commander, there are usually two other players who can help deal with anything you can't deal with.
This allows your deck to be focused. Budget decks are usually trying to do one thing and do it fast whether than be prepared for every eventuality. Often their win conditions are a little more fragile, so you've got to get their fast.
My Marwyn deck came in at $30.53 cents when I made it. It's a focused big mana green elf tribal deck. It's designed to get out a ton of elfs, buffing Marwyn to make more mana and make more elves. Many elves get bigger with each elf on the battlefield. The goal of this deck is to smash face quick with big creatures before anyone can board wipe. The big hitters include:
There's plenty of card draw to help keep Marwyn in cards to spend all her mana on. Creeping renaissance is excellent card draw for this deck as it can help you get back from a board wipe...twice!
Finally there's some good +1/+1 counter synergy. Both putting them on creatures and rewarding me for having them on creatures.
This deck needs to win in the first few turns or it's going to get hobbled by a board wipe. But I feel like it's going to be a fun roller coaster ride. Budget decks won't win as often as pricey ones, but when they do win, it feels amazing. We'll have to see how this deck fares at tomorrow's Magic Wednesdays.