Starting with a Good Foundations, Part 2

Last week, I began my series on the creation of Foundations. I introduced the Set Design team, showed off two preview cards, explained the history of products focused on teaching Magic to beginners, and started telling the story of Foundations's design. Today, I will finish that story and introduce you to the four major products in the release, walking through what each has to offer.

When I left off last week, I explained that Bryan Hawley and his team realized that there were two key lessons for teaching beginners, concepts that were the core of Foundations's design. I promised to walk through those two lessons in today's article.

The Foundations Beginner Box

The first big lesson we learned was the need for what we call "pathing." We would create a product for a new player to play with in their first few games. Great! The end goal was for them to go and play with their friends who already play Magic. The problem with that is there's a huge gap between "I've played a few games and have a general sense of what I'm doing" and "I'm a weekly Magic player." Foundations gives that new player a path from their first game ever to their hundredth game.

The first step is the tutorial game. It's the part of the learning process we've spent the most time on. Each player has a preordered deck along with a booklet that walks them through their first game turn by turn. That allows us to control the order they learn things and space that out accordingly. This tutorial is in the first product in our Foundations line-up. This product would become the Foundations Beginner Box. It was the first design Bryan and his team worked on.

The next task was to figure out the next step after the Beginner Box. This is an area that we failed to execute on in the past. We'd teach people how to play and then just leave them to figure out how to get from the shallow end of the Magic pool to the deep end.

The next step had to be structured enough to give those new players guidance but open-ended enough to let them explore. The solution to this was Jumpstart. Technically, Jumpstart deck-building technology. Jumpstart is the simplest form of deck building. Your sole decision is to pick two halves of your deck, then shuffle them together. You can start playing immediately. What if the Foundations Beginner Box was a collection of carefully selected Jumpstart packs, each with enough cards to support half of a deck?

The Set Design team figured out what these packs needed to do:

Introduce All the Colors

The Magic color pie is the foundation of the game, both in its flavor and in its mechanics. If we want to introduce the players to the coolest elements of Magic, we want to expose them to the color pie right out the gate. That meant we wanted to make sure there was at least one half of a deck in each color. In the end, the team chose to have two of each color, ten in total. Since each half of the deck is 20 cards, that means the Foundations Beginner Box comes with a total of 200 cards. In addition to the 20-card packs and tutorial booklets, the product also comes with playmats, dice, counters, and tokens. It's everything you need to play your first games.

Show Off Cool Magic Themes

One of the strengths of Magic is the ability for the player to customize their own deck. Players can pick and choose between a huge number of themes based on flavor, mechanics, or both. The deck themes would be another opportunity to show off a key aspect of Magic. The Set Design team chose ten themes, two for each color, that highlighted aspects of the game that we knew were popular with new players.

Here are the ten themes of the Foundations Beginner Box:

• White: Cats and Healing
• Blue: Wizards and Pirates
• Black: Vampires and Undead
• Red: Goblins and Inferno
• Green: Elves and Primal

These themes were carefully chosen based on the data we've collected over the years about what themes most resonant with players. It was also important to show a diversity of themes to help reinforce that Magic is a game that provides the player with a lot of choices for what to play.

Demonstrate the Idea of Mixing Themes

Another one of Magic's strengths is its synergy. An advantage of trading card games is that there are a lot of open-ended game pieces that can get stronger when mixed with other game pieces. Learning about how you, the player, can find these synergies is a big part of what makes the game fun. The fact that the themes in the Beginner Box allow a new player to sample that is a huge boon. It's another reason that Jumpstart and its related products are such strong teaching tools. The idea of mixing and matching is baked into them.

Reveal the Variety of Play

These 20-card packs also show the vast possibilities of trading card games, homing in on the idea that mixing and matching different components allows for a variety of play. For example, with the ten packs included in the Beginner Box, you can mix and match them to make 45 different decks. That gives a new player a lot of play value out of one box.

Once the Set Design team figured out that the Foundations Beginner Box would contain ten 20-card packs, they realized that they could use two of them for the tutorial. They ended up choosing the mono-white Cats theme and the mono-black Vampires theme. These two were chosen because the cards included did the best job for the tutorial and the themes seemed beginner friendly. Each pack has a Planeswalker on the front theme card who acts as the face of the deck in the tutorial booklet. The Cat deck's Planeswalker is Ajani, and the Vampire deck's Planeswalker is Liliana. The tutorial has each player start with an ordered deck and then walks you turn by turn through a game, stopping to explain key elements of gameplay.

After you play your tutorial game, you can shuffle the decks for the first time and play again. Once you're comfortable with that, the Foundations Beginner Box has eight other 20-card packs. You can grab another pack and mix it with your tutorial deck. You can then continue mixing and matching any of the ten half-decks with one another. Every Foundations Beginner Box includes the same deck themes. This experience can continue for as long as the player needs to get a handle on the basic gameplay.

Foundations Jumpstart and the Foundations Starter Collection

The Foundations Set Design team then had to answer the question of what would be next. As I said above, our philosophy wasn't just to teach a new player and run but to create a full path that would get them from being a non-player to a regular Magic player. To do this, they decided they needed to create three distinct products, each with a different path a new player can take.

The first path is Foundations Jumpstart. The Foundations Beginner Box is basically a new-player Jumpstart experience, meaning that a beginner would have a rudimentary understanding of how the system works. This makes for an easy transition to a full Jumpstart product. The big difference being the Beginner Box and Foundations Jumpstart box is random.

Foundations Jumpstart works like both previous Jumpstart products. There are 46 possible booster themes. There are 20 themes with four variations, meaning the card lists are slightly different. There are fifteen rare themes, each with two variants. Finally, there are eleven mythic rare themes, with only a single version. In total, there are 121 different possible half-deck lists among the 46 themes.

There are 56 new-to-Magic cards in Foundations Jumpstart, meaning cards only found in this product. Each theme has at least one new-to-Magic card, with some having more than one. Each booster comes with a legendary creature, with one or more in each theme. Some of the legendary creatures are new designs and some are reprints, but each theme's highlighted legendary creature has anime-inspired artwork. There are also a bunch of reprints that get new art.

Each of the 46 themes has its own name. Some are straightforward, like Angels or Ninjas. Some hint at what to expect, like Surprise! or Nefarious. Some are just playful like Of the Coast or Giddyap. Most of the Jumpstart Boosters are monocolor. Players can open up Foundations Jumpstart Boosters and choose what two themes to put together, or open them blindly and shuffle, experiencing the new themes as they play.

The Foundations Jumpstart path is for new players who are enjoying the Foundations Beginner Box but aren't yet ready for deck building. Each box of Foundations Jumpstart comes with 24 Jumpstart Boosters. This allows a new player many hours of mixing and matching. Foundations Jumpstart has a total of 780 cards that can be opened in Jumpstart Boosters.

The second path is the Foundations Starter Collection. This is a single product with over 370 cards. The contents are non-randomized, meaning every person who opens it will get the exact same cards. This collection of cards was carefully selected to do several things:

Encourage Deck Building

We wanted players to be able to build their own decks, so there are over fifteen themes woven into the cards to allow full decks to be built out of it, including a bunch of themes that are viable in Standard. There's even the ability to build a five-color, 100-card Commander deck.

Promote Magic's Potential for Depth

We didn't want this to be a box of simplified commons, so there's depth to the cards selected. There are cards of all colors and rarities, including some of the greatest hits from throughout Magic. There are staples from Standard, Pioneer, Modern, and Commander.

Provide Players with Key Cards

We wanted the Starter Collection to have a lot of useful cards, so it was built to give the player a lot of agency as a deck builder. There are pieces of iconic decks, nostalgic staples, and core cards.

Showcase a Wide Variety of Play Styles

The card pool was selected to show off the variety of what Magic has to offer. For example, to give a sense of how multicolor cards affect your deck-building decisions, the card pool has traditional multicolor cards, hybrid cards, and monocolor cards with off-color activations.

The idea of this second path was to help players dive head first into deck construction. The goal of the Foundations Starter Collection is to take a player from their first ten games to the first 100 games. An integral part of starting to play Magic is having a friend with a shoebox of awesome leftover cards to build out of, so we wanted to make sure every player had the ability to acquire one of those. This collection of cards pulls no punchesand provides a new player with a peek into the history of Magic. The Starter Collection gives those players the tools they need to start building decks.

The Foundations Main Set and Play Boosters

The third path is the main set of Foundations. It has 271 cards, plus 20 basic lands. Around half of the cards are new designs. As for our usual Standard-legal releases, it has 14-card Play Boosters with 36 Play Boosters per box. The main set of Foundations is the core randomized booster component of the Foundations product suite.

The main set tackled the second major lesson we'd learned over the years. The key to making a good introductory Magic product is to allow a new player to see what makes the game so exciting. This lesson has an interesting story.

Whenever we create a beginner product, we do a lot of testing on it. Not just internally but externally. If the product is designed to teach people who have never played the game to play Magic, well, let's go get some people who don't know how to play Magic and see how it does! This is called a focus group. You put the people who you want to test your products in a room, and then you go sit on the other side of a two-way mirror and watch them. Focus groups can be very frustrating as people will always surprise you with how they can mess things up, but they're super informative.

Our strategy for many years has been to simplify the starter product as much as we can. Magic is intimidating, so we chose to limit how much we threw at a new player. Our core goal was to let the player finish the first game feeling like they understood the basics of how to play. This was our driving philosophy for a long time.

Back to the focus group. We would give them the starter product "unaided," meaning the only thing to teach them how to play was the product itself. In some focus groups, a professional will explain some things to the group. But, as we wanted to see how good of a teaching product we had, we wanted the product to do all the teaching. After the players learned how to play using the product (or at least give it their best shot), a professional joins them to ask questions.

I often talk about how the best indication that your game design is succeeding is players wanting to play it again. One of the most important questions we ask focus groups is "Would you like to play more Magic?" followed by "Why?" On this particular day of testing, we got a bunch of "no" replies. When we asked why, they said the game was too boring. There just wasn't enough to it. It lacked depth.

As I said at the beginning of last week's article, Magic's core strength is its depth. We had pulled so far back to keep people from being intimidated by the game that we removed what made the game exciting. That was an important lesson. We learned that we'd been pushing the wrong goal. We wanted them to end the first few games knowledgeable in how the game worked, but that was a mistake. What we needed to do was make people excited by what Magic entails. It's okay if they don't understand everything. We just want them to be eager to play more games. If they're excited to keep playing, they'll figure out all the details eventually.

What this means is that every aspect of Foundations had to show off the coolest parts of Magic, but the blunt of that responsibility falls onto the shoulders of the main set of Foundations. This philosophy permeated its design, resulting in four things.

First, the set prioritizes coolness over complexity. We've learned what excites players over the years. We put as much as we could into the set, even if doing so adds more words on cards. This led us to add a lot of legendary creatures. There's a full cycle of planeswalkers. We have individual cards that other core sets might not have ever considered, although sometimes shifted up in rarity. Finally, the set has a bunch of deciduous mechanics. Those are non-evergreen mechanics that we bring back a lot. The following deciduous mechanics appear in the set in these colors:

• Flashback – Blue, black, and red
• Kicker – White, red, and green
• Landfall – Blue, red, and green
• Morbid – Black, red, and green
• Prowess – Blue and red
• Raid – Blue, black, and red
• Threshold – Blue and black

Second, the set is focused on hitting themes that have a history of player popularity. There are typal themes, graveyard themes, spell-based themes, combat-based themes, and more. Foundations very consciously plays into themes that are proven successes.

Third, the set embraces not just the scope of Magic's mechanics but also its flavor. Foundations does not take place on a single plane but is instead spread out across the Multiverse, showcasing a variety of different planes. That variety also extends into its legendary creatures and planeswalkers. We want your early games of Magic to expose you to the full breadth of the game's creative elements as well as its mechanical ones.

The final thing that was important when putting Foundations together was to make it something that the experienced players would enjoy playing with a beginner. It is not watered-down Magic. The set is full of iconic cards and mechanics that have helped players fall in love with the game. Now, you get to share them with the next generation of players.

Foundations's main set is the best path for beginners who enjoy jumping into the deep end of the pool. While the depth can be intimidating to some, it's captivating to others. Foundations allows newer players to get a sense of what a Magic set is like, although with deciduous mechanics instead of new ones. It also has a robust Limited environment for those interested in exploring Sealed or Draft formats.

Foundations can also be a step later on the path. If Foundations Jumpstart and the Starter Collection are better introductions, the main set could serve best as a follow-up to one or both of those products. The core of Foundations is that it gives a new player the power to dictate how they learn the game.

Lost and Foundations

I hope these last two weeks have done a good job at giving you a sense of what the Foundations suite of products is all about. As always, if you have any feedback on the article or any part of Foundations, you can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).

Join me next week for a look through some of the the reprints in Foundations.

Until then, may you have fun rediscovering the parts of Magic that made you fall in love with it.