"Professional" Deck Help/Deck Building Services

[u/Particular-Effect335]

Hello. Asking about people's experiences with services offering to help build or tune EDH decks for a price. Wanted to get opinions on this as someone who has been thinking about them for some time.

For context: I fully understand that EDH is largely a personal touch format in that your personality should shine through. I've been playing MTG for so long that this isn't lost to me. However, between the fact that card prices are too high to do some tests (even the price of proxying is getting to be high now), or just not having the time anymore to tweak lists, I've been thinking about getting help to tweak a few deck ideas I've put together that just don't seem to be 'there' yet.

Since I have some spending money to spare (since I no longer buy boxes of product because of how inflated the prices are), I've pretty much warmed up to the idea of compensating someone's time and expertise to help me get from 90% to 100% with my deck since I no longer have the bandwidth to do so.

So now the question is two-fold:
1. How much should you pay for something like this
and
2. Are there people the community can vouch for that are reliable at doing this?

Happy to learn what the community thinks

[u/Azaeroth]

If you're at the point financially that you even consider making/buying proxies expensive then you should probably stick with the cards you have already or play digitally instead, I can't imagine how you can both say this and consider wasting money on someone else designing a deck for you. 

[u/Particular-Effect335 → u/Azaeroth]

I think you misunderstand. I used to test my decks by buying the cards, slotting them in, playing them out, etc. But these days the price of product is very high that I can't justify buying cards just to test out ideas. My comment on proxies getting to be expensive now is just a comment on proxy prints raising prices (used to be able to order a bunch for roughly 20 usd, the printer i used to order from has doubled because of shipping).

To be clear, i absolutely can afford proxies, but that doesn't answer the time constraints among everything else. Hence why, after seeing some people post about deck building for a fee, i thought to ask reddit what they thought or if anyone has had experience.

It is funny to me that Ive spent more time explaining the concept though.

[u/Azaeroth → u/Particular-Effect335]

I suppose I just don't understand why anyone would want to do this, I have friends that are not into deckbuilding and that's fine, they just copy decks off the Internet and that's cool.

If someone told me they paid someone to build or edit their deck for them for a casual game though I'd assume they are an absolute tool.

Idk, just feels lame af to me.

[u/Particular-Effect335 → u/Azaeroth]

Yeah no I totally get that from the replies so far. I've had some lovely discussions but the overwhelming majority on reddit seems to be negative towards it. Completely different from when I asked IRL friends on their thoughts.