Magic: The Gathering Foundations Starter Collection review ⏤ An incredible starting point

The Foundations Starter Collection is another new product being released with the Foundations Set. While the Beginner Box and the Jumpstart packs focus on teaching you to play the game, the Starter Collection is the jumping-off point for deck construction. While there were similar products in Magic’s ancient history there hasn’t been a fixed starter collection in a long time. Let’s see if the Starter Collection is as good as it claims to be and what exactly comes inside it.

Overview – Harbinger of the Tides

So you’ve learned Magic and you want to start building your own decks but you’re not sure how. This is what the Starter Collection is for. The Starter Collection is a fixed set of cards for someone who doesn’t have a preexisting card collection. Within this box, you’ll get 387 cards, 90 lands, tokens, three Foundations Play Boosters, a storage box, and a click life wheel. I’m going to leave a link to the MtG Wiki for the Starter Collection as it has an exhaustive list of all the contents. There are even three Commander staples included as a nod to the importance of Commander, though this product isn’t quite intended for Commander.

The hope for anyone acquiring this set is that they will use its contents to start customizing their own decks. Maybe you’ll start swapping out cards from a jumpstart pack or create something from scratch. The Starter Collection has everything you need to build a deck inside it. All five colors, multicolor, artifacts, and lands are all included allowing someone to mix and match to their heart’s content. The included building booklet focuses on sixty card decks which is largely to be expected. The premier format that Wizards of the Coast wants players to experience is Standard. If you’re unfamiliar with Standard, it’s a competitive format that uses the cards from the last three years of releases and allows up to four copies of a card. Foundations as a whole is intended to support Standard.

Pros – Charming Prince

This is one of the rare Magic products where you know exactly what you’re getting (not including the three Play Boosters). For me, the question becomes: Is what you’re getting worth the price? The Starter Collection has an MSRP of $59.99 and for what’s inside this is a good value. If the intention was to make a fixed Magic playground for new players to have fun in, the Starter Collection succeeds in providing everything they need.

You might think that the cards inside wouldn’t be able to compete with other sets, but the cards inside the Starter Collection are no slouches. There are fun card designs new and old within the Starter Collection. I don’t know what will get used in constructed play, but there are a lot of cards here that are just fun to build around. Some cards aren’t exciting but functional like Think Twice, Abrade, Llanowar Elves, and Impact Tremors. These cards encourage experimentation through play which is exactly what this set wants you to do. Magic is a game of finding synergies and the Starter Collection wants you to seek them out. As someone explores what colors speak to their playstyle they’ll be able to build different decks to further refine their taste.

The other small inclusions are also great. The life clicker wheel is something that every Magic player needs and the one included here is a nice chunky plastic life wheel. They’re very satisfying to play around with. Some of the cards are foils and borderless frames. As usual, all the artwork is fantastic, but I especially like the borderless frames for Foundations. Overall the artwork within the Starter Collection is a great love letter to many of the planes across Magic’s history. The foils look nice, but only time will tell if they will curl. I appreciate the smaller inclusions such as the tokens too. Having these included means players won’t be scrambling to find substitutes when they come into play.

Cons – Arbiter of Woe

If you look at the full list of included cards you’ll see that there are a lot of single cards in the Starter Collection. I would have liked to see more two-of or even full sets of four in this. I get that this is a Starter Collection so players need cards to chase, but the reason I bring this up is that the deck-building booklet wants you to build a Standard deck. Standard decks tend to use full playsets of four cards to create decks that are as consistent as possible. With mostly only single cards to build from in the Starter Collection, the decks won’t be very focused on what they do. This also applies to the dual lands inside as you generally want as many of those as possible so your multicolor deck functions. This might give a new player the wrong impression of what deck-building is, but then again, all of this is in service of learning the game and its many ways to play.

I find it odd that you get three Play Boosters with the Starter Collection. They’re nice to have included, but you can’t do much with them on their own. If that had been six Play Boosters, then a player could use them to build a Sealed deck and that would also be a lesson in deck-building. From there you could then modify your forty-card deck with cards from the Starter Collection and challenge other players who have done the same thing. As it stands the three Play Boosters don’t do a whole lot other than just get opened to be added into the box. (If you do pick up a Starter Collection I would recommend grabbing three more Play Boosters alongside it so you can build a Sealed deck.)

This is a true nitpick, the Bundle Boxes have always been great starting storage, but here it’s cramped to organize everything inside it. If the Beginner Box had been designed for more storage it would have been the perfect companion box for a new player to start organizing a collection.

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