Instead of having any commander precons here, let’s have a whole mess of either things for really casual players (big part of the UB audience I know) and really cynically made chase cards.
Continuing the concept of the Foundations box, this box has 10 jumpstart-format packs, 2 for each color, 2 among the 10 will be in a fix order to teach people their first game of Magic.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | C | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TLE-R | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 10 | |
| TLE-U | 4 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 14 | |
| TLE-C | 7 | 4 | 6 | 9 | 4 | 1 | 31 |
| Total | 13 | 7 | 8 | 16 | 9 | 2 | 55 |
What’s special this time is that those two packs will have the order number at the bottom left of the card so that you know for sure where they are in the deck, something I surely wish all the Jumpstart cards say, you know which pack (or more specifically variant) they belong in. One problem with this approach however is that each copy will have a different collectors’ number. And no, that number isn’t sorted according to the deck order.
(I’m not too sure about this “beginner box subset” because maybe they will be reused for the jumpstart packs yet they’re numbered this deep in. also bookmark the mythicspoiler page because it actually breaks down the pack by these avatar printings.)
At rare, each color gets two cards. Four of them are commanders we’ve already seen, three are normal creatures where black has both here and red lacks flavor text despite having the space for some, two enchantments that offers creature buffs, and lastly one sorcery.
At uncommon, blue gets yet another bounce spell (that’s what its rare sorcery is), weirdly discounting the commanders red has just as much new stuff as green, and our hybrid card is Gruul. Most notable balance wise is 3 mana for a slightly better Orinflame because it works on blocks.
At common, one black creature reigns supreme in complexity, followed by one white card with a mana sink and a 1 mana 2/2 with a drawback. Literally everything else are French vanillas. Well white has one literally vanilla creature and red has two, where comparing their 2 drops see white having 1 more toughness, you can some color pie philosophy going on here. Also there are three reprints here, in Jund color, each serving a different purpose and the red one seems notably less useful than the others.
Finally there are the five thriving lands here, it surely would be silly to lock these off the actual Jumpstart packs. But well, it’s surely an upgrade over FDN’s box containing Evolving Statics.
Rarity configurations wise, it’s a lot more complex than just 1/4/8/7. Sure, they still exists, in both black packs and one pack for each of Gruul. But things are about to get a lot less lucky. The white starter pack is 1/4/7/8 because the thriving lands are missing from both of these packs, I guess new players can’t handle multicolored lands. The red pack is actually even worse, 1/3/8/8, where the fourth uncommon is missing. This extends to 3 more 1/3/9/7 packs, one for each of Bant. And finally, for the ultimate unlucky pack, so bad that the normal Jumpstart set doesn’t have one, 1/2/10/7, it’s a blue pack and it’s terrifying it has as much common as a draft booster. Overall, you box would have 8 thriving lands color imbalanced, 34 uncommons and however many commons left.
Set configuration wise, there’s a mix of eternal cards that get their own subset despite the fact that some do overlaps with the Jumpstart packs and also draft set cards, this is surely a downgrade from the Foundations box.
| W | U | B | R | G |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 7+2 | 6+3 | 4+1 | |
| 6+3 | 7+2 | 4+4 | 7+2 | 7+3 |
The number of draft cards in each packs are as follows, ordered in commons plus uncommons. So it turns out that outside of those two starter packs, there’s a green pack that’s pushing it in the lack of draft cards, through that color do make up in having the single pack with the most draft cards. Which might be to balance out black’s very balanced packs of 4 cards for each unstamped rarity.
Duplicates wise, whether it’s surprising or not to you, there are a couple. The draft set got three, in White, Black and hybrid Golgari (this one does in fact appears in both colors). The eternal set got a colorless artifact and three of the thriving lands (forming Sultai).
Themes wise, the two starter packs, Aang and Zuko, certainly maps out to the main Jumpstart set. The two Gruul elements can also easily do so, which leaves the blue element feeling pretty weird. Lastly, the other themes are things that you can totally find an analogue to, knowing that in this box we prefer to use more literal and generic names rather than putting too much duty on the line of text below (Big Creatures = Earth Rumble, Allies = Alliance, Spells = Lessons + Adept, Attacking = Relentless, Reinforced = Counters).
Face cards wise, we surely use different ones from the actual Jumpstart packs, right? White is pretty upfront about the rare the pack have, so does the other starter pack actually. Save for one common in black, all other cards are uncommons, where except one red card being the only magecraft, all other are commanders from the draft set.
And lastly as a brutal plot twist, one of the cards actually managed to not appear. It’s Earthbending Student, it’s numbered with all these beginner box cards, yet not only it doesn’t appear in these 10 packs, it doesn’t appear in any of the Jumpstart packs, and obviously you can’t open it in a play booster. So your best shot is in the one slot of a collectors’ boosters, especially when those industrial pack openers just care about the rare and shelf all these bulk pringles (yes there won’t be a normal version this way).
Instead of having the full 121 packs, the rare and common packs are compressed in half so that we only have 66 packs in total, but there’s still the proper 46 themes gamut. This will partially explains the lower than usual amount of reprints.
A Jumpstart staple of having a lot of commanders that have off colored activated abilities are now replaced with hybrid cards. Which means those cards can appear across both colors, so that’s gonna be difficult to track once we get to the by-pack review. Edit: Here’s the page.