5cent Fun

Man… the 5centbin rocks.

And I’m not even the one who has good luck in the 5centbin. Usually I can find playsets of commons that I need—including Basking Rootwallas, Wild Mongrels, Impulses, and Brainstorms (including the Davestorm, signed by David P. Baum)—and every once in a while you find a real gem of a card. My cousin has found Patriarch’s Bidding and Serendib Efreet in there. Of course, they weren’t supposed to be in there, but that’s beside the point.

Plus, I think the 5centbin makes you a better player. I mean, you can make a deck completely from 5centbin cards for $2, but you have to be judicious when you pick out your cards.

I mean, say you’re looking for a white card that grants color protection to your creatures. Obviously your first choice would be Mother of Runes, but there’s never any in there (I think I’ve found 2 in there, both were really played). The rest of your options stretch across multiple blocks covering almost the entire history of Magic. You could get Shelter, Flickering Ward, Razor Barrier, one of every Ward from Revised (actually, I usually stop looking through the 5centbin once I find one of every Ward from Revised, that or one of every CoP from Ice Age), even Akroma’s Blessing is pretty common. Which do you choose? Each one has its benefits and drawbacks. I’d probably dig for Shelters and Flickering Wards myself, but if I was worried about artifacts I’d probably have to get Razor Barrier, and if I was worried about sweeping red damage, I’d have to find some Akroma’s Blessings.

The 5centbin also teaches you to play and win with worse cards, just because even a lot of your power commons are fairly hard to find.

Next time you’re hanging out at the store with nothing to do, try this:

Pick a row of the 5centbin and build a legal deck using only cards from that row. Sure you might run into a section of twenty or forty Pestilence, but that might just be a hint that you should make a mono-black Pestilence deck. I bet you can. It might not be the best deck you could make from that row, but it would be something new. And, no, it won’t have the speed or the agility most of us are used to, but that really does improve your playing as you have to find new uses for cards you might not have realized were even passable, much less good. Have you ever considered putting Whirling Dervish in a Pestilence deck, for example? What about Cemetery Gate?

Trust me, it’s more fun than it sounds.

Once I built an entire Kamigawa-Block legal UR Splice deck that killed with Ire of Kaminari out of the 5centbin. Everything I needed was in there; the only card that took a while to find was Glacial Ray.

Long before Leonin made their debut in Mirrodin, my cousin built a GR Cats deck that he called Pussy Galore. It just had a bunch of random cats like Stalking Tiger and King Cheetah, plus token generators like a lone Waiting in the Weeds and Firecat Blitz, and some strong boosters like Song of Blood (which has a Panther warrior in the artwork).

Sure you wouldn’t take it to a tournament ever (EVER!) but it was fun to play.

Next time you have a group of people without enough money to do a booster draft, just make decks from rows of the 5centbin. You’ll spend a fifth of the money but you’ll have approximately twice as much fun.

Also, if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up with a terrible manabase that will end up causing you so many problems. See, I would do something like this, because I’m not very smart:

Fire Sale.5centbin

4x Nightscape Familiar
4x Thornscape Familiar
4x Thunderscape Familiar
28x Red Spells that do damage to things—bonus if four of them are Firecat Blitz.
12x Mountains
4x Swamps
4x Forests

Hot. You can Fireball for five on turn four.

1. First turn land.
2. Second turn play Thunderscape Familiar
3. Third turn play Nightscape and Thornscape Familiar (which cost one less each!) and fireball for two! It’s just like normal only you’ve got 4 power of creatures on the board too.
4. Fourth turn play Nightscape and Thornscape Familiar and fireball for five or for four twice!
5. Fifth turn attack for the win or cast more damage for the win.
6. Gloat. Shamelessly.

I say again: Hot.

Bah-ro-ken.

That’s broken like a Ming vase, though. As in doesn’t work, won’t hold water, used to have promise until it started being stupid, which happened right after I typed Thornscape after Nightscape Familiar.

Still, someday you’ll thank me for all this hot tech I’m handing out for free.

Why are you laughing?! It only requires that you draw two each of two four-ofs in your deck by turn four and have an appropriate land drop for each of the first four turns and draw nothing else but damage.

Okay, but seriously, the 5centbin is good stuff. You can usually find something interesting in there, something that you’d never seen before, something useful. Especially since Dave started acquiring more older cards, those before Ice Age I mean. I mean, Clergy of the Holy Nimbus is awesome and last time I was there I definitely saw a fourspot of them in the 5centbin.

It’s like Finders Keepers on Nickelodeon:

Larry Toffler: These cloudy guys just won’t go away. These…cloudy guys…just won’t go away. Find it!