Magic the gathering

If you want to win easily with little to no game knowledge, mono-green infect and mono red are the best.
How to play them:
1. Play everything in your hand
2. Go HAM
3. Win in ~2-5 turns
4. If you do not win by then, you lose.

I'm just going to talk generally since I'm not familiar with the current Meta...

but it's very similar to YuGiOh in that if you're against a savvy player with a $500 deck and you're playing with near 100% Commons, no amount of Skill/Strategy on your part will be enough.

Learn MtG and challenge him to a Draft match. You'll both be on completely even fields cards-wise.
It seems like you're in a pretty big MtG group, so you could probably get enough people together for it. And you wouldn't have to spend $500, that you would probably mis-spend since you're still new to MtG.

That said, very functional decks can be made for very cheap. If you build smart almost all commons with cheap rares can get you a pretty fair shot at winning local top 8, depending on the crowd.

ConTroll is fun, but benefits the most from more expensive cards and is probably the hardest to play on a budget. You can do Dual Color with a budget deck too. Red or Red + Black/White/Green will be your Fastest/Fast/Mid-Range beatdown decks.

From what I remember; while important, creature cost wasn't too big of a deal in YuGiOh. But in your situation especially Card Cost/Value is going to be EVERYTHING.

I definitely think your best shot is to learn Card Economy and just Draft. It's as Skill vs. Skill as Magic can possibly be.

Or just use some of the free software that allows you to make your own decks and play them against people.
If you're interested PM because there are several but there's one people use the most because it's stable and easy to use.
If you're learning and have some questions or want to test your deck ideas I might have some time this weekend.

Speaking of which, does anyone draft on Cockatrice? I do it occasionally and it's pretty fun.

If you want to win easily with little to no game knowledge, mono-green infect and mono red are the best.
How to play them:
1. Play everything in your hand
2. Go HAM
3. Win in ~2-5 turns
4. If you do not win by then, you lose.

or, consider Slivers.
quick, easy to play, easy to learn, dozens of strategies, and can be cheaply made. iirc it's one of the most common pauper decks.
and mono-red Goblins do a similar thing.
but do look into proxying cards (printing out existing ones).

wish i had more people to play with around here myself, but i'm nervous about playing randoms at the card store near me.

-snip-

He has a budget of $500, so I think he can dump ~$50 on a formerly tier 1 deck. Mono-red goblins loses out to mono red, since mono red can just put in ball lighting, hellspark elemental, hellrider, hell's thunder, etc without worry about any theme/synergy other than beat, beat, beat. If he's allowed to proxy everything though, he can just play OP legacy decks.

Don't worry about playing against randoms, most of them are just people who want to play a good, casual game of magic.