mtg hug cards Building Mono-Blue Group Lady Octopus in Commander you may play those cards The 26 Best Group Hug

Seems like an incredibly fun commander and can get even better with keywords like lifelink or infect

However, if WotC never reprints these cards, the prices will never go down, so I think it's completely fine to buy proxies for casual use

and I know you can do it with newly-entered creatures, but then you're still missing out on blockers

There are lots of cards with zombie synergy however not all that many of them are any good, in addition to this there is, as with merfolk although not as bad, little depth in zombie creatures

This, at least in part, probably explains the higher deck price, although to be fair, if Legacy is your primary format, new players have to buy a Legacy deck if they want to play, so the comparison to Magic's Standard seems reasonable