The best cards in the Foundations Starter Collection

Important takeaways

• The Starter Collection in Foundations offers interesting cards and a mix of rarities, making it attractive to Magic veterans.

• Gilded Lotus, while not as effective, provides a quick boost in mana to help advance the board.

• Dread Summons is a powerful card that sizzles opponents and floods your board, while creating synergy and combos in your graveyard.

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's coming next. And one of the most exciting things released alongside Foundations is the Starter Collection.

This box contains three Foundations booster packs along with 361 predetermined cards in all rarities. Many of these can only be found in this collection, making it a worthwhile purchase even if you're already a magical veteran.

10

Gilded Lotus

A big, expensive Mana Rock

Gilded Lotus might pale in comparison to more efficient mana cloaks like Sol Ring or Arcane Signet, but it's still a quick way to get ahead in mana.

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

The general wisdom around Gilded Lotus is that if you can do something that flips with the mana you can tap it for, then it's a worthwhile play. After casting a Tauren Mauler or Predator Ooze, it goes from a five-mana artifact that just destroys instantly, to, effectively, a two-mana stone that can tap into a lot more.

9

Maze's End

Your first alternative win condition

Maze decks are often one of the first alternative ways to win a game that a new Magic player discovers. Put two different Gates together before triggering the Maze's End and instant win is easy to understand, but also impressive to do.

With so many Gates printed in recent years, Maze's End is much more interesting now than it was at its debut. In Standard, you don't have as many Gates to work with as elsewhere, making Maze decks a harder thing to put together. But if you're dealing with Commander, you also have the seven Baldur's Gates, the Gateway Plaza, and one-time portals like the Talon Gates of Madara and the Thran Portal.

8

The Wurm Massacre

Punish token players

Foundations is full of cards that make a lot of small tokens, and it's one of White's prominent themes in the set. If you have an opponent that 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 life loss carnage Wurm inflicts makes it one of the scariest cards in the Starter Collection. And after all that, you still have a 6/5 carrier, which is nothing to sneeze at.

7

Dread Summons

All we want to do is eat your brains

Dread Summons are the kind of huge, splashy cards that new players love, and anyone with a zombie deck will know how much that can be. Paying X to get everyone sizzling before making a ton of 2/2 Zombie tokens can quickly turn the game in your favor.

You don't just grind your opponents, you also do it to yourself. That makes this a great way to set up your graveyard for recursion, falling, threshold, and a dozen other graveyard-centric mechanics. Meanwhile, if you have a Champion of the Perished on the battlefield, be prepared to drop out big time.

6

Mentor of the meek

About as good as it gets for white card drawing

White is one of the worst colors when it comes to drawing cards. Most effects limit you to only doing it once per turn, or allow your opponents to pull with you as well, making it hard to catch up. Mentor of the Meek is one of those rare examples of white card draw that really helps you get ahead.

You have to play small creatures and pay a mana to do it, but in any deck that has a lot of “weenies” it can help you keep tough. Foundations is full of symbolic strategies, so having a few cats or bunnies coming in can help fill your hand with ease.

5

Basilic collar

Give anything the Deathtouch

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

Anything with trample can chew through blockers like they're nothing, combat spells become instant removal, and with Fynn the Fangbearer also in the set, poison gains become much more profitable. Remove the creature and the Basilisk Collar stops, ready to retool for something else and continue its reign of terror.

4

Boros Charm

Set a trap for your opponents

Boros Charm is one of the most powerful flexible instants in the Starter Collection, and is still wild as an uncommon 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 win through combat.

There is a third option to deal four damage to a player or planeswalker, but it pales in comparison to the other two. All red/white decks will want Boros Charm, simply as a treat 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 a fairly expensive mana cloak with five generic mana. But the payoff is huge, 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 to the original.

In Foundations, it can let you make tons of trolls with a Goblin Negotiation, give a +6/+6 buff to all your creatures with Overrun, or gain control of two creatures with involuntary employment. To make it even better, you can do this every time you tap Pyromancer's Goggles, giving you an absurd amount of value every 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 bit of an expensive way to make a copy of a target creature, but kicking it to make five copies instead of nine mana is incredibly explosive.

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

1

Darksteel Colossus

The Big Bot Of Box

Every single part of the Darksteel Colossus is terrifying on its own: an 11/11 would be bad enough, but it has overruns. An 11/11 with stomp is bad enough, but it's also indestructible. An 11/11 with stomp and indestructible is terrifying, and instead of dying, it just shuffles back into your deck.

Darksteel Colossus is hard to get rid of without exile, and hard to block thanks to its size, Darksteel Colossus is also easy to learn and cheat thanks to being an artifact. Plus it comes in the same box as a Rite of Replication, which is completely overkill.