Best Basket: Cheapest Way to Buy a Deck

Price a 40-card Riftbound deck the obvious way — open each card, buy it from whichever store is cheapest — and you'll usually end up with an order spread across eight, ten, sometimes fifteen different stores. Each one charges its own shipping. The "cheapest" card-by-card total quietly stops being the cheapest total once postage lands on top of it a dozen times.

Best Basket exists to fix exactly that. It takes a full decklist and works out the cheapest way to buy all of it, not the cheapest way to buy each card in isolation. Any signed-in account sees the delivered total for its own list; RiftCompare Premium shows the store-by-store plan.

The problem, concretely

Say a 40-card list has its cheapest matches spread across 12 different stores. Buy it that way and you're paying 12 separate shipping charges — plus 12 separate deliveries to track, 12 separate free-shipping thresholds you're not close enough to hit, and a much higher chance one store is out of stock by the time you check out.

Consolidate the same list into, say, 3 or 4 stores instead, and you often come out cheaper overall even though a few individual cards cost a little more than their absolute lowest listing — because you're paying shipping 3 or 4 times instead of 12, and you're more likely to clear each store's free-shipping threshold along the way. That trade-off — a few cents more per card against dramatically less postage — is exactly the calculation nobody wants to do by hand across a 40-card list and a dozen stores' worth of shipping policies.

How Best Basket actually works

1. Give it a list. Paste any decklist in standard list format, or send your watchlist in from your account — and tick Skip copies I already own to leave out what's already in your portfolio. You can also send your binder, which prices what re-buying it would cost. If you got here from a deck page, your list is often already pre-filled.
2. It searches combinations of stores — not just the single cheapest store for each card, but sets of stores that carry enough of the list to be worth consolidating into, each with its real shipping cost and free-shipping threshold applied — and shows the best one-store and two-store orders beside the cheapest split. Any line it can't match or find in stock is listed, not dropped.
3. It shows you the comparison, not just the answer. The result gives the total delivered cost and — right alongside it — what the "naive" per-card-cheapest approach would have cost and how many stores it would have needed. You can see the saving, not just be told one exists.
4. You check out at each store yourself. Best Basket tells you where to buy; it doesn't process the order. Every store in the Premium plan gets a direct link.

Best Basket vs. the free deck pricer

RiftCompare has two related tools, and it's worth knowing which one you actually want:

• The deck pricer — free, no account needed. Prices every card in a list at its own cheapest store and adds it up. Good for a quick "what's this deck worth" check.
• Best Basket — your own list's delivered total with a free account, the store-by-store plan with Premium. Solves the harder, more useful question: what's the cheapest way to actually buy the list, once you stop pretending shipping is free.

If you're pricing a list out of curiosity, the deck pricer is enough. If you're actually about to place an order, Best Basket is the one that saves you real money.

When it matters most

• Full 40-card decks, where the naive approach realistically does spread across a dozen-plus stores.
• Cheap-to-mid-value staples — commons and uncommons where postage is a large fraction of the card's own price, so consolidating a handful of $1-2 cards into one store's order genuinely moves the total.
• Rebuilding after a rotation or ban, when you're replacing several cards at once rather than one at a time.

It matters least for a single chase card or a short shopping list of two or three cards — there's no split to optimise when everything's coming from one order anyway.

Try it

Open Best Basket, paste in a decklist — your own, or one copied from a published tournament report — and see the store split for yourself. If you'd rather just price a list with no account, the deck pricer does that part for free.