I remember back to when I first learned how to play Magic: The Gathering. My dad had just got home from a tour of duty, and we went to a small local game store right outside the front gate of the Air Force Base I lived on growing up. We went there a few times for comic books and just to kill time every so often, and I found myself infatuated with the art on one of the boxes I saw on the shelf: a Magic: The Gathering Portal Starter Kit.
My older brother was also interested in learning, so my dad bought the kit and that evening we sat at the small coffee table in our living room learning how to play Magic through the guided turns laid out in the starter kit’s rule book. I don’t remember much about the individual turns - I was 10 years old at the time, but I just remember vividly the fun I had, especially spending time with my dad.
But, I do know that this set me on my journey of playing not just Magic, but other TCGs growing up, all because that tutorial felt less like a set of instructions, but more like a learning game, more often associated with board games like Go or Chess. By guiding me through the motions of an actual game instead of throwing abstract terms at me and letting me loose, I became a semi-decent Magic player (though my family would probably disagree, considering I mostly just play Blue control decks now).
Fast-forward to 2024, and Wizards of the Coast is primed to release a product that reminded me instantly of my first foray into Magic’s multiverse: Foundations.
“We very much set out to make the best on-ramp into Magic possible,” Magic’s Game Designer, and the set lead on Foundations, Brian Hawley tells me in an interview. “One of the things that, historically, a lot f our acquisition products have done is you’ll have two decks and the tutorialization will kind of walk you through the first four or five turns of Magic. And then it just like leaves you to it. Good luck. And one of the things that we really wanted to do with Foundations is extend that path further.”
Enter the Foundations Beginner Box, a tutorial, and, in a very real way, start your collection in a box ready to go. During a visit to Wizards of the Coast during PAX 2024 last month, I actually had the chance to check out this Beginner Box in person and walk through a game with someone newer to Magic overall.
The Beginner Box is a rather large box full of Magic: The Gathering cards, from the two pre-made decks used as the teaching game to quite a few Jumpstart decks designed to be combined, shuffled up and played.
Naively, as I sat and played the first few turns and checked out the box and its contents, it seemed like a rather simple idea to put together. My reasoning was, in part, influenced by the fact that the way the tutorial in the box was laid out, it very much felt like what the team had built for Magic: The Gathering Arena, both in presentation and style.
Yet, as I asked about the lead time on a project like this, admitted I was not in fact a game designer but just played armchair designer in my articles, I was quickly disabused of this notion by Foundations Executive Producer Mac McCall.
“It was about two years,” McCall said with a chuckle at my clear naivete. He continued, “ In general, Magic’s design cycles are all about that long.”
He continued, explaining that a product such as the upcoming Beginner Box really presented some unique challenges during its design process.
“The beginner box is one of the things [that] we also started designing last year, but more hours of those months were spent devoted to things like the Beginner box relative to most other Magic sets because they’re both so new and because they need to be tested so many times to make sure all the kinks get ironed out so that we can actually release something that will actually work for its intended purpose.”
Teaching Magic Is Hard
I remember when I got back into Magic: The Gathering after what amounted to a six-year hiatus. My daughter, who was all of seven at the time, wanted to learn since we were hosting Friday Night Magic at our house with family and friends again, so we sat down to teach them how to play the game in the hopes my kid would eventually join us.
We gave my kiddo a mono-red Land Destruction-style deck to teach, mostly because we felt that the idea of “play a land, burn face” would be easy to grasp early on. Yet, as my best friend and I were teaching them how to play, my daughter wasn’t quite catching on to how things that I thought were relatively simple worked.
Things such as tapping for Mana took a few games to quite get the hang of, while reacting to instant-speed spells on the stack is still something of a foreign concept to them years later. However, on those turns where they blew up my lands and made me groan, wondering why I ever decided on this deck to teach them with, brought the largest smiles. To this day, my kid still only plays a mono-Red deck with land destruction, but I’d be lying if those early years teaching them how to play weren’t rough.
“Teaching Magic is so hard,” Max said during our interview. “Basically, the way you teach Magic is you’re like, ‘Here are all of the rules, and I can’t explain half of the rules and then you’ll get the other half. As you go, you actually have to understand everything simultaneously.’ And so explaining that to people is really challenging.”
So, to fine-tune the Beginner Box, Max explained that the team would make one, give it to players, and then watch them actually play through a game with it. From there, the team would fine-tune it by swapping cards, rewriting tutorials, and more until it was just right.
Indeed, this happened while we were testing the product at Wizards HQ. As someone who has played Magic pretty much since I was in 6th grade, the process of slowing a game down and following the directions so I could be of help to my partner was actually a challenge for me. I’m someone who loves a turn that is simply, “Land, Go.” Yet I had to partially shut part of my brain off in order to help walk through my partner, Kate Sanchez from ButWhyTho? (and part-time contributor here at the old MMORPG dot com) through the turns.
I really appreciated the fact that it felt sort of like following a video game tutorial, but on paper. The two pre-made decks, a mono-White creature deck led by Ajani and a mono-Black creature deck helmed by Liliana, were well made and by injecting the personality of two of Magic’s best characters into the process, roots the tutorial in the world.
The gameplay was rather simple, as you’d expect for a starter game. Each player played a land for the turn (the tutorial was not about to emulate the feeling of getting mana screwed for sure), while also dropping creatures to teach both attacking and blocking. The tutorial doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of first-strike damage, assigning and ordering blockers if more than one creature is put in front of an attacker - these are higher level concepts that would slow the learning down at the jump.
But, one aspect I liked about the tutorial was how it showcased you can respond to anything with an Instant-speed spell - such as destroying a creature with an Instant during combat. While it in a way introduces a more abstract theory like The Stack, it doesn’t do it in a way that would be confusing.
“In the beginner box in particular, we definitely spent a lot of time thinking about what are the concepts that somebody just really needs to understand to have fun playing Magic,” Bryan explained. “And the Stack and interacting on your opponent’s turn or in response to things is definitely a pretty important part of Magic.
“The other thing that we held pretty important is some of the concepts you can have fun playing Magic without them - it is more fun with. So something like playing an Instant in the middle of combat on your opponent’s turn is really important to having fun with Magic. Knowing you can respond to a removal spell with a combat trick to save your creature, that could probably wait until your 10th or 15th game and be totally fine.”
“I would say, like, Giant Growth is one of the things that makes Magic really fun,” Max added. “Like, we’re in combat and you surprise your opponent. And the next layer of that even like, ‘I have Lightning Bolt, so I want them to Giant Growth. Cards in the Beginner Box can facilitate that. We are teaching you about instants and how they work in combat. We’re not teaching you [that] removal spells exist and are also at Instant speed.”
Max goes on to tell me that the types of players who like those style of mind games will find that here, but states that these types of elements don’t necessarily need to be in the first few games to make them enjoyable, which is what the aim of the Beginner Box’s starter game to be.
However, it’s not like the team isn’t providing a way for that type of gameplay or learning to happen. Within each Beginner Box is a rule book that goes into detail of these high-level concepts should players look deeper into them, and the extra Jumpstart decks that the Beginner Box comes equipped with can, in fact, facilitate these types of interactions.
Keeping Magic Accessible
One key aspect to the Foundations set as a whole is that it is meant to be accessible to new players across the spectrum, whether you’re someone looking to build a Standard deck, start playing Commander with your friends, or even start to learn things like Draft or Limited formats. The Foundations set isn’t just the Beginner Box, but an entire line up of products.
Crucially, Foundations set cards, unless otherwise marked, are legal in Standard, Magic’s premiere competitive format whose legal sets rotates on a fixed cycle, until at least 2029. This ensures that investing in the set today doesn’t mean that, if you focus on Standard, your cards won’t be useable in the format within a year.
It reminds me of the old yearly Core sets, and while there are similarities here, the Core sets weren’t always the most exciting thing on the market. Foundations, though, is being built with the idea of it being a fun set all its own, and something that will stand the test of time throughout the years by comparison.
“There is definitely some similar DNA there,” Bryan tells me when asking if the approach to this set was like the Core sets of old. “They’re definitely trying to approach the same goal of [being] something that experienced players will play with, while also being something that is accessible and friendly to new players. It’s just a different approach to doing that, and one of the things that was really challenging about those sets, a lot of them in the attempt to pare complexity back as far as they did, they strip away what makes Magic fun. So a lot of those sets were just less fun than the sets around them.
“One thing that we’re approaching here is that learning Magic is hard. It’s just a complicated game with a lot of history, and we want to make that on ramp to being a Magic player smooth. But that doesn’t mean make it flat for as long as possible and then suddenly you hit a cliff. So we just focused really, really heavily on [making] it fun as quickly as possible and make people want to continue learning. That was really driving the thought behind Foundations.”
One of the constant refrains I hear from people, though, is that Magic: The Gathering is too expensive, and in some ways it really can be. Commander preconstructed decks can heavily fluctuate based on the secondary market around them, making it hard financially for some to hop into Magic’s premiere format, while building a deck that can compete at a Friday Night Magic at your local game store might cost a couple hundred dollars.
I won’t even say how much I’ve spent on Magic: The Gathering cards, but I just know if something happens to me and the life insurance doesn’t pay right away, my kid can sell them and have a pretty good nest egg for a while. Magic is a collectible card game at its core, and cards retaining value is a massive draw for many, many players.
I’m happy then that Magic: The Gathering’s Foundations set, especially the Beginner Box, doesn’t seem too expensive for the package you’re getting. Selling for $30.99 on Amazon (you can pre-order them now, as well as at your Local Game Store), there is both an entry path into playing Magic, but the start of a collection right there.
Products like the Starter Set ($59.99 on Amazon or your LGS) also offers quite a lot of value for the money, with over 350 cards from the set, as well as borderless lands, play boosters, and more. It’s an easy way to build a small collection to build your first deck from, and while it might not compete with a high-level Azorious Control or Izzet Phoenix deck across the table from you, it’s a great place to get your bearings and learn the game before investing even more into the ecosystem.
Many of the cards are also meant for Commander play, which is the format many Magic: The Gathering players end up gravitating towards. Many staples such as Sol Ring and Command Tower will find themselves printed in Foundations to help spur along those singleton deck builds and get players to shuffle up and play more games.
The idea here isn’t to create an environment that doesn’t feel like you can stick around and play, but instead ease players into Magic: The Gathering and give them the tools to branch out from there, and I kind of wish something like this existed when I taught my daughter how to play years ago.
Maybe then I wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of another Stone Rain or Obliterate each time we play.
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