The Best Cards In The Foundations Starter Collection

Key Takeaways

• The Starter Collection in Foundations offers interesting cards and a mix of rarities, making it attractive to Magic veterans.
• Gilded Lotus, although not as efficient, offers a quick boost in mana to help get ahead on the board.
• Dread Summons is a powerful card that mills opponents and floods your board, while setting up your graveyard for synergy and combos.

Foundations is meant to be a solid way to get into Magic: The Gathering, with a healthy mix of simple cards to learn how to play, and more complex ones to show you what comes next. And one of the most exciting things released alongside Foundations is the Starter Collection.

This box includes three Foundations booster packs alongside 361 predetermined cards across all rarities. Lots of these can only be found in this collection, making it a worthwhile pick up even if you’re already a Magic veteran.

10

Gilded Lotus

A Big, Pricey Mana Rock

Gilded Lotus might pale in comparison to more efficient mana rocks like Sol Ring or Arcane Signet, but it’s still a quick way to pull yourself ahead in mana.

Sol Ring and Arcane Signet are both included in the box, as part of a special mini-pack that also bundles Command Tower to introduce you to Commander.

The general wisdom surrounding Gilded Lotus is that, if you can do something that turn with the mana you can tap it for, then it’s a worthwhile play. Following it up with casting a Tauren Mauler or Predator Ooze turns it from a five-mana artifact that just gets immediately destroyed, to, effectively, a two-mana rock that can tap for a lot more.

9

Maze’s End

Your First Alternate Win Condition

Maze decks are often one of the first alternate ways to win a game a new Magic player discovers. Assemble two different Gates, before triggering Maze’s End and outright winning is easy to understand, but also impressive to pull off.

With so many Gates printed in recent years, Maze’s End is a lot more interesting now than it was at its debut. In Standard, you won’t have as many Gates to work with as elsewhere, making Maze decks a harder thing to bring together. But if you’re dabbling in Commander, you’ve also got the seven Baldur’s Gates, Gateway Plaza, and one-off gates like Talon Gates of Madara and Thran Portal.

8

Massacre Wurm

Punish Token Players

Foundations is full of cards that make lots of small tokens, with it being one of white’s prominent themes in the set. If you’ve got an opponent who keeps going wide with a horde of Cats or Goblins, dropping a Massacre Wurm can be a game-changer.

It costs a lot at six mana, but the chance to wipe the board and outright kill an opponent through the lifeloss Massacre Wurm causes makes it one of the scariest cards in the Starter Collection. And after all that, you’ve still got a 6/5 bearer, which is nothing to sniff at.

7

Dread Summons

All We Want To Do Is Eat Your Brains

Dread Summons is the kind of huge, splashy card new players love, and anyone with a Zombie deck will know just how much of a banger it can be. Paying X to make everyone mill, before making a ton of 2/2 Zombie tokens can quickly turn the game in your favour.

Not only are you milling your opponents, you’re also doing it to yourself. That makes this a great way to set up your graveyard for recursion, descending, threshold, and a dozen other graveyard-centric mechanics. Meanwhile, if you’ve got a Champion of the Perished on the battlefield, be prepared to pop off big time.

6

Mentor Of The Meek

About As Good As It Gets For White Card Draw

White is one of the worst colours when it comes to drawing cards. Most effects limit you to only doing it once a turn, or allowing your opponents to also draw with you, making it tough to catch up. Mentor of the Meek is one of the rare examples of white card draw that really helps you pull ahead.

You need to play small creatures, and pay one mana to do so, but in any deck that runs lots of ‘weenies’, it can help you keep chugging along. Foundations is full of token strategies, so having a few Cats or Rabbits entering could help refill your hand with ease.

5

Basilisk Collar

Give Anything Deathtouch

Basilisk Collar re-entered Standard for the first time since 2010’s Worldwake with Foundations, and brought with it a terrifying way to permanent grant a creature deathtouch. While this alone is enough to be an appealing card for new players, veterans know just how busted deathtouch can become on the right creature

Anything with trample can chew through blockers like they’re nothing, fight spells become instant removal, and with Fynn the Fangbearer also in the set, poison wins become a lot more viable. Remove the creature and Basilisk Collar will stay, ready to re-equip to something else and continue its reign of terror.

4

Boros Charm

Set A Trap For Your Opponents

Boros Charm is one of the most powerfully flexible instants in the Starter Collection, and is still wild as an uncommon to years after its first printing. For just two mana you can make your permanents indestructible to save them from a board wipe, or you can give them double strike to take the win through combat.

There’s a third option of dealing four damage to a player or planeswalker, but that pales in comparison to the other two. Any red/white deck is going to want Boros Charm, simply as a gotcha for when your opponent is convinced they’ve won.

3

Pyromancer’s Goggles

Two For The Price Of One

Like Gilded Lotus, Pyromancer’s Goggles is generally considered quite an expensive mana rock at five generic mana. But the payoff is immense, as tapping it for red mana and using it to pay for an instant or sorcery will copy it for you for free.

Copying an X-cost spell will also copy the value of X you paid into the original.

In Foundations, that could let you make a ton of Goblins with a Goblin Negotiation, giving a +6/+6 buff to all your creatures with Overrun, or gaining control of two creatures with Involuntary Employment. To make it even better, you can do this every single time you tap Pyromancer’s Goggles, giving you an absurd amount of value with each time you activate it.

2

Rite Of Replication

Why Have One Copy When You Could Have Five?

Rite of Replication is such a fun card. If you cast it regularly it’s a slightly pricey way of making a copy of a target creature, but kicking it to make five copies instead for nine mana is incredibly explosive.

The best bit is that nowhere on Rite of Replication does it say that the creature you copy has to be yours. If an opponent has a Massacre Wurm out, or something scarier like a Bloodthirsty Conqueror, or even something with a handy enters effect like Bigfin Bouncer, then Rite of Replication suddenly turns into a massive problem for your opponent.

1

Darksteel Colossus

The Big Bot Of The Box

Every individual part of Darksteel Colossus is scary on its own: an 11/11 would be bad enough, but it has trample. An 11/11 with trample is bad enough, but it’s also indestructible. An 11/11 with trample and indestructible is terrifying, and instead of dying it just gets shuffled back into your deck.

Tough to get rid of without exiling it, and tough to block it thanks to its size, Darksteel Colossus is also easy to tutor and cheat out thanks to being an artifact. Plus it comes in the same box as a Rite of Replication, which is just utter overkill.