Modern Season Is Here!
Price Breakdown · Modern
Modern Season Is Back. Here’s What the Top 8 Costs in Paper vs. Proxies.
RCQ season means Modern is everywhere again — and the format quietly got expensive. We took all eight Top 8 decks from a recent 175-player Modern RCQ, priced every card at its cheapest real-paper TCGplayer printing, and compared it to building the same 75-card lists (60 maindeck + 15 sideboard) with proxies from mtgproxies.biz. Across eight decks, the real-card bill came to $6,496. In proxies it was $1,396.
The Top 8, deck by deck
Every line is the full 75-card tournament configuration — 60-card maindeck plus a 15-card sideboard, with real 4-of quantities. “Real cost” uses the cheapest available paper printing of each card on TCGplayer. “Proxy cost” uses mtgproxies.biz pricing for cards we stock; the cheap commons we don’t carry are counted at their (already low) real price, so the savings shown are conservative.
| Finish | Deck | Player | Real (TCGplayer) | Proxy | You save | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Creativity | Deanthonymdavis | $606 | $144 | $462 | 76.2% |
| 2nd | Chord Toolbox | Brent Clift | $788 | $158 | $630 | 80.0% |
| 3rd–4th | Kethis Sewer-veillance | Amin Ebady | $1,972 | $190 | $1,782 | 90.3% |
| 3rd–4th | Landless Belcher | Chylz | $414 | $182 | $233 | 56.1% |
| 5th–8th | Boros Aggro | Marcelineorion | $927 | $205 | $722 | 77.9% |
| 5th–8th | Ruby Storm | Anthony Dennis | $590 | $186 | $404 | 68.5% |
| 5th–8th | Simic Birthing Ritual | Luke Vankleek | $789 | $152 | $637 | 80.8% |
| 5th–8th | UrzaTron | Rlodini | $410 | $180 | $230 | 56.2% |
| All eight Top 8 decks | $6,496 | $1,396 | $5,100 | 78.5% |
The cards carrying the cost
Modern’s bill isn’t 60 expensive cards — it’s a handful of format staples played as 3-ofs and 4-ofs. These six show up all over the Top 8, and they’re where proxies do the heavy lifting. Tap any card to grab it on mtgproxies.biz.
Where the money actually goes
One card — Mox Opal, the engine of the second-place artifact deck — costs more on its own than seven of the eight decks save in total. After that it’s fetchlands, Modern Horizons staples, and a few mythic bombs. Here are the biggest per-copy swings across the Top 8:
Case study: the winning deck
Deanthonymdavis won the event with Indomitable Creativity — a Jeskai-based deck that’s actually one of the cheaper Top-8 lists at about $606 in paper. Even so, just fourteen cards carry most of that cost, and almost all of it is the manabase: fetchlands, shocklands, and a couple of Modern Horizons staples. Here’s what those fourteen cost in paper versus proxy (card names link to the proxy on our store):
| Card | Qty | TCGplayer (cheapest) | mtgproxies.biz |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scalding Tarn | 4 | $145.08 | $11.00 |
| Arid Mesa | 4 | $126.40 | $10.00 |
| Boseiju, Who Endures | 1 | $50.54 | $4.25 |
| Bloodstained Mire | 2 | $34.38 | $5.50 |
| Fable of the Mirror-Breaker | 4 | $28.88 | $7.80 |
| Wrenn and Six | 3 | $28.32 | $5.85 |
| Archon of Cruelty | 3 | $18.93 | $5.85 |
| Thundering Falls | 1 | $16.15 | $1.95 |
| Valakut Awakening | 1 | $15.77 | $2.25 |
| Jetmir’s Garden | 1 | $15.67 | $2.75 |
| Consign to Memory | 4 | $12.48 | $7.80 |
| Xander’s Lounge | 1 | $12.42 | $2.95 |
| Steam Vents | 1 | $11.42 | $2.50 |
| Sacred Foundry | 1 | $10.92 | $2.50 |
| These 14 cards | 31 | $527 | $73 |
Fourteen cards, thirty-one copies. $527 in paper, $73 in proxies. The rest of the 75 — the Lightning Bolts, the Prismatic Endings, the basics — barely moves the total either way.
Why this matters
- Modern got expensive while you weren’t looking. Modern Horizons sets pushed staples like Ragavan, Orcish Bowmasters and Ocelot Pride to $40+ each — and a competitive deck wants four. Proxies put those back in reach.
- RCQ prep means playing the field, not one deck. For about $1,400 you can build all eight of these lists in proxies and actually learn the matchups before your qualifier — instead of betting one $900 paper deck on a metagame read.
- The sideboard is part of the cost. These totals include all 15 sideboard cards, where a lot of the format’s pricey answers (Force of Negation, Boseiju, fetchlands) quietly live.
Build the whole Modern Top 8 for about $1,400.
Every staple in this article — the Moxen, the Modern Horizons all-stars, the fetch and shock manabase — is available as a high-quality proxy at mtgproxies.biz.
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