The fun of the game is that it's played at two levels--tactics during gameplay and strategy as you tune your deck. To get this effect without pay-to-play, you can get some friends together, deal twenty cards to each player, and then take turns drafting more cards from a shared pool of a few hundred. Everyone gets to build their deck from their pile of cards. After each round, everyone can update their deck and the loser gets to draft some more cards from the shared pool.