The Foundations Era of Magic has arrived. I recently had a chance to sit down with the Beginner’s Box to see if it had the potential to teach a new player Magic: The Gathering. My 21-year-old son first learned to play Magic when he was 11. While he didn’t fully understand all of the nuance and mechanics at 11, he could grasp the basic concepts of Magic and has grown in the last 10 years into a formidable opponent and an intelligent deckbuilder. My other son is 11 years old now, but due to his ADHD, I was concerned that he might struggle to learn Magic as easily as my older son did, so I knew the Beginner’s Box was going to be put to the test.
The Beginner’s Box comes with 10 20-card jumpstart packs, two spin-down dice, two playmats with marked play zones, and a guide to walk players through their first game of Magic: The Gathering. Two of the jumpstart packs are intended to walk through a game of Magic.
The instructions say not to shuffle them but does give a list of the card order in case they are shuffled by mistake or, in my case, they weren’t in the right order out of the box. Each player takes a guide that tells them what cards they will pull and how they should play each turn for the first five turns. With only 20 cards, the life counters are set to 10, allowing the game to continue an extra two turns after the guide runs out.
In his very first game of Magic: The Gathering, my son did not win, but he learned quite a bit about the order of a turn, how to move through the combat phase, how to cast spells, and how to track life. As a Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon player, he struggled at first with combat because he so desperately wanted to attack creatures directly instead of me. This didn’t surprise me as both I and my older son had similar struggles when we first learned how to play Magic.
After that initial game, we took the other jumpstart packs and started playing games by combining two jumpstarts to make a playable 40-card deck. We adjusted the life counter to 20 and played several games. Each jumpstart pack had a focus like Healing, which was white, or Wizards, which was blue. We learned together that not all jumpstart packs were created equal. Some of the packs, like the red Inferno pack all but guaranteed defeat against the other more powerful packs.
We spent time mixing and matching the packs so that my son could learn and understand that some card interactions were stronger than others. He learned early on that he really enjoyed playing with the green Primal pack, which he will only refer to now as “playing Big Boys.” Because there was a lopsided level of power amongst the packs, he also learned which jumpstart packs to avoid. In this way, his power of reasoning was higher than I honestly gave him credit for.
I wanted him to learn without having to reveal his hand to me but at times that was hard because I couldn’t tell if I was winning games because he was drawing poorly or if he was not understanding what cards he should play. To remedy this, I recruited my older son and my oldest friend, Magic players in their own right, to help me out. Mostly I only had access to my son who would sit with his brother and guide him into better decision-making practices. My younger son may not have learned through years of heartache and losing like the rest of us, but he learned valuable lessons about Magic cards and how important it is to cast cards in critical moments.
The most fun we had was when all four of us sat down and played a team battle. It gave my son the ability to work with a partner, and we had the ability to test more of the jumpstarts in a single game. We separated all of the jumpstart packs and rolled dice to randomly assign people the cards they were going to play with so to account for the imbalance in their power levels. Ultimately, my son and I defeated my older son and my friend. When we swung out with an eclectic army of goblins, wizards, and healing deck based creatures, the battle had been won.
At the end of the day, my son had learned the basics of Magic: The Gathering. More importantly, he had gained love for a game that he knew people in his home would want to play with him. He asks almost daily now for a game of Magic. Because of his age and because of his ADHD, we decided he would stick with the Beginner’s box for now. We’ll work on higher concepts and deck building when he’s more comfortable with the cards he already has access to. While it wasn’t perfect, Magic The Gathering Foundations’ Beginner’s Box was a complete success in teaching the basics to a new player.
Full Disclosure: A Beginner's Box was sent by Wizards of the Coast for the purposes of this review.
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