Magic: The Gathering is the game that invented the entire trading card game category, and more than thirty years later it's still the biggest one going. That's brilliant if you're already playing it, and slightly terrifying if you're not — the sheer size of it (tens of thousands of unique cards, a dozen ways to play) makes it genuinely hard to know where to even open your wallet. Here's the actual starting point, no spreadsheet required.
Skip the Deep End: Start With Jumpstart
If you want to be playing an actual game within five minutes of walking out of the shop, this is it. Jumpstart boosters are pre-built 20-card half-decks designed around a theme — grab two, shuffle them together, and you've got a complete, playable deck. No deckbuilding knowledge required, no research, no "wait, what's a mana curve." It's the single easiest on-ramp Wizards of the Coast has ever made for the game.
Magic: The Gathering – Marvel Super Heroes Jumpstart Booster — grab two of these, shuffle, and you're playing. Built specifically for exactly this situation.
Then: Foundations, the Set Built for New Players
Once you've had a taste, Foundations is where we'd point you next. Unlike most Magic sets, which rotate in and out and lean on years of accumulated lore, Foundations is an evergreen set built specifically as a stable, beginner-friendly base for the game — a mix of classic staples and new cards designed to teach you how the pieces fit together without needing a history lesson first. Wizards of the Coast's own announcement describes it as exactly that: a permanent, always-available entry point into the game.
Magic: The Gathering – Foundations Play Booster Pack — the set Wizards themselves built as the modern entry point into the game.
Once You're Hooked: Play Boosters and the Current Sets
Play Boosters are Magic's standard modern pack format — a mix of new and old cards from a specific set, built for drafting, deck-building and general collecting. This is where most ongoing Magic purchasing happens once you know what you're doing, and it's also where the game gets to be genuinely fun to follow, since new sets (and increasingly, crossovers) land every few months.
Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy Play Booster — the crossover set that had even non-Magic players paying attention. A good one to grab once you want to start exploring beyond the basics.
We also stock Play Boosters from Murders at Karlov Manor, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Duskmourn: House of Horror, Aetherdrift, Lorwyn Eclipsed, and Marvel Super Heroes — worth a browse once you know your colours and want to start building toward a real deck.
A Bit of History
Magic: The Gathering was designed by Richard Garfield — yes, the same designer behind Magical Athlete, which we also stock — and released by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. It's widely credited as the game that invented the trading card game genre outright; everything from Pokémon to sports card games to Riftbound owes something to the template Magic set thirty-plus years ago. It's also, by some measures, still the most complex competitive game ever designed — which sounds intimidating, but the good news is you genuinely don't need to know any of that to have a great first game.
Come Open a Pack
The honest advice, every time someone asks us this in-store: grab two Jumpstart boosters, shuffle them together, and just play. Everything else — the formats, the deckbuilding, the thirty years of card history — can wait until you're already having fun.
We believe the best moments happen around a table, and there's a particular kind of magic (sorry) in watching someone play their first spell and immediately understand why this game has lasted three decades.
Photo by Ryan Quintal on Unsplash