MTG

Here are a few different resources:

• Solid Reddit thread
• Power Level Calculator
• Solid Stack Exchange thread
• Draftsim article

They’re all loosely similar and contain the same info. Understand what they’re trying to explain and you’ll be able to better evaluate your decks.

Money alone is a bad measure because it misses what the money is spent on. I have a precon that’s 3 or 4x base cost because I have some expensive basic lands in the deck. I could spend a ton of money and put a bunch of cash expensive Eldrazi in a deck but still get stomped before I can build a decent board state because everything is so mana expensive. It’s where the money goes that matters.

Additionally, you should really consider whether or not a 1v1 is a fair test of your deck. I have some solid upgraded precons that work really well in a pod and shit the bed in a duel. Precons are often geared toward at least 3 player play so if you’re improving the deck, you might be leaning into that. Some decks I play against do much better in duels than pod play. Some are great in both. And sometimes you just don’t have the heart of the cards no matter your deck.

Price doesn't always equal power, but some big pieces are expensive.

First of all, you should look at the cheapest value/printing for a card to really see what the "value" of your deck is. Spending on an older foil card can be vastly more expensive than the reprinted, non-foil version.

Second, it kinda depends on what the money is being spent on. I dropped over $100 the other month just adding a fetchland and a few shocks into a 3-color deck. Spending money on a manabase, or on the staples that hold a deck together, isn't the same as spending on the big combo pieces that do uniquely powerful things.

As a rule of thumb, I know the price of my deck, but I don't use it as a thermometer for how high-powered it is. I do use it as an indication of how invested I am in it, since the more I want it to perform, the more money I'll throw into it.

If price point is an issue with your pod, consider having your powerful pet decks and whatnot, but also setting up a budget deck where the total value of the deck (once again, using cheapest printings) must be below a price point. I've seen interesting budget formats where each card must be sub-$1, or Pauper EDH, or where the total value of the deck must be below $25, or $50, or $100. Discussion is the best thing about playing Commander, a social format. Figure out what makes everyone have a good time and roll with that.

Synergy is always going to be more important than how good individual cards are, but the individual cards are expensive because they are popular and are popular because they are good…

You can absolutely build an insanely pricey deck that sucks.

If you want to beat an expensive deck with a cheap deck, you won't do it by netdecking. Competitive players know which cards are essential in netdecks. "Oh, they're on esper control, but they don't have x and y cards? Good, this will be easy."

My solution to this is to play a deck that no one is expecting. Surprise them. Make them think you're playing a certain deck for the first 2 turns, then throw out something they're not expecting.

Now, you can make a crappy deck this way, if you aren't careful. So playtest and drop the things that don't work.

Some of my best commander decks are my cheapest. It's almost all about synergy.

However

There is a saying, that the most powerful card in Magic is the credit card. I mean, look at something like Counterspell vs Mana Drain. Same mana cost, except one is cheap ($$) and the other is super expensive, and Mana Drain is insanely good.

Your friend could just have a deck that naturally counters yours, but I think having a precon deck with $120 in upgrades over $20 in upgrades will definitely give them a leg up. The only real way to compete is try to optimize synergies, which often involves upping the value of the deck.

You can stop reading here if you want, as the rest is anecdotal.

After a few years of playing, my group eventually slowly increased the power of our decks with good pulls from packs, or buying high synergy singles. You can really get lost in the weeds of optimizing your deck, and it turned into a financial arms race, which feels bad. I talked to most of my play group about this, and a lot of them agreed that this was getting kind of "pay to win" for us, and we all hit the brakes a bit with our deck optimization. The nice thing with Commander when you are playing with 3+ people, is the game is sort of self balancing. One person has a great deck and starts dominating? Well now all the others can agree to gang up on them, which can be fun.

Some of the decks in my group are crazy good, but we try and be considerate to what the power levels of the rest of the group might be playing. I think the healthy option is to just open the conversation with your friends and let them know how you feel or think, which is what you've done.

Personally, I love the PDH format. Uncommon creature as your commander, common cards in the rest of the deck. You can still have a great time with a lower power deck, and everyone is roughly on the same playing field due to the power limitations of the cards. A deck for PDH would cost me $30-$40 CAD, and it plays mostly the same as EDH.

I would say that pure monetary value does effect power but with highly diminishing returns and even at the lowest cost the synergy and construction of the deck is more important.

The most expensive card I own is Sheoldred, The Apocalypse - and I always take her out of my decks because she just doesn't synergise with them. Yeah it's powerful, yeah it doesn't weaken my infect deck (for example), but a dirt cheap Blightbelly Rat is far more valuable to me in that deck if I want to do the things my deck is supposed to do, have fun, and have a good chance of winning.

1v1 is a different kettle of fish, and rewards aggro strategies that generally won't get there in 4 way EDH.

Mana bases matter more in 1v1 as well and good lands are not cheap.

However, powerful cards are also rarely cheap cards. It's not 1-1, but a higher price tag tends towards more powerful in a vacuum.

Willingness to spend more might also correlate with greater investment/familiarity with TCGs, and thus better heuristics in how to play too, though.

As others have said, price can be a bit deceptive. My most expensive deck is an angel tribal deck. Angels are generally expensive on their own and I have some rarer printings of a few of them. My most metrics the deck isn’t actually good though. I can manage well enough in my play group, but it is by no means competitive. A few expensive cards does not a good deck make.

Consider playing a couple games where you swap decks. Commander players are used to downplaying their decks' strengths and other decks' weaknesses. Maybe you're wrong and you just need to learn some strategy fundamentals, but it sounds likely that there really is a significant deck power disparity.

However, if that is the case, it's possible that your deck's shortcomings could be fixed without having to spend more than $5 on a single card. Adding more removal, removing duds, simplifying your game plan, or improving your mana base could help keep you in the game.

Oh also I would be derelict in my duties if I did not remind you that proxying cards is good and everyone should do it all the time. If your play group doesn't allow proxies, they suck and you should start looking for some cool people to play with.

Money has an impact but is largely irrelevant outside of competitive environments which you're clearly not in. There are $40 tuned pauper decks that could walk all over your edh deck. You can slot a $2700 Tabernacle at Pendrale Veil into any deck and that isn't going to make it better. Are you ever going to beat a $25k fully powered blinged out cEDH deck? Probably not. But as a new player your likely issues are with building efficient mana bases, prioritizing cards that advance your game plan over being fun, and making your deck more consistent. Nobody says you're required to do any of that, just understand what your goals are. Do you want to have fun, make friends, and/or win? None of those are a wrong reason to play magic, you just need to pick yours

There’s definitely a substantial positive relationship between deck value and performance. Rare cards aren’t valuable merely because they’re rare. They’re valuable because they’re rare and they’re strong, often being either way more efficient than more common cards, or having rare or unique properties. The correlation isn’t 1:1 because a given deck’s win condition is based on the emergent properties of the deck when cards combine, which is why pauper decks can be surprisingly strong, but if the difference is large enough and the deck is constructed halfway competently, it’s going to be much more powerful.

This is a feature, not a bug. MTG’s business model is to sell booster packs. People buy booster packs for the rare cards, either to put them in their own competitive decks, or to sell/trade them for other cards so that they can build competitive decks. If the rare cards weren’t objectively more powerful, there would be no need for them, and it wouldn’t drive the kind of massive premiums for them in the card market.

Obviously you can’t just look at the value of the cards to get the value of the deck as a whole, but $20 vs $120 is a big gap. Deck value doesn’t equal strength, but it’s highly correlated. MTG isn't pay-to-win, per se, but spending more money on cards will give you better cards, without question. Competitive players spend what they need to spend to build a competitive deck, so at that level it becomes all about skill, and spending way more than your opponent isn’t necessarily an advantage, not to mention that certain types of decks fare better against others. At the level you’re talking about, though, the extra $100 is going to make a massive difference. It would be embarrassing for your friend if he wasn’t beating your $20 deck with his $120 deck.

@bec A lot of decks are expensive due to their manabase. When trying to compete on a budget stick to decks with fewer colours (but 1 is better than 0 for cost). An all islands manabase is ~free and pretty good, where the ideal 4 colour manabase will be 24 $10~50 cards (or $500 if looking are revised duals).