First look: Magic: The Gathering Foundations, the new set for beginners

polygon.com:

Publisher Wizards of the Coast has spent the last few years targeting two very different segments of the Magic: The Gatheringaudience. On the one hand, you have the multiplayer style of play called Commander, arguably the game’s most popular format. On the other hand, you have the ambitious Universes Beyond products, designed to turn the heads of lapsed fans and non-players alike with products that support multiple styles of play. Now the trading card game is returning to its roots with a new set called Foundations, a collection of cards and a curated play experience custom-built for newcomers.

Foundations launches on Nov. 15, and will have all the trappings of a mainline set release — that includes Play boosters, Collector boosters, Jumpstart boosters, and Bundles as well as all the same pre-release pomp and circumstance as any other new set of cards. But it will also feature two new-to-Magic products: a Beginner Box and a Starter Collection.

Wizards’ game design director Bryan Hawley told Polygon that the Beginner Box will include 10 packets with 20 cards inside each one, with two packets for each of Magic’s five colors of mana. Using a mix-and-match system originally designed for the Jumpstart product line, players will be able to combine and recombine those 10 packets into many different kinds of decks. At least some of those packets will be pre-shuffled, with the intent that players will first open and explore them alongside a detailed, step-by-step written tutorial.

“One of the things that Foundations is really trying to do differently than any of our past attempts at an onboarding experience,” said Hawley, “is to really focus on that full pathway, [taking a new player from] I am interested in Magic, but I don’t know anything! up through Oh, I’ve identified what I like to do and I’m going to do more of that! So the Beginner Box is a significantly more built-out experience that has a lot more content [than previous starter sets]. You can play dozens of games