Magic: The Gathering goes back to basics with Foundations: green decks go tall, monsters get bigger

Magic’s always been tough for beginners. The starter sets, cheaper boxes that give you two premade decks and a little rulebook, are the standard way in for a lot of players. Arena has a tutorial that was recently redesigned to be a smoother on-ramp. But the problem isn’t learning how to play land and tap it to cast spells—it’s where you go from there. The steps between learning the basic rules and learning the full suite of arcane keywords, the principles of deckbuilding, and the familiarity with typical cards you need to understand what’s possible, is vast.

Which is where Foundations comes in. Rather than the kind of set that arrives, makes a splash, and then fades out, it’s intended to be a long-lasting core that’ll remain standard-legal at least through 2029, maybe further. A ground floor of cards that will be reprinted on the regular so they’re always there on the shelf of your local gaming store to direct new players toward.

Half of the cards in Foundations will be reprints, many of them well-loved classics old heads will remember. Cards like Shivan Dragon and Serra Angel, which have been around since the earliest days of Magic, but plenty from this century as well. Like the two green cards below: Wildwood Scourge, from the 2021 Core Set, and Ghalta, Primal Hunger, one of five rare elder dinosaurs from 2018’s Rivals of Ixalan expansion.