Getting someone (or yourself) into Magic can be a daunting task – Magic has been around a long time and has a reputation as a complicated game with tons of rules. And while that may be absolutely true, that doesn’t mean it needs to be hard to learn! There’s a lot of products designed specifically to ease people into the game and we’ve got them all grouped together in our Gift Guide for easy choosing.
Just Getting Started
Now is a great time to be a new Magic player – Foundations, a set focused on bringing Magic back to its roots and setting the stage for the rest of the decade when it comes to Constructed play, just came out, and it has two products made specifically for those just getting started.
First, the Beginner Box. Designed to get people playing as fast as possible, the Beginner Box is the perfect place for anyone to start. The Box provides a ton of replayability while also taking a lot of the mental burden of the game – specifically deckbuilding – and making it easy, quick, and fun. Of course, once people have the basics down, the next question is simple: where do we go from here?
The Starter Collection is pretty much exactly what it claims to be – a way to kickstart your Magic collection, giving players a fixed set of over 350 cards and some packs to boot! With enough basic lands included to build decks of any color combination, and with Foundations being key to the next five years of Constructed Magic, this is the perfect gift for the budding deckbuilder.
Next Steps
So now that your collection is started, what next?
Jumpstart! Featuring the same basic gameplay as the Beginner Box (take two packs, shuffle them together, and you have a playable Limited-sized deck. With more variation and mechanical depth than what is included with the Beginner Box, this is the perfect way to continue to hone skills while also growing a collection.
Or maybe you want to get someone into Commander once they’ve learned the basics. Well, the Preconstructed Commander Decks that come out with nearly every new Standard-Legal set are a great place to start, especially with the last few years’ decks riding a wave of fun, clever designs. We have a selection of Precons available in the Gift Guide, with even more scattered around cardkingdom.com.
Your First Deck’s First Home
Of course, now that cards and decks are being accumulated, the next step is figuring out how to protect those cards and decks. Let’s start with some sleeves.
Dragon Shield Matte sleeves are the gold standard, balancing durability, ease of use, and smoothness of shuffle. Coming in a wide variety of colors, and even a few different art styles, Dragon Shield are fantastic sleeves to slide your first deck into. And they even come in Commander-friendly packs of 100!
For solid, dependable deck protection, the Ultimate Guard Boulder is hard to beat. Tried and true, the Boulder does exactly what it needs to – keeps your deck together and safe from drops and spills. Coming once more in a wide variety of colors, sizes and styles, there’s a Boulder out there for everyone.
If you want a little more flair (and a compartment for holding dice or counters), the Ultra PRO Satin Tower is a great place to start. Easily accommodating even a double-sleeved Commander deck, the Satin Tower (again in a wide variety of colors and styles) is a good next-=step of a deck box.
Accessories Make Things Easy
Ah, Accessories. None of these are strictly necessary to play, yet accessories make the experience of play so much nicer and smoother. Let’s dive in.
The Foundations Click Wheel Life Counter makes keeping track of your life total easy, and takes up less room than either dice or pen and paper. While keeping a written record of life totals is highly recommended at competitive events, for more casual tables, the Click Wheel Life Counter makes life easy.
Magic games can end up needing a lot of tokens, and tracking down the right tokens and keeping them with the right deck all the time can be a pain. Enter the Card Kingdom Dry Erase Tokens (from Infinitokens)! Usable with any dry erase marker and easily erasable, these tokens are some of the most useful things we’ve ever carried in our store. Once you start using them, you’ll never want to play without them again.
For the beginning (or even veteran) Commander players out there, we present the Card Kingdom Command Center V2. Designed to help keep track of all the extra information required in a game of Commander, everything you need to know about the current game is just a quick glance away. While using it for a bit will help make you into a Commander player who doesn’t need to play with the Command Center, you won’t want to!
End Step
We hope you have a happy holiday season, especially knowing that Card Kingdom is here to help you with any Magic you may need. Don’t forget to check out all of our Gift Guide articles for 2024 to make sure you get the most out what we have to offer. The end of the year is fast approaching so get those orders in as soon as you can to get them to you in time for whatever celebration you may have! Happy holidays from us to you!