The Tenth Ed Components

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game, filled with good-quality cards with great-quality art, each of which represents either the land that wizards use to power their magic or else a spell cast using that mana.

The Tenth Edition “Core Set” is sold in three major parts, all of which are described further below.

Starter Set: A 50-card set, packaged with a beginner’s rulesheet, intended for starter’s play. This is a largely random card distribution other than a core set of land.

Theme Decks: Five 40-card decks, each of which has been hand-constructed to provide a good playing experience.

Booster Packs: 15-card packs which contain random assortments of cards.

As noted, Magic is a collectible game, meaning that most packages of cards are randomized, giving you a small assortment of the 383 cards found in the Tenth Edition core set. These cards fall into three levels of commonality; there are 121 each of the common, uncommon, and rare cards, plus 20 basic lands.

Tenth Edition Usability

The usability of the Teneth Edition Magic cards deserves a bit of additional discussion. Cards in Magic have a lot of unique powers, so it’s not possible to note everything with easy-to-read icons as is the case in Eurogames.

In fact, the only actual icons in the game are for mana colors. However, there’s also some easy-to-find statistics for creatures and a standard notation for special abilities. Most of the rest of a card is taken up by text, but despite its preponderance, a good effort has been made to make it easy to use. This is done through standard words which describe what cards do, such as “Trample”, “Reach”, and “Flying”. Further, any card with standard powers lists not only that word, but also a full description of what that word means.

On whole, Magic is (and always has been) a game that’s built around great components. In this Tenth Edition the beauty, quality, and usability of the cards are all about as good as you could hope, and thus it earns a full “5” out of “5” for Style.

Magic Gameplay

The core gameplay of Magic is quite simple. What follows is an overview of the broad strokes.

Each player has a deck of cards which contains an assortment of lands and spells. A player starts out a game with seven of his cards in his hand. On his turn a player:

1. Untaps all his cards, which means that he marks his land and creatures and other cards as ready to be used again.
2. Draws a new card.
3. Plays up to one land card.
4. Taps one or more land cards to cast new spells from his hand and/or activate powers on cards in play.
5. Optionally attacks his opponent with one or more of his creatures.

Spells: The spells are, of course, the heart of the game.

Each spell is associated with a specific color—red, green, blue, white, or black—which broadly defines the types of things it can do. Each spell also has a casting cost, which is typically one or two of the appropriate color of mana, plus some amount of mana of any color.

The mana used to cast spells comes from lands. Lands are color-coordinated too, and so when you tap the appropriate type of land, you get one of the appropriate type of mana (e.g., you tap an island for blue mana). Because you can only put down one land a turn, this means that Magic is a game of slowly building up your resources to do the really impressive things.

There are several broad types of cards which have different purposes in the game. The all-important creatures allow you to attack your opponent turn after turn. There are also sorcery spells, which have an immediate effect and must be cast on your turn, and instant spells, which have an immediate effect and can be cast in reaction to something else at any time.

Combat: A game of Magic is usually won by having creatures attack your opponent.

Each creature has a power and a defense. The power is how much damage the creature does and the defense is how much it can take. On average, they’re the same (e.g., 2/2 power/defense), but they can widely diverge (e.g., 5/1).

When an active player initiates combat, he chooses some creatures to attack (usually tapping them), then a defender chooses some creatures to defend. Unblocked creatures deal their damage to the opponent, while blocked creatures deal damage to each other, possibly resulting in creatures dying.

Creature Special Powers. There are many special powers which affect how creatures work. For example, “Terrain Walk” makes a creature unblockable if an opponent has the right sort of terrain, while “Flying” makes it unblockable except to creatures with “Flying” or “Reach”, and “Trample” causes a blocked creature to do damage to your opponent if it has any power left after it kills its blocker.

Winning the Game: Each player in Magic starts with 20 life. He’ll gradually lose those, primarily to creatures, but also to sorcery and instant spells that cause damage, such as Blaze or Shock, or even to special powers that creatures can use, such as the “Pyromancer” creature who can deal a point of damage if tapped.

Tenth Edition Packages

As noted, there are three different packages available for the Tenth Edition Core Set.

The Starter Game

The Tenth Edition Starter Game is intended to be the way for new players to get involved in the game. It contains a rulesheet and 50 cards.

The Rulesheet: This is a large, folded-up rulesheet. On the one side it tells you how to construct playing decks (on which, more presently), while on the other side it describes how to play the game.

Overall, the rulesheet is well done. My wife, who hadn’t played Magic before was able to pick up the game from it. Later, whenever a question came up during play, we’d reference the rulesheet, and we could almost always come up with a very clear answer from it.

The Cards: The Starter Game contains twenty basic land cards (with four of each color), plus two booster decks of 15 random cards. You get ready to play by pulling open the boosters, then separating everything by color.

First, one player chooses all the cards in one color, then the other player chooses two colors, then the first player chooses a second color. Voila! you have two Magic decks for play.

There were some advantages and disadvantages to the setup.

On the one hand, this all felt a lot like deck construction—creating your own decks from random selection of cards—and since that’s ultimately the strength of Magic, this Starter Game is neat way to show it off.

On the other hand, these decks really aren’t big enough for play. Each player ends up with a deck of 30 or so cards, which is definitely short. I hit my last card in the game that I played with just the Starter Game. If the game hadn’t ended there, I would have had no idea what to do next.

At just $10, the Starter Game is a great way for two players to see what they think of Magic, but it’s somewhat lacking in long-term usefulness because of its small size. Except for a money-conscious player, I’d suggest most people just go ahead and get a pair of theme decks, which will provide much better play.

I’m going to give a final rating of Magic Tenth Edition later in the review, but I give just the Starter Set a “4” out of “5” for Style: a good attempt, but not fully baked. It’s a pity because I think including a third booster would have made all the difference in the world.

The Theme Decks

The theme decks are each a pre-constructed 40-card deck built from a single color. Overall, they’re interesting decks that are well-designed and pretty easy to play for beginners. There are five in all. Each of them centers on a “legendary” hero who helps to give the deck its theme and structure.

Kamahl’s Temper (Red): A deck with a variety of monsters and some “direct damage” spells. This offers interesting choices during play, as you have to figure out what monsters you need to kill with damage and when.

Arcanis’s Guile (Blue): A very thoughtful deck that gives you opportunities to counter spells and return creatures to a player’s hand. It’s my favorite of all of the decks because of the huge number of choices that you have, thus rewarding intelligent tactical play.

Molimo’s Might (Green): One of the simplest decks to play. You get out land quickly, and then you use it to summon big creatures.

Evincar’s Tyranny (Black): A deck that allows you to kill individual creatures while at the same time summoning creatures of your own which can be impossible to block.

Cho-Manno’s Resolve (White): A deck of first striking creatures that can kill blocking creatures without being hurt themselves. There’s also a few enchantments and special abilities which can give you some tactical options.

Overall the quality of the theme decks is quite good, and if I wanted to start playing Magic, this is how I would do it: by buying two or five of these decks, and then going crazy with them. As such I’d give them individually a “5” out of “5” for Style, with particular call-outs to the Blue deck for tactical play and the Green deck for simple play.

The only real deficit of the Theme Decks is that they (somewhat inexpicably) don’t contain rules. Fortunately you can find those online at www.playmagic.com. There are some nice videos, and also an attractive rulebook.

The Booster Packs

Of course one of the main elements of Magic is that it’s collectible. After you buy your initial sets of cards (be they starter games or theme packs), you then go buy boosters, and use them to create new decks, or else modify the decks you’ve been playing.

Each booster contains 15 cards, including a rare, a couple of uncommons, a land, and several commons. As a new feature, each deck now also contains a 16th card, which is some sort of accessory. Some of these cards offer strategy hints, but my favorites are cards which depict “token” monsters--which is to say virtual monsters created by other cards. I thus now have cards for goblins, saprolings, and zombies, which is a cool way to represent monster that you previously had to use chits, scraps of paper, or dice to denote.

I wish Wizards would just offer decks of these token monsters for purchase.

The Evolution of Magic

Before playing Tenth Edition, I hadn’t seen any new Magic cards in close to a decade. I was given a couple of Invasion theme decks in 2000, but it was 1996 or so that I was last actively buying any cards.

Generally, the game hasn’t changed that much. I was surprised by how few cards I recognized in the Tenth Edition theme decks, but the overall power levels and card types were largely similar. Things have been polished up a bit and usability has been improved, but except for the specific details of individual cards, Tenth Edition isn’t that different from Fourth Edition, the last one I purchased.

The Game Design

Magic: The Gathering has been wildly successful since it initial release in 1993. Part of that was due to its innovative approach to making a game collectible. But, it also succeeded because it was a good game. That hasn’t changed with this new Tenth Edition.

As a game, Magic works well. Though some decks play themselves, more complex decks allow for important tactical decisions as you figure out which spells to expend on which situations, and how to use your mana for various spells and special effects. This keeps the game interesting whenever you play. Magic also plays quite quickly, which keeps things enjoyable.

However where Magic really excels is in a player’s ability to create unique decks from a large set of cards. This allows for very strategic design that can be uniquely done on one’s own, before you encounter other players.

The new Tenth Edition has done a little bit to make the game more accessible, mainly through a simple intro package and improved usability of cards (though some of these innovations have actually been around for a few editions). In the process it sacrificed none of the uniqueness and variability of the cards that helps to make Magic a good game, and thus is earns a “5” out of “5” for Substance.

It’s not just the first CCG, but also one of the best.

Conclusion

The new Tenth Edition of Magic: The Gathering continues to show off the game’s clean gameplay and great components in an attractive new version.