Budget Exalted

We agreed on Vintage, I'll update that. It's for a casual thing at work.

I gotcha. Even if this is casual, there are some tweaks I would propose. If you're playing in vintage, you get to use the awesome vintage cards (budget version) that you don't get to use anywhere else. The budget cards you positively need to use are: Gitaxian probe, Brainstorm, Sol ring, Ponder, Skullclamp. Everything but Skullclamp is restricted in vintage, so you can only use 1 copy. Skullclamp you can use 4 copies.

Exalted is sort of a unique strategy in magic, as you want critters on the field, but you only want to attack with 1 every turn. So, the deck is vulnerable to mass removal (nukes), but doesn't get the benefit of doing massive swarm damage. So, you have to take advantage of the critter drop every turn to boost the attacker. Meaning, every turn you want to play a critter with exalted in mainphase 1, and attack with the critter from last turn, taking advantage of the exalted boost. This makes up for the vulnerability with speed. Unfortunately, that means your critter drops need to be as reliable and fast as possible. To that end, I recommend maxing out the easy to cast (mana color wise) and low cost critters over the "better" mid-tier critters. 4 akrasan squire, 4 aven squire, 4 knight of glory for sure. Then take a look at qasali pridemage and sighted-cast sorcerer. Giltspire avenger is too hard to get out (color wise) on a budget, as is sigled paladin. Court archers is "ok" but you don't really care about blocking in this deck (you want to outrace opponent), so a cheaper option might be better.

Your support spells are ok, but realistically aren't needed for what this deck is trying to do. You're trying to outrace opponent, so you don't need to gain life or anything like that. Aqueous form is nice for unblockable, but it doesn't produce good card advantage. Selesnya charm is ok, but there are better versions. I would suggest cutting most of them in favor of cards like swords to plowshares and preordain.




However, taking into account that this is a budget build so you can't use exalted's grand master, noble hierarch, I would give some thought to forgetting the bant color scheme entirely and just going mono-white. Yes, you don't get to use rafiq, but going monowhite fixes the mana problems, lets you use sleeker cards more quickly, and realistically doesn't lose much (if any) momentum when compared to a budget bant verison. Or, if you want to keep some diversity, go white/blue and you can use the cool vintage cards, the white cards above, plus ardent plea and ethercaste knight. Realistically, that's what I'm gunna recommend, as its a compromise between power and speed/playability.

This is how I would build that deck:

https://www.mtgvault.com/dknight27/decks/vintage-budget-exalted/