Is it legal to use proxies in EDH? Mainly for cards such as Timetwister and Gaea's Cradle, but also for those certain cards that are lower priced, but still out of 'your personal price range'. (I.E., for me this includes Liliana of the Veil and numerous planeswalkers. I just don't have $2000 to spend on 'ONE DECK'.)

How far is too far? How much value does a card need to be an 'okay to be proxied' card? $20? $50? $100?, etc.

The correct answer it depends...

on your play group
on your opponent
on your budget

there's a thread about this on reddit today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/77f51n/whats_your_policy_on_players_with_proxy_cards/

I like this guys response...

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/77f51n/whats_your_policy_on_players_with_proxy_cards/dolhb3q/

For me personally, i play all my decks as if I'm playing in a sanctioned event... I don't proxy anything and If I can't afford it oh well... sure there's a percentage of games I'll lost due to power level, and that's okay.

As elpablo, there are several things that factor in. My playgroup has ruled that you can proxy anything you already own a copy of (if the real copy is in another deck for example) or if you are actively looking to acquire one, but not anything on which you wouldn't actually spend the money. For example, I will never proxy a Library of Alexandria, because I would never actually buy or trade for one. I would proxy something like Survival of the Fittest, which I am still currently trying to acquire.

I'm going to weigh in on this, despite the fact that I don't actually play EDH, so take my opinion with a very large grain of salt. My understanding of the format, is that it was never meant to be competitive. It was meant to be a casual format. What is different between EDH, and any other constructed format? 1) Larger decks, 101 vs 60. 2.) Singletons, vs. up to 4-ofs. What does all this equate to? 80 something unique cards, vs maybe 20 at most. The combination of these things to me, says the spirit of the format was that it was meant to be a collectors' format. It was about what unique cards you could collect to make up your 101. It was never about power level, as it was never intended to be competitive. (With 101 cards, and mostly singletons, the variance is just too high to ever be truly competitive IMO.) As such, proxying the powerful cards that you can't afford is antithetical to the spirit of the format to me.

Where I could see justifying it, is if one person in the group has collected a handful of high power level cards... You can't really have fun playing with them since they're playing on a higher power level, and it's not fair to ask them to not play a prized card that they probably had to work decently hard to acquire.

All that said, to each his/her own. If your group is all ok with proxies, have at it. For me though, I would much rather have everyone play at a lower power level with cards they can reasonably acquire, than jack the power level up by allowing proxies, even if that means one or two players have to sideline some of their most powerful cards.

Yeah, the only thing I need for a deck right now is a gaea's cradle. I just can't spend as much as I'd like to on a single deck.
That's the only reason I ask. (My group is semi-competitive and some of the players have equally powerful cards in their deck)