The end of 2024 may be fast approaching, but Magic: The Gathering has one more set coming to store shelves, and it may be the most notable of all. Foundations, which will serve as the core of the Standard format for at least the next five years, drops November 15, and with it comes a batch of cards new and old that hope to shake up the competitive Magic scene.
At MagicCon Vegas last month, we sat down with three members of the Foundations team at Wizards Of The Cast: creative/narrative lead Ari Zirulnik, product lead Max McCall, and Play Design team member Carmen Klomparens, to talk about the upcoming set. Topics include curation strategy for the set, the Starter Collection and its place as a new jump-off point, new treatments, and more.
Read on to hear the team's thoughts, and look for MTG Foundations in local game stores during prerelease events this weekend, and everywhere else on November 15.
[This interview was recorded, transcribed, and edited for clarity.]
MMORPG.com: When choosing or designing cards for this set, how did you decide which cards would be flat out reprinted, as opposed to new designs that incorporate older ones – Bloodthirsty Conqueror's use of Exquisite Blood, for example. What were the parameters in figuring that out?
Max McCall: This may sound obvious, but typically we want all of our cards to do something, right? Some of those cards already exist; say we want a 1/1 green creature that tells people that green is about mana and growth and so forth. We want this creature to tap for a green mana specifically, because we don't want the mana acceleration to let people play colors that aren't green. It would also be good to have some kind of creature-type association to sort of help people build a linear type of deck.
So, with those parameters, Llanowar Elves already exists. But also, it turns out, Fyndhorn Elves also already exists. And Elvish Mystic already exists. We don't need another one of these. For that scenario, we decided we wanted Llanowar Elves to come back.
With Bloodthirsty Conqueror, that card doesn't exist; we want an awesome black flyer that pays you off for attacking an opponent's face, but also, is just a sweet card, right? There are existing vampires that are strong and cool – like Vampire Nocturnus is an old card that is more of the classic "reveal the top card of your library, when it's a Vampire, all of your creatures become massive" mechanic. That card does exist, but we didn't want people to just put all of their vampires into a black deck, we wanted something more open-ended, or more "hyper combo finish" stuff.
Carmen Klomparens: A lot of it came down to how much we felt we had to sacrifice to something that was old and iconic, versus making sure that whenever a player saw a card, it was very obvious why this was cool. Exquisite Blood is cool if you've played some amount of Magic, but a new player may think "oh, how much am I going to actually be gaining life? Does that come up very often" even though it's not necessarily a given that it's going to be a relevant thing.
When you're hyper-enfranchised, you know [Exquisite Blood] is cool and has all of these combos, but when you see something like Bloodthirsty Conqueror, a new player will say "oh, that's so sick that a card can do that" because it's also a big, epic vampire. In a lot of ways, it's a little bit more "obviously cool," without all of the extra knowledge we happen to have about Magic.
Ari Zirulnik: From the creative side, when we get those cards, we want to represent both the new card and the card it's referencing from Magic's past; in the Bloodthirsty Conqueror example, the flavor text specifically mentions "exquisite blood." So, while my team isn't selecting or designing the cards, we are tasked with representing what they are.
Here's an idea of what I mean: For this set, the art director Don Mirren and I took a list of all of the reprints, and we went through every version of every reprint in Foundations, looked at them all, and chose the artwork that we felt would best help represent the game as good as possible.
MMORPG: Are you able to dive into the history of Magic often for sets like this, or even in general?
Ari Zirulnik: It really depends on the set, right? So for Dominaria United, we had all of that Dominaria history that you are able to dive into, but if you have something in a brand-new plane like Bloomburrow, you're instead starting things up.
For this set, it includes all of Magic. I'm a big Magic nerd, right? I've been playing since the late '90s, my first booster pack was Weatherlight, I love Magic. So it was such a joy to go look at basically every card in the game for Foundations.
For example, when we picked the basic lands, we looked at every single basic land across four hours to narrow everything down. I thought "what says 'childhood' to me?" and Rebecca Guay's land art was the answer.
MMORPG: The Starter Collection and the "shoebox" analogy really stuck out during the preview panel. What went into the design process for that product specifically?
Klomparens: The "shoebox" analogy was sort of our guiding star. If you're familiar with the Cube format, I ran the Vintage Cubes for Magic Online for a long time, I'm very passionate in that side of the community, and I got to flex a lot of those muscles with this Starter Collection to say "OK, how many different dec cks can you build with this?" It's a little shy of 400 cards – 387 including basic lands, to be exact – but there's a lot of optimization. You'll see exactly how many cards you'll need to make mono-white, red and white, and red, black, and white, and all of these happen to work.
There are, I think, 17 different decks you can build right out of the box without being too "hand-holdy." You can still customize a little bit, but we tried to make sure it really did give you the opportunity to fall in love with any card in there, while also giving you something to do with that card.
McCall: The basic idea behind it is simple: Everyone learns how to play Magic at some point. Someone came to you with a deck or singles and said "here, these are Magic cards," and eventually you thought "hey, I like Magic cards. I'm interested, and I wanted to build my own deck."
Problem is, then you go to your local store and say "I want some Magic cards," and the clerk says, "OK, which set do you want to buy" and you think "oh jeez…" Or, if you've only played with a starter kit or something, someone may ask what color you like and you say "I've only ever played with red cards, and I don't know if I want more red cards or if I want to try something else."
The Starter Collection, then, is for folks who say "I want to have my own cards that I can go through and organize and look at in my own time," and then use that to try out different wants to play Magic.
In terms of picking which cards to go in, it was basically like, "hey, how can we get the most cards that are sweet in the box?" The box is literally full; we cannot add any more cards to the box. We tried; at the end, I thought it would be good to have a few more tokens than what's already inside, and I was told flat out "nope, box is full." When you open it up, it is literally full and bursting with cards for all types of decks you want to build, with all of the lands you need… but also all of the cards in there are sweet.
One of the problems a new player first discovering Magic might have is when a friend says, "here, you can have all of the commons that were left over from my last draft" or whatever. Not all of those cards are fun or coherent to play with. Not here, this box has around 75 rares, it has all of the Llanowar Elves you'll need, all of the Opts, one of each Temple so the mana fixing is good, etc.
There are a few Commander cards in there too, in case a new player's friends also play Commander – we are selling this collection as a way to build whatever deck you need, and at some point, you may want to play a Commander deck, so you should have a Sol Ring. If a friend asks what they should get, you can honestly say the Starter Collection, because it includes staples for multiple formats.
MMORPG: As the majority of the cards in the Starter Collection are included in Standard legality, what thought went into including deck types that new players could use without accidentally creating a strong new meta deck that could invade the format after launch?
Carmen Klomparens: Ultimately, we want players to take something like the Starter Collection and actually speak the same "language" as other players at Friday Night Magic. You want them to have the shared vocabulary so they aren't just a "new" Magic player, they're a "Magic player." What that means is giving them stuff like Maelstrom Pulse, Lyra Dawnbringer, Darksteel Colossus, and other cards that are punching a little above the weight class of what some might expect from brand-new players.
They are strong cards that will show up, but we are confident that they're not always going to be the meta-defining, most powerful cards in Standard. They're just going to be things that give you tools to build a deck and be able to actually win some games at FNM instead of just politely going 0-4 while your opponents crush you with Duskmourn cards or whatever.
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MMORPG: Regarding the Mana Foil treatment, we noticed that all five symbols are included on the mana foil, as opposed to just the colors represented on the card. Was there any consideration for only including the right colors, or did that prove to be too complicated?
Max McCall: We did look at that, but the problem we ran into was making sure every card is printed correctly, with the right pips represented, becomes extremely challenging. We print billions of Magic cards, but most of the time it's less complicated than it sounds, because we're printing multiple copies of the same card, in the same format, with no changes to the layout.
Once you're layering the foil on top of the card, though, the act of making sure they match every time would have to be checked manually by hand; otherwise we'd run into situations like "Hey, why does this Twinflame Tyrant have Island markers on it?" Another problem there is, if one of those cards slips out of alignment, all of the cards that will follow it on that press will be jacked up too.
Ari Zirulnik: There are so many permutations too, right? We'd have to have multicolored permutations on top of the monocolored, and then there's colorless cards, how would they be represented?
I do think the current version still reflects the overall goal of the set being a celebration of all of Magic: "Here's all the colors! They're all here!"
MMORPG: Is there a particular card in the set that you're excited to see in (or back in) the Standard meta?
Ari Zirulnik: Llanowar Elves! They're back, my boys! My favorites of all time; there's nothing better than casing a three-drop on turn two.
Max McCall: My hope is Ball Lightning comes back. [All laugh.] A man can dream!
Carmen Klomparens: People seem stoked about it though, with the newLeyline of Resonance, you can cast Turn Inside Out on a Ball Lightning and then copy it so you get two things.
McCall: So lightning can strike twice in the same spot? [All laugh.]
Klomparens: For me, I don't really know what Mystical Teachings is going to do, I just think that's a really cool card that I don't think has aged the best in terms of power level, it's just fun to resolve. I do think it's going to be the type of thing where you're scrolling some Magic Online decklist dump, or someone's social media account where they did pretty well with the fun of one-of Mystical Teachings, and you're going to say, "yeah, that's the good stuff."
