Introduction

The idea behind this format is to offer a small group of friends in Japan an alternative to Draft and Sealed modes for organizing low-cost casual Magic nights. The advantages over these formats are:

• You spend the entire evening actually playing, instead of losing half of it preparing a deck.
• No frustration related to randomness.
• It costs the same as buying 4 boosters (cheaper than Sealed).
• The deck you leave with is more satisfying in terms of mechanics and synergies.

Description

To be legal, a MTG 2000 deck must:

• Consist of 60 cards or more.
• Have a total value of 2,000 yen or less in a Japanese store (Hareruya, Bigmagic, etc.). The value of basic lands is not considered.
• For some cards, if the Japanese version is cheaper than its English counterpart, it's acceptable to consider the lower price. Conversely, it's acceptable to have some cards in Japanese. But the maximum number in a deck using the Japanese price or version is limited to 8.
• Follow the Vintage banned and restricted cards.
• Sideboard is included in the price restriction.

How to prepare a deck?

Japanese shops

• BigMagic is often the cheapest shop. When you search for a card, look for the kanji 英 for English version. Sometimes it is required to hover the card with the mouse to display more options to find it. If there are more than four options available for a card, it is required to click on it to find the English options.

• Single Star is even cheaper than BigMagic for the cheapest cards, particularly their english versions. A 50 or 30 yens card on BigMagic is often sold 10 yens on Single Star.

• Hareruya has a nice advanced search. For instance, "all black zombies creatures that are 100 yens or cheaper" ^link. In fact, this format idea comes from this search page.

Useful resources

• Scryfall has a powerful advanced search. For instance "all black creatures containing the words "graveyard" and the sentence "to the battlefield" that cost less than a dollar" ^link. Or "all common cards that are legal in standard" ^link since standard commons are almost free.

• Forge is an awesome free software to play Magic against an AI, letting you use any card from the entire Magic history. Its AI is obviously not as good as a human but it's a fantastic sparing partner to test new decks.

• While creating a new deck out of nowhere around a random card you just discovered is super fun, if you don't know where to start, you could search for inspiration by entering "mtg five dollars decks" in a search engine or another.

Revisions

2025/03/29: Improved Single Star description. 2025/03/21: Added the shop Single Star. 2025/03/02: Added the maxiumum of 8 cards with japanese price limitation, the Vintage format limitation and the fact sideboard is part of the price.