I'm considering starting to play legacy but don't have much staples, particularly the *expensive* ones. My play style is typically draw-go control and many of the staples are $60+ including JTMS, FoW, and revised dual lands.

What is the best way to acquire legacy staples without breaking the bank? Trading up might be possible if I give up tons of stuff in high demand. Selling to buyers such as Channel Fireball for credit could go along way. Are there other, or better options?

Depends on your time-frame. How much do you enjoy collecting (slower) vs playing (as in, I want to play right now)? Me, I enjoy the collecting and the challenge of trading/trading up. The cheapest is staking things out on ebay for a few weeks. The fastest is to mail some standard stuff to one of the big online guys for credit (or just pulling out your Visa).

There is a great thread on MTGS that is talking about this very thing. http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=447765 . The TLDR is to start with a cheap deck like burn or dredge and try to build up store credit to get the more expensive stuff, or just save up your money. I personally did sell a large chunk of standard stuff to Channel fire ball and used it to get singles or EDH. It can be the way to go if you have a TON of standard stuff and want to play standard AND legacy.

Only legacy stuff I ever picked up in State College area was from trading foils and other rare stuff to Don, lol. Other poster had some pretty solid advice about trading in to CB with store credit- they way over offer on stuff when set comes out...traded like 4 sorins to them at 47$ a piece store credit. Sure their prices suck, but things like that will make up for it.

You could make a good/competitive standard deck and go to a lot of tournaments around wherever you live. Some weeks I'll make up to $80 or so in credit just from playing a few days during the week.

Patience and a lot of trading is one way to do it.

Just finding the right person who is willing to trade is a huge challenge sometimes.

I've slowly migrated standard era cards for modern, and then modern for legacy. Most folks (hell even me included) are hesitant or flat out refuse to trade new for old due to price fluctuations in new cards.

@darcet - I think I know Don from playing at the Hub haha, small world...

I'm in no rush but I have been trading for a while and have accumulated a fair amount of staples, but not the expensive ones. The MTGS article was very helpful and some of the things I took away were to not spend money on packs but use that money to invest in staples. Another take away is to attempt to *predict* what to hold onto for long term financial increase which seems to be mostly luck driven, so I'm breaking out my rabbit's foot. Other than that, trading in for credit seems like the best short term option.

Thanks all for helping a legacy noob out...

The biggest difference between Legacy and other formats is that, instead of people swapping entire decks and regularly rebuilding based on the latest tournament results, most of your competition will have one deck that they have been playing for months or maybe even years. I'd suggest you do the same, i.e. pick a deck that you want to play, build that deck, and then ignore all the rest of the so-called Legacy staples until you get a good enough handle on the format and actually think changing your deck is necessary.

(The exception to this is duals, if you can afford them, as they're only going up and you're almost guaranteed to get back whatever you spend on them if you sell them in the future.)

I plan on building maverick eventually. My plan is to not build a billion standard decks this season and stick with a couple very good ones. This way I can funnel any winnings I get towards that deck. Gonna start slow with the cheaper stuff (Knight, Dryad Arbor, Green Sun's etc.) and move up. If I'm halfway through the duals by the end of the season, I'm happy.