I like the effort. I'm not sure about the giving away of proxy decks to vintage first timers or even semi-newbs for a nominal fee or not for a couple of reasons; not the least of which is the effort on your part for something that might just end up in someone's trash or on their shelf for perpetuity. You'll need to do that a lot of times to get a good base established.
If you are creating a library for your local shop, maybe you just ask the owner if you can leave it there for people to use in house with a sign "Vintage proxy decks, try them out, but put them back!" or even "Vintage proxy decks, try them out, bring one or two home if you want, but bring them back!". The least a player can do is copy one to make their own proxy deck if they find they like Vintage.
The price I was thinking was "please buy me a pack of sleeves to replace the pack I'm handing you" which would put the cost at around $8. I think that's enough that people will want to at continue trying them at least a little bit.
I like the idea of a box of decks for the store. Unfortunately, while this reduces work in that I don't have to constantly print new decks, it also means that someone needs to be looking through those decks periodically to ensure that none of their cards went missing and that the sideboard and main deck are properly separated. I'm not sure if it would actually end up being less work.
I think it's a good idea in general. I believe your best bet for success would be to target Legacy players, since many of them will have the duals, the Forces, the more midrange cards and could probably transition straight to 10-15 proxy unsanctioned events. They would basically just be proxying the power + Time Vault, Library etc.
I've detailed a bit in
this post why, at least locally, legacy players are not a good target for Vintage. But in principle, I agree.
True story about bringing out the power at the local shop:
Two of my buddies were testing before NYSE, and this little 9 year old kid is watching and asking questions as they play, but he basically shit talked Andy for "only" having 4 moxes on him, and zinged Jesse because some of his power was white bordered. Kids these days.
I have two funny things like this. At FNM me and a friend are jamming some games.
1. His deck is 100% beta 100% japanese foil. People were ragging on my non-proxy deck for not being as nice as his.
2. Several people came up to me and assumed I didn't know what I was doing and, while comboing out with gush-bond, told me "you already played a land this turn, you can't play another" and "dude you can't just PICK UP lands whenever you want"
* With each deck, have a pre-written short explanation of how the deck works. (I'm working on an example of this)
I've thrown together a sample of this for Fenton Oath
here. Again, feedback is greatly appreciated.
As I was toying with this, my idea was to have something that could be printed out on one single front-and-back piece of paper to be included with the deck and decklist.
As a follow up, would anyone be interested in working with me to compile more of these super-brief deck descriptions aimed at noobies?
