I got to try some of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering’s Foundations set during a recent visit to Wizards of the Coast’s office in Seattle. Serving partly as a long-term core for Wizards’ new aspirations for the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Standard format, and partly as a fresh learn-to-play sy🐬stem for new players among the group of 15 journalists there, I think I may be the most qualified person to talk about it.

I definitely didn’t feel that way when I got there. When the event started we were introduced to a panel of some of WoTC’s top creative minds, including head designer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mark Rosewater, and the attendees were asked to introduce ourselves too. One by one each person talked about their decades of experience as M🐭agic players and their accomplishments in the game, and when it was finally my turn to speak I felt embarrassed, because I’ve only played one game of Magic in my life.

I’m a competitive D🐓isney Lorcana player and a lifelong Pokemon TCG collector. I have thousands of hours logged in Hearthstone and I love Marvel Snap, but Magic has completely passed me by. I didn’t grow up with Magic-playing friends, and as I got older it just felt too big, too daunti☂ng to get into.

The only thing I could say was that I have a nice little collection of Secret Lair, which I like to buy anytime I see an artist or theme I really like (the Junji Ito collection is my favorite). I went to the event to learn more about the upcoming horror-themed Duskmourn set and gather info for our Magic team (who do fantastic work covering Magic here, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:you should check it out), but for the first few hours, I couldn’t help feeling out of pl༺ace and behind the curve.

But then fine folks at Wizards broke out the Foundations Beginner Boxes, and I was suddenly filled with a powerful sense of purpose. The other attendees are all fantastic writers that are fully capable of evaluating a learn-to-play experience, but I was the only one there, and perhaps one of the first people ever, that was learninꦦg to play Magic through Foundations for the very first time.

What Is Magic: The Gathering Foundations?

As mentioned, Foundations is filling two roles in Magic. The first is as a regular set that provides a basis for the game’s main format, Standard. By featuring a ton of reprints of much-needed cards, and by not rotating out of the fo🌠rmat until 2029 at the earliest, Foundations is meant to plug the cracks in the format regular sets like Bloomburrow and Duskmourn: House of Horror can’t.

The other, more important goal for the set is to be a hopping-on point for new players like me, much like the Core sets of yesteryear. With new products desi𒀰gned specifically for teaching you how to play the game without fumbling through starter decks or the Arena tutorial, it was this that I had the most interest in.

I love learn-to-play experiences, and I wonder if I had had access to something like Foundations when I was younger if I would have grown up to be a master of Magic today. I recently 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:reviewed Locana’s learn-to-play box, G♕ateway , which teaches you the game by slowly introducing new mechanics across several games, asking you to complete a checklist ♛of non-competitive tasks along the way. Foundations takes an entirely separate approach by giving you a scripted game play, guided by a booklet that walks you every turn, step by step.

If you’ve ever seen the old Spellsling𝔉er kits released a few years ago, these feel like an expanded version of those.

Each player is given their own walkthrough that provides step by step instruction on how to play each tu🔯rn. One player uses a Cat-themed deck full of lions and lion-people called Leonin, while the other players used a Vampire-themed deck, full of tricky enchantments and life-stealing effects. A classic heroes vs. villains set up. Who knew Magic’s brand of fantasy could be so straightforward and approa🐎chable?

Foundations Has A Unique Take On Learn-To-Play

At first, I found it a bit awkward to play a scripted card game. My opponent and I, Screen Rant’s Willaim Cennamo, had our heads down reading big chunks of text that explained which actions to take each turn, and it felt weird trying to read and digest information while sitting across from someone waiting for me to do something. Eventually we found a good pace where each of us would make our moves and summarize the text to the other person. Given more time, it probably would have been useful to swap decks and play the game again, even if it would have been t🔴he exact same game.

I say that because the explanations in the book are incredibly thorough and helpful. Not only do they tell you the optimum play to make each turn, they explain exactly why you do it that way. Tabletop instruction manuals are notoriously bad at this. R🅺ule books, even really good ones, will teach you all the rules of the game in ꦇa digestible way, but they won’t teach you the strategy of playing the game.

It’s not enough to know what 𒉰you can do, you also need to know why you would do it. If you play through Foundations Beginner Box correctly and really digest all of the information in the book, you’ll come out with a strong sense of not just the rules of Magic, but how it's meant to be plaꦅyed too.

One of my favorite featu▨res of the Foundations guide is the diagram at the end of each turn that shows you what the board state should be so that you can make sure you’ve done everything correctly. There’s no chance the game will ever get out of sync with the book, which is important because you have to do exactly what the book tells you to do for it 𒀰to work.

We went back and forth taking turns, following the instruction, and absorbing the bits of details that explain the strategy behind those actions, for quite a few turns. Eventually both of us had dropped down to five or six health, and suddenly, the tutorial ended, and we were instructed to finish the game on our own. It was a nerve-wracking moment. I’d been pedaling along with dad’s h♓and on my back, and then all of a sudden with no warning his hand was gone, and I was riding the bike all by myself.

Going from a fully scripted game🍌 to playing totally on my own with no warning was jarring, but I managed to pull out the W (I think my more experienced opponent let me win). While I appreciate the way Lorcana Gateway eases you in by slowly adding new cards and mechanics to a deck, I’m also impressed by how fast the Beginner Box teaches you how to play. By combining the chore of reading a rule book with the back-and-forth action of actually playing the game, It’s a surprisingly effective crash course in Magic that left me with a lot of confidence to pick up a deck and start playing. Maybe not totally on my own, but I can at least get started.

The Foundations Beginner Box Goes Beyond Learn-To-Play

Once you finish the tutorial game, the Box 💜offers a large selection of 20-card packs to play with. You can pick any two out of the box, shuffle them together, and start playing games. This is identical to Magic’s beloved Jumpstart booster packs, but my reference point is Smash Up, a ‘shufflebuilding’ card game that works the same way, and one of my favorites to bust out on game night.

Adding replayability to the Beginner Box through these Jumpstart decks is a huge selling point for me because it means the box (which is fairly large for a TCG prod⛎uct thanks to the game board) won’t sit on my shelf unused once I no longer need to learn-to-play. The selection of themes and mechanics in the additional decks also act as an additional step towards mastering Magic and learning more about its world and story.

As a true Magic noob, I got a lot out of playing Foundations. Its approach to 🧸tutorial feels like something you’d find in a video game, but with clearer, deeper explanatio♎ns about why you’re doing the things you’re doing, that help speed up the learning process greatly.

Foundations provides a much-neede🔯d baseline for playing Magic that gave me the confidence to play with preconstructed🦩 decks, and maybe even eventually to build a deck of my own. If they decided to re-release this thing next year with a Marvel edition when the Marvel Universes Beyond comes out, I think Magic might just take over the world.