Building a Foundation in Magic The Gathering

Foundations is a set that’s all about making a new baseline for Magic. Cards from the set are going to be Standard-legal through 2029. So at least for the next half-decade, this set will be a good starting point to use for anyone. As the spiritual successor to the Core Sets, with a simpler design philosophy than other Standard-legal sets, Foundations is also perfect for people looking to get into Magic for the first time…or get their friends into it. 

Foundations even comes with two brand-new products designed specifically to get people into different parts of the game. The Beginner Box, which gets folks playing actual Magic and learning the rules and mechanics with minimal fuss; and the the Starter Collection, which helps ease people into the deck-building side of things.  

Let’s start with the appropriately named Beginner Box. 

The Foundations Beginner Box 

First, let’s run down what exactly you’ll find in a Beginner Box: 

• 10 Jumpstart Packs 
• 2 Reference Cards 
• 1 Reference Guide Booklet 
• 2 How to Play Booklet Guides
• 2 Gameboard Playmats 
• 2 Spindown life counters 

Let’s focus for now on those Jumpstart packs. The packs found in the Beginner Box are different from Foundations Jumpstart (J25) packs. These packs contain 20 cards each from the main Foundations set, and no cards from J25. The packs are predetermined and designed for Beginner play – all you need to do is pick any two packs, shuffle them together, and you’ll have a functional 40-card deck.  

That ease-of-use runs through everything in the Box. Back in the day of Core Sets every year, there was the Deck Builder’s Toolkit. Something of a mix of the Beginner Box and the Starter Collection – Kits contained a few Booster packs, an assortment of Commons and Uncommons from the set, enough basic lands to get you going, a how-to-play booklet, and a deck-building booklet.  

Notably, the Beginner Box comes with two How-to-Play Booklets and 2 Reference Cards, in addition to the playmats which help you orient the playing space. That doubling up of resources makes things much more user-friendly for those just starting out. Both players can be referencing those guides without passing them back and forth. It’s a nice attention to detail that smooths the experience considerably. 

The modularity of the Jumpstart packs creates a good amount of replayability in the Box, as you can reshuffle the packs together in endless (well, 40) different configurations. That replayability is important, as a large part of getting the rules for a game like Magic to stick is repetition. While that Jumpstart modularity is by now likely quite familiar to veterans of the game, it’s hard to overstate how effective it can be for novices just starting out in Magic. 

So, the Beginner Box has folks playing. What’s next? 

The Foundations Starter Collection 

If the Beginner Box gets you playing, the Starter Collection gets you building. This largely predetermined batch of cards provides you with all the tools you’ll need to start creating Standard deck entirely on your own. What do those tools look like? 

• 350+ Magic: The Gathering cards (in a fixed set, and includes 22 Foil Cards) 
• 3 Magic: The Gathering Foundations Play Boosters 
• 2 Reference Cards 
• 13 Tokens 
• 95 Basic Lands, including 10 full art lands 
• 1 How to Build Your Deck Booklet 
• 1 Click Wheel 

Given that Foundations is meant to form the basis of the Standard format until the turn of the decade, this does seem like a hyper-efficient option to use for getting a collection going if you are just getting started as a player. The booklet that comes with the Collection contains both tutorials and expert recommendations to work off of, so you aren’t just given the cards and thrown completely into the deep end. 

And from there, once you know how to play the game, build your decks, and have a collection started…well, hard to call yourself anything but a Magic player.  

A First End Step 

Whether you’re considering a Beginner Box, Starter Collection, or both, for either yourself or a friend, we’ve got you covered. Magic is a vast, wild, and fun place to play, and I’m glad that Wizards is putting a rael effort toward making its notoriously difficult on-ramp a little easier to navigate.