Hello, and welcome to the first week of Magic: The Gathering Foundations previews. Today and next week, I'll talk a bit about the history of introductory Magic products, introduce the Foundations Set Design team, tell the story of Foundations's design, explain the full suite of Foundations products, and show off two card previews, one reprint and one new-to-Magic card. That's a lot, so let's get started.

"Your greatest weakness is your greatest strength pushed too far" is a favorite saying of mine. Magic's strength is its depth. Magic offers you over 27,000 unique cards to choose from. That depth provides customizability, variance, and strategy. It keeps the game from getting boring because there's always something else to explore. But the depth comes at a cost, what we in design call a "barrier to entry."

A barrier to entry is how hard it is for someone who knows nothing about the game to learn it. How long does it take to go from absolutely no knowledge of a game to enough knowledge to play it? I'm not talking about being good at a game, just knowing enough that you can play it. Here are the core things we've learned people need to know:

The concept of what a trading card game is
Most games come with all the components you need. When you open a Monopoly box, for example, you get the board, the cards, the "money," and the game pieces. That's everything you need to play. If you go to your friend's house and play with their copy of Monopoly, you'll encounter the same pieces. For most people, that's how a game works. The idea that Magic is bigger than a box, where you collect some of the game pieces and choose which ones to play with, is a radical idea, and that's something we have to get across to players early on.

The basic card types
A new player doesn't need to know every card type, but in their first game, we need to at least expose them to lands, creatures, and sorceries. Instants, artifacts, and enchantments shouldn't be too far behind. We can take our time with planeswalkers, and there's no need to rush into battles or kindreds.

The basic zones
We need players to understand their library, hand, graveyard, and the battlefield. We can take our time to get to the exile zone, a little more time to get to the stack, and the command zone isn't necessary until you teach someone about Commander. Most of the core zones are made easier to understand through a player's knowledge of other card games.

How lands work and how spells are cast
This is a crucial one, and one of the hardest to teach, as it doesn't come intuitively for most players. The key to teaching this aspect of Magic is getting them to see the connection between lands and the mana costs of spells.

The five colors of Magic
The five colors are, interestingly, the opposite of spell casting. Players understand it easily, but it's not integral to learning how to play, other than understanding how colors in mana costs work. The reason you want to introduce it early on is because it's one of the most-compelling elements of the game.

The steps of a turn
This involves learning the order and process of untapping, drawing a card, playing your cards, and attacking. The player doesn't need to know all the details, such as what's a step and what's a phase, but we do want them to get a sense of the organic flow of a turn. When things tap or untap is another common pain point for beginners.

How attacking and damage works
This is the third area where new players struggle. They really want their creatures to attack their opponent's creatures, not their opponent. You don't need to get into most of the details, but you do want them to understand how creatures make the game end and the basics of attacking and blocking.

If you can master these components, you'll know enough to play Magic with a little bit of guidance.

Beyond the complexity of a game's components lies another major question: How intimidating is the game for new players to learn? Chess, for example, isn't that difficult to learn. It has six unique pieces, and the basic rules fit on a sheet of paper. But there's a lot more to a game than just the nuts and bolts of how to play. Designers have to think about how people who don't play the game perceive the game. Chess is thought of as this highly intellectual game, which makes learning it intimidating.

Magic is both complicated and intimidating. Over 30 years of cards and a comprehensive rules book that is inches thick makes learning it pretty daunting. At the time of this article being published, I just celebrated my 29th anniversary working at Wizards of the Coast in Magic R&D. For all those years, we have been trying to figure out how best to teach new players. It's a challenging task, a fact that's made clear by how hard it's been to do well.

When I first got to Wizards, we tried something called the ARC system.

The idea behind it was that it was a simplified version of Magic. There were just three colors rather than five and just four different card types: the equivalent of land, creatures, sorceries, and instants (though they could only be cast during combat). We made three different versions of it. One had an original story made by famous comic artist Jim Lee called C-23. The others were based on television shows: Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. This was our earliest stab at something like Universes Beyond.

When the ARC system failed, our next attempt was something we called Portal. It was another attempt at a simplified version of Magic, but this time a little closer to the actual game. Portal used all five colors, complete with the Magic mana symbols, and had card with the Magic card back. Some of the cards were even reprints from existing Magic sets. The Portal cards were designed so they could be shuffled into a normal deck and work, but the core of Portal was a simplified version of Magic. There were only three cards types: land, creature, and sorcery, although some of the sorceries acted like instants. Some of the terminology was changed. Blocking, as an example, was called intercepting.

While all the cards could work in a Magic deck, the new cards weren't legal in any Constructed format, creating a divide between Portal players and Magic players. Years later, we would make all Portal cards Eternal legal. There were three Portal sets: Portal, Portal Second Age, and Portal Three Kingdoms, the last of which was designed for the Asian market and based on a famous historical novel called Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Among other things, the set is famous for changing flying into an ability called horsemanship.

The next attempt at a beginner product was called Starter. Rather than being a separate product with different terminology, Starter was a subset of Magic cards, albeit ones that focused on the simpler side of the game. There were lands, creatures, sorceries, and a small sampling of instants. Creatures had some evergreen abilities but no tap abilities. Starter had a boxed product that acted as a tutorial as well as randomized boosters. I believe this is the first product that adopted the idea of a turn-by-turn tutorial. Both players are given decks in a specific order and were then taught by a booklet that walked them through each turn of the prearranged game. This turn-by-turn tutorial was one of our biggest discoveries in how to teach Magic. There were two different Starter products: Starter 1999 and Starter 2000.

Beginning with Seventh Edition, the Starter Box was incorporated into core sets. In addition to the normal first-game tutorial, Seventh Edition came with a CD-ROM that allowed you to play one of the decks against the other. One of my jobs for Seventh Edition was to write the logic behind the code of how the computer played its deck. I prioritized what order the computer should play its cards and then walked through the logic of what order the computer would make use of the cards. For example, if the card was going to destroy a creature, I gave the program a priority list of what to destroy. It wasn't exactly modern AI, but it did a good job of giving a beginner a fun game. The CD-ROM allowed a new player to play for a while by themselves, figuring out basic strategies at their own pace, before playing with other people. In later years, this would morph into digital tutorials.

We tried numerous things with various core sets and starter products over the years. We experimented with different layouts for our teaching manuals. Pictures, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned out to be instrumental. We tried different preconstructed decks. We used various mediums to teach, including incorporating more digital teaching tools. The biggest leap forward in this area was a video game called Duels of the Planeswalkers. It released in 2009 for video game consoles and demonstrated some of the huge advantages that digital methods had for teaching Magic.

It allowed a player to learn at their own pace, gave them the ability to have more control of how they learned, and most importantly, let them learn without another human judging them. The computer was patient and kept to itself if you took a while learning something new. Also, the fact that it was available on consoles let people play on their televisions in the comfort of their home.

The next big leap in teaching technology was Jumpstart. Jumpstart started as a hackathon project run by Doug Beyer. The impetus behind it was to find a way to make deck construction simpler. One of the things we'd learned over the years was that a major barrier to learning Magic was deck building. We could make preconstructed decks, but our goal was to find a way to let players have some input into deck building without it being too onerous. Doug's pitch (based on various ideas that had been explored) was a system where you had the choice between a variety of half-decks. You could choose any two and they would go together to make a deck.

While simple in concept, this idea proved to be a lot more complex in execution. How exactly do you make a bunch of half-decks that all go together, especially when each half-deck has its own mechanical theme? Even once we figured out the mechanics of it all, figuring out how to print such a product was a huge undertaking. It also required us to work with our printers to do things we'd never done before.

Jumpstart and Jumpstart 2022