Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming set, Foundations, offers the true blue Magic: The Gathering experience, not a ‘diet’ version, say the game’s designers. In a preview panel on Monday, they gave press some insight into what Wizards was going for when choosing and making cards for the beginner-friendly starter collection and main Foundations set.
MTG Foundations is intended to provide a backbone for Standard for the next five years plus, with tentative plans that it could remain a part of the Magic: The Gathering format forever. However, that doesn’t mean the company has played it safe and only added weak or nerfed cards.
“These are real cards, these are things that are honest Magic,” says senior game designer Carmen Klomparens. “We’re not giving you the diet version of the experience.”
Klomparens adds that Wizards wants newcomers to be able to take Foundations cards to their local game store and hear stories about them from the ‘old heads’.
She gives examples of Maelstrom Pulse and Lyra Dawnbringer as cards that had some competitive success in the past, and which Wizards took a bit of a risk by including in the Starter collection, a box of 360 cards that are designed to give players their first feel for deckbuilding.
Wizards clearly wants to avoid Foundations being seen as ‘just for beginners’, a label that may have doomed core sets, one of the company’s prior attempts at making a beginner product. With simple designs that, like Foundations, were supposed to make the game digestible for newcomers, core sets were never hot sellers, partially because they were seen as less valuable by fans.
As well as powerful older cards, Klomparens explains that the starter collection has a bunch of what she calls ‘aspirational designs’. These cards, like Pyromancer’s Goggles or the combination of Demonic Pact and Harmless Offering, are supposed to make newbies say “that’s something I hadn’t thought you could do with Magic cards” and inspire them to build a deck.
As for the main Foundations set, game design director Bryan Hawley says Wizards is aiming to “give established players more of what they love and show new players the really cool things we have to offer”.
There’s a clear focus on the most popular creature types like MTG angels and MTG dragons, big splashy designs like Progenitus and Omniscience, and awesome legendary creatures. There’s even a new version of Niv-Mizzet who goes infinite with the old version.
Finally, Foundations is bringing back the Japan Showcase style from Duskmourn. Found on 20 cards in the main set, this is perhaps the blingiest a Magic: The Gathering card has ever looked.
Check out our MTG Foundations page for more details on this set, which comes out very soon, on November 15. And to find out what’s next, check out our MTG release schedule guide.
Source: Wargamer
