Oh no. I should have known this was coming. After my Dandy Ace review went on about cards, magicians and Arrested Development, I knew I would be singled out as the magic cards guy.
You might say, I’ve made a huge mistake.
Ok, so, for you lucky few out there pondering what this box is, it is the current starter set aimed at new players interested in getting into that one trading-card game that isn’t Yu-Gi-Oh. Or Pokemon. Or Weeb Schwartz or whatever it’s called.
This is Magic: The Gathering – a game where you are no longer Terry from Croydon. You are a Planeswalker – a mighty, multidimensional wizard. While your deck of cards is your library of spells and portals to magical lands you can tap into to cast those spells. Your deck is entirely customisable, from thousands of cards, limited only by their rarity, your collection, your tactics, and thousands of dollars.
Magic is a great game. As a player of nine years, customising decks, and trading cards and tips with other players are my favourite parts of the hobby. Less so playing people who don’t believe in fun and let articles on the internet decide their decks for them. If you do that, more power to you, but you will never know the unbridled joy of my deck that revolves around flying hippos and their unbridled generosity. You will never know their sweaty, sweaty caress.
This product, however, is for two new players to try their first games. For ~£7, you get two complete 60 card decks, built from a mix of the four sets in the current rotation when this was released;
~ Zendikar Rising cards are set on a world of floating islands and hidden treasures as adventurers seek their fortunes exploring mysterious ruins.
~ Kaldheim is a Norse world of Valkyries, Giants, Heroes and Gods.
~ Strixhaven is set in an academy of magic. A place where students study the arcane arts in distinct colleges, and you know what this is, but there are way more owls here.
~ And Adventures In The Forgotten Realms is a Dungeons & Dragons set. With lots of dragons, classic monsters and (though not here) cards that require you to roll dice. Classic.
The two decks you get, complete with neat little card boxes, are named Sneak Attack, and Rough and Tumble. Let’s take a closer look.
THE DECKS
Sneak Attack
Sneak Attack is a deck consisting of red and blue cards: in MtG, a card’s colour not only dictates what is needed to play it but also, very loosely, its effect. Red is the colour of fast, aggressive plays and direct damage, while blue is all about trickery and control. This results in a deck built around small, fast creatures with several cool tricks. They ensure your enemy can’t block them when they attack or make them larger than expected. Use Thundering Rebuke, a damage spell, to kill your opponent’s blockers, and Red Dragons to deal damage to their face without even attacking.
Sneak Attack also contains five rare cards.
~ Arni Brokenbrow, a named Legendary character (meaning you can only have one copy of him on the battlefield at a time) from Kaldheim. He can Boast when he attacks, making him bigger than your other largest creature, turning him into a bulldozer.
~ Archmage Emeritus is a Strixhaven professor wizard that rewards you for playing your direct damage and card draw spells with an extra card draw. Card draw is the most powerful effect in the game, as it gives you more options, so a great starter piece.
~ Calamity Bearer, a big red Kaldheim Giant that doubles the damage output of your creatures and spells, something you really want to keep around.
~ Mind Flayer, the iconic D&D creature that steals one of your opponent’s creatures for as long as you keep Mind Flayer, giving you a really effective two-for-one.
~ Finally, Cyclone Summoner, an enormous, expensive blue Kaldheimm Giant that bounces everything off the board and back to the players’ hands… except for Lands, Giants and Wizards. Which is most of your deck. Which is nice.
As well as just having strong cards that work well together, there’s a kinda fantastic, kinda awful combo here. You need way too much mana, and far too many turns into the game to pull it, but if you do, you have full permission from me to boast to your local game store, where they will either ignore you or kick you out.
TURN 7: Play Cyclone Summoner, knock all your opponent’s creatures off the board
TURN 8: Play Calamity Bearer. Swing with Cyclone Summoner when he’s blocked or is about to hit the opponent, play Run Amok.
Run Amok adds three to an attacking creature’s power and toughness and lets them do damage over and through blocking creatures via Trample.
Cyclone Summoner is already a 7 in both. So 7+3 = 10
Calamity Bearer doubles damage. 10 x 2 = 20, which is the starting life total.
This means that if they don’t block, there’s a 90 per cent chance you’ve killed them, and if they do, there’s a 90 per cent chance you’ve killed their blockers and smashed their life total too. Yay!
Rough and Tumble
Rough and Tumble is a green and black deck: Green is a colour of massive monsters, and black is death or cheating it. This deck’s synergy is the number of cards that give and benefit from ‘+1 Counters’, the way you make a card permanently larger. Dauntless Survivor, Oran Rief Ooze, Cragplate Baloth, and Dragonsguard Elite all put counters on themselves or others. While you’re building up to those, use Vampire Spawn and Spectre of the Fens to steal life points from your opponent. There aren’t enough ‘+1 Counter’ cards in this deck. However, Oblivion’s Hunger saves your boosted creatures, and Rabid Bite and Might of Murasa turn them into deadly combat tools.
Rough and Tumble also contains five Rare cards.
~ Dragonsguard Elite is a cheap Green Strixhaven Druid and gets bigger every time you play an Instant or Sorcery. When you have 6 mana, spend it to double the Elite’s power & toughness, making her enormous! And you can keep doing that as long as you have the mana!
~ Oran-Rief Ooze is a nasty pile of hungry green jelly from Zendikar. When it enters play you can drop a counter on it or someone else. Also, whenever it attacks you can drop another counter on each attacking creature that already has one. This Ooze desperately wants to be the centrepiece of the deck, so that’s something to consider if you wanted to customise it.
~ Cleaving Reaper’s a little odd here, despite being an enormous Kaldheim black Valkyrie. Obviously, she’s some deadly air support but you can snatch her back from the graveyard when you play another angel or berserker… of which there are two others in the deck. A decent card but a little weak here.
~ Another odd one, Asmodeus the Archfiend is the Devil God from D&D, here as another Legendary. While being a massive 6/6, his strength is that he stops you from drawing cards. Huh. But later, you can pay mana and a lot of life for loads of cards, suddenly, whenever you need them. Definitely the most complex card here, and more of a curio, but an awesome curio at that.
~ Finally, Cragplate Baloth is a gigantic green beast from Zendikar. For seven mana, you get a 6/6 that cannot be countered by blue spells, cant be targetted by any of your opponent’s spells, and can straight up attack when it enters? Not good enough? Pay 3 more mana, and now it is a 10/10 instead. Uh Oh. This boy is a game-winner if you can get him out.
All in all, I think Rough and Tumble is, as packaged, worse than Sneak Attack, but it has so much potential. More Oozes, another Baloth, and you’re laughing.
PLAYTESTING
So, how do these decks fare? Are they good decks for starting players? Are they chaff?
Perhaps we should have used the code that comes with the set to play them online on Magic The Gathering Arena, the fun MTG online version of the game. But instead, we decided to do things properly – we sat in a pub, playing a children’s card game, drinking, and eating chicken wings.
Gareth played MtG for a year or so, maybe fifteen years ago, so he’s one step beyond a newbie. I’ve not stopped playing MtG for almost a decade, but my fingers were amazingly greasy from all that chicken, so, if you squint, it balances out, I guess?
GAME ONE
Rough and Tumble: Gareth
Sneak Attack: David
Gareth attempts to play Oblivion’s Hunger – an instant spell used to save creatures as if it was the Vampire Lady on the art. While Gareth considers why an artist would depict a magical shield as a tribal vampire lady hanging out in the shadows rather than say, a magical shield. I hit him many times with my owls in the sky and unblockable wizards on the ground.
GAME TWO
Rough and Tumble: Gareth
Sneak Attack: David
Gareth makes delighted noises as he sniffs out Rough and Tumble’s playstyle. Using Vampire Spawn to sap my life total and increase his, he puts down a wall of blockers, each made stronger thanks to the Dauntless Survivors. With the Spectre in the sky to blocking attacks and draining life points, and Kennel Master making his creatures indestructible – Gareth’s victory seems all but assured when he casts the large, fast, and deadly Cragplate Baloth.
Impressed, I give Gareth a brief moment of false hope before playing Cyclone Summoner. This returns all his creatures to hand, empties the battlefield except for wizards, and leaves me to tear him a new arsehole with my big-ass giant. Weeping ensues.
GAME THREE
Rough and Tumble: David
Sneak Attack: Gareth
Gareth is suspicious Sneak Attack might have an advantage so we swap decks. I do so happily, and through judicious use of buffed up giant squirrels eating his wizards, I throw an acorn party in Gareth’s backyard.
Sorry, the metaphor ran away from me somewhat there. I won, you see.
GAME FOUR
Rough and Tumble: David
Sneak Attack: Gareth
This time my opening hand is rubbish. This forces me to mulligan down to a starting hand of five. Not a good start.
Gareth has me at his mercy, with Red Dragons, and Calamity Bearer’s double damage effect. A few rounds in, and I’m down to less than 10 life while Gareth’s on full.
Two turns later, I’ve drawn the land I need, killed his creatures, and now have big black flyers. Gareth writes a letter of complaint to Wizards of the Coast asking how they could possibly design two decks that only favour me.
All in all, these games were fun! I find the decks easy to use and straightforward, with lots of customising options. Hint: Rough and Tumble has three creatures without any abilities, so they’re a good place start to switching cards out. Also, as both are two-colour decks with only single-colour cards, the two halves of each can be switched around. Perhaps green and red versus black and blue, for something even more conventional.
The starter set also includes two deck boxes to keep your cards in, play reminder cards to help you during your turns, and a little glossary book that lists all the terms and keywords that appear on the different cards, as well as their effects.
Finally, there’s a code to use the two decks in Magic: The Gathering Arena, which is a neat bonus. I’ve been using both of them in online games. While they aren’t top tier decks or anything, they’re fun to play with, and I’ve won my share of victories with them against ‘professional’ decks. The giant non-combo is hilarious if you can pull it off.
Sadly, it doesn’t come with two things I’d have honestly expected.
Firstly, there’s no way to keep track of your life total. Other MtG sets come with spin-down dice or card wheels, but not here. This is very silly, though I guess either might add a pound to the product’s already ludicrously low pricing, so I guess they might have considered that.
Secondly… there’s no actual rules. There’s the glossary, the reminder cards, and a website to watch tutorial videos. But imagine you just bought this ‘Starter set’, to play with a friend, and you’re both brand new to the hobby. You have everything you need to play; heck, you even have pen and paper for life totals, etc. Only now, you need to spend 20 minutes huddled around your phone.
Like, I get it. The rules are, on paper, long and complicated, and would use precious paper. I get that. But I learned the game from one of those fold-out How To Play cards in 2012 that covered the bog-standard basics, combined with reading the cards and playing with new people. It’s not a massive ask, is it? Maybe I’m just not taking for granted how online everyone is nowadays. I’m an old man, rar, rar, rar,.
THE RUB
As stated before, this product is £7. £7 for two complete standard (the MtG term for decks made from current card sets) decks. That is, honestly, a fantastic price for what you get. Wizards Of The Coast no longer do off-the-shelf introduction decks (which is a rant for another day), but when they did, they were £10 to £15 for one, with a booster or two. You may not get any real ‘value’, that being valuable cards you can use in a tournament, which as a new player will mean nothing to you anyway, but you do get all the common and uncommon cards you need to start two solid decks that will be “legal” for competitive play until September 2022, and some fun rares to boot.
I cannot recommend this product enough. Whether you’re a newbie interested in MtG, someone who’s been off the wagon (I envy you) and would like to come back, or a current player looking to bring in friends or just wants two new decks to play with. This is less than the price of, a couple of pints, two big coffees, or three cheap teas. It is super worth it.
Side Note: Almost everywhere will sell this in a black box with a bronze glow on the front, showing two of the cards off – Dragonsguard Elite and Cyclone Summoner. These two are foil cards, worth slightly more, and a whole lot prettier and shiny.
While you can get this set on Amazon, they also sell a version with a blue glow on the front instead and two different cards – Oran-Rief ooze and Mind Flayer. This is the same product, with the same two decks and cards, with the only difference being the two cards on the front are the foil cards this time, not the previous two. It’s less than a pound more expensive, and which one you get is up to you. Personally, I think the foil Mind Flayer is super cool, but your mileage may vary.
Seven Pounds. Seriously. It’s a bloody bargain.