I've been playing since Dec. 1st, but man this primer would've been helpful then. As an avid player I think this is a great guide. Thanks for sharing.

My lil girl and I play this about every other night now and it is a fun little game I just wish you could group in it so we dont have to keep teleporting to each other after ever zone.

The article is a good explanation of the basic nuts and bolts, and there's nothing really wrong with it, but let's fill in some details.

"All spells have a number in the upper left area of the card - this number represents the amount of mana and pips required to cast the spell. Each round, you gain 1 pip..."

Strategy is largely based around using some zero pip cards for a while to store up pips until you have enough to use something more powerful.  Zero pip cards are weaker than cards than use several pips, of course, but still a lot better than a pass.

"You gain a 10% chance each round to gain a power pip instead of a normal pip - and this chance goes up as you raise your level."

You get a 10% power pip chance at level 10.  Before that, you do not get power pips at all, apart from a tutorial.  Your base power pip chance increases linearly with level (up to rounding) up to 40% at level 50.

The reason why this matters is that it means that among cards that use at least 2 pips, cards outside your primary school become relatively less useful than cards from your primary school.  This mainly means damage cards, of course.

"Ranks go up from Rank 1, but are not parallel to the player levels. A rank 3 monster may be a good challenge for a 12th level character, for example. Elite monsters are tougher than their rank would indicate, and Boss monsters are even stronger."

The general rule is rank 1 yellow < rank 1 orange < rank 1 red < rank 2 yellow < rank 2 orange < rank 2 red < rank 3 yellow < ...

Red mobs are labeled "elite", but it's better to think of this as just adding a fractional rank.  The effect of a mob being "elite" here is dramatically less than for, say, elites in WoW.

Bosses don't really fit this scheme.  One boss of a given rank can be dramatically stronger than another.  For example, Ngozi the Beguiler and Krokopatra are both rank 5 bosses, but they have 3400 and 1200 HP, respectively.  Indeed, Krokopatra seems quite a bit weaker than Serket Guardian, who is only rank 4.

"Monsters pass from time to time as well, and it makes me wonder what their hands look like."

Monsters don't have hands like players do.  Monsters have decks, and pick a card at random from their deck.  (This can be viewed as no more than one of each card, but some cards more likely to be chosen than others; or all cards equally likely to be chosen, with more multiples of some than others.)  If they have enough pips, they use the card they drew, and if not, they pass.  Unlike players, a monster's card is replaced in its deck when it is used.  As a test, I got Rattlebones to use more than 100 cards in a single battle.

"Monsters use an "aggression" system, much like other MMORPGs."

I'm not entirely sure how the aggro system works, and KingsIsle doesn't seem to be saying.  My observation is that if one character obviously has far more aggro on a mob than another, it invariably attacks the one with more aggro.  If it's close, it's less predictable, though a mob does seem to repeatedly attack the same target if there are no changes to aggro.  My best guess is that when a monster enters a battle, it obtains a random but fairly small amount of aggro on all players in the battle.

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The article doesn't really touch on what puts the strategy into the game.  One major part is in setting up your deck.  You end up with far more cards than you can put into your deck, and have to pick which ones (and how many copies of each) you want to actually put into your deck.  Naturally, this greatly affects which cards you'll actually draw in combat, and the probabilities that various cards will come up.

Another major part of the strategy is the damage modifiers.  Get a blade and a trap up and you might do 170 damage per pip.  If the monster uses a shield, you might do 20 damage per pip instead.  Increasing your amount of damage per pip and decreasing what monsters do (and, of course, targetting your damage intelligently) is how you win battles.  You want to use your own blades and traps for powerful spells that use several pips, and not have the damage mostly negated by a monster shield.  You want to clear monster shields with spells that waste few (or no) pips.  You want to use shields to defend against spells that would have done a lot of damage to you (multiple pips, especially with traps and blades), rather than having them wasted on spells that barely would have done anything.

Just for those newcomers to Wizard101 reading this:

The "Lightning" school mentioned in the guide as an opposite to Myth is actually called a "Storm" school.

This is a very good guide for lower level players. Once you get higher in level deck building becomes very important and some (myself included) modify it before getting in any known battle.