(Doubling Season | Art by Kawasumi)

2024 has seen a ton of sets enter the battlefield this year. Seven sets if you are including remasters and nine sets if supplemental product like Fallout and Assassin's Creed count as well. With each of these sets injecting their own new and unique mechanics to the game, it's started to feel like we'd be running into the wall of information overload. From Outlaws of Thunder Junction's Plot mechanic kind of being like Kaldheim's Foretell mechanic but not really because the card is face up and free; to Rad counters making Mill fun again, we've needed a break. A return to normalcy that Core Sets of Magic's ancient past used to provide. Which is exactly why Foundations has been such a surprising breath of fresh air that has the whole community cheering.

- Pictured, all the homies cheering

Magic: The Gathering: Foundations is a truly unique. On a meta level, the timing of this set and the longevity of its legality makes it incredibly special. Being legal in standard for five total years is something we have never really seen before, but its great because it gives everyone equal ground to stand on when it comes to building a deck. You won't need to buy a pack of Aether Drift in order to build your first mono-red Goblin deck because Foundations will always be here to give you access to the basics. Basics that include a bevvy of mechanics that Wizards of the Coast clearly feels all players, be they new or old, should have a working understanding of going forward, and that's what we are going to cover today.

Flash it back now ya'll

Flashback

So you're playing Magic, and you play some spell that draws you a card. It goes from your hand, to the stack, resolves, and then ends up in the graveyard. That sounds kind of boring right? What good is a card that just gets cast once and then you never see it do anything again? Well Flashback was invented specifically to give your cards another go, letting all of your goobers that love it when you cast spells trigger an additional time. Appearing most often on cards, flashback is stapled onto cards that are usually just decent on their own, but for the privilege of casting them again, you'll often have to pay a more expensive cost while in the graveyard.

When the card does what the card says

It's good to remember however, that the graveyard counts as another zone, or better yet, somewhere other than your hand. Cards like Vega, the Watcher, The Twelfth Doctor, and Keeper of Secrets all mention this exact condition and absolutely love Flashback cards. Yet casting these cards from the graveyard tends to be rather expensive, but luckily cost reductions cards like Stormcatch Mentor and Mocking Sprite still work while they are in the graveyard anyway. Haughty Djinn and Melek, Reforged Researcher can lead to some interesting combat scenarios when you cast Dream Twist, swing for damage, then Flashback Dream Twist at instant speed with reduced cost.

Timelords love Flashback

Flashback is really good, but its not like we can just copy-paste Flashback onto just every instant and sorcery right? Right? It turns out giving spells extra sentences that they don't normally have is actually pretty good, as one of the previous greatest-cards-ever Snapcaster Mage can attest. Use Backdraft Hellkite and Sphinx of Forgotten Lore to give your Swords to Plowshares and Lightning Bolts double the value. Or use them on cards that already have Flashback like Inspiration from Beyond and Electroduplicate and pay the original cost instead of the upcharge of those hidden fees.

It's like a four mana convenience fee!

Kicker

Kicker, the "Everything" mechanic is honestly as foundational to Magic as any mechanic could possibly be. Kicker quite literally just paying an additional cost as you are casting a spell in order to get additional effects. Which might sound pretty much like most other mechanics and you would be perfectly correct. So it stands to reason that Kicker returns for Foundations on nine different cards an appearing in each color. Each Kicker ability on these cards pretty much makes each of these cards just a bit more "blue" or "green" than the card already was before. For example Burst Lightning takes the regular two damage for up to four damage for . Gnarlid Colony is already a two mana 2/2 but for three more you get something bigger for your trouble later in the game. Into the Roil and new card Divine Resilience are great examples of how to make cards scale with the length of the game. for making one creature indestructible but for any number of creatures is amazing value.

A default creature

There are tons of Kicker cards though that are more or less only considered by players for their kicker costed abilities. Like yea, sure you COULD play Rite of Replication for four mana, but then its about the same cost as many other copy spells. Yet there isn't a single Be'lakor, the Dark Master or Lord of the Nazgûl commander player who doesn't plan on spending anything less than for the card that will win the game for them. Nullpriest of Oblivion is technically a costed spell, yet even pre cons will list it as the reanimation card. There isn't too much to say about the mechanic that is the basis for most all mechanics strangely enough, other than hey, more mana into the spells equals more of what you were casting it for in the first place. Consider where you are really planning on casting these spells and if either the high or low cost is worth that card slot!

 

Landfall

Have you ever been bored of simply playing lands and casting spells? You know, just playing lands and then tapping them to drum up some mana and then chuck a giant Grappling Kraken at your foes? Well thank goodness Magic: the Gathering invented landfall, so that you get even more value out of playing lands than just simply tapping for mana! Landfall is an ability that triggers whenever a land you control enters (the battlefield) and is present in each color but largely focused in green. This makes a lot of sense considering every color deals with putting lands into play, but green tends to deal with them just a bit more often than others. Yet each color is inherently tied to the core resource of the game and reward the player for triggering landfall with abilities that speak to what make those colors unique.

White tends to get landfall abilities that tie directly into their essence of community building, creature resurrection, and exile. Look no farther than Emeria Angel, Emeria Shepherd andAdmonition Angel for examples of how white's massive angels, who already require a bit of land to cast in the first place, reward you for working up to and past their huge costs. White's other main creature type, cats, also bring these same traits to the table but with smaller bodies and rewards 's go wide strategy.

Blue is not very known for getting a lot of land into play. Sure you need always have for the next threat that needs to be dealt with. So if you're going to tap out for a permanent creature with landfall, blue needs to make sure it was worth your defenses being down. Things like tapping your foes down with Guardian of Tazeem, Grappling Kraken, and Tideforce Elemental's abilities make up for this as well as blue's mind control tendencies with Roil Elemental. Lets not forget Blue's best tools for ensuring their victory through drawing more cards than everyone else or making sure they have no cards in their deck, which landfall rewards too.

 

Less than even Blue, Black is perhaps the least known for getting lands out more than once a turn and honestly it makes sense considering black is seen as more of a corrupting influence than anything and it shows. Juxtaposed from White, Black's expression through landfall is a hodgepodge of selfish abilities that lack cohesion like with Dreadwurm's weird indestructible, Surrakar Marauder's intimidate and Scrib Nibblers's topdeck land exile. However we still see that landfall wont let us forget the main things that black is known for, necromancy, pain/drain, and demonic punishment.

 

Red has a huge, fast and explosive relation ship with land, similar to the exploding volcanoes typically shown on mountains themselves. Phoenixes, Elementals andDragons each represent some aspect of Red Landfall in Magic. Yet lets be honest with ourselves; what is more Red the combat damage and noncombat damage? Skyclave Geopede, Reckless Pyrosurfer and Moraug, Fury of Akoum each teach a lesson in throwing hands, while the following kick in the door and just start blasting.

 

Ok. Green. Where do I even begin and an even bigger question, where do I end? Green is THE land color, not only shown by the fact that there are over 60 cards in Magic with Landfall on them, some of them have had to be errata'd to have the actual word Landfall added. That's just how ubiquitous Green getting buffs for lands entering is. They truly do everything here, from making massive armies on every trigger, gaining more life, and +1/+1 counters.

Every single aspect of Green is perfectly(horrifyingly if you are me) expressed and if you add all of the land ramp that puts lands from your deck into play, you will simply never believe in mana flooding.

 

Foundations has more mechanics in it, but being a core set, I wanted to focus on the ones that are truly at the base level that holds the pillars of the game, and ones that if you master them, you end up learning how to look out for aspects of the game you might not have before but should. If you can wrap your head around flashback and its many use cases, then you will get a handle on how spellslinger decks work in general and how the graveyard can be seen as a second hand. If you can get how kicker is everything, everywhere all at once, you'll have an affinity for any other mechanic. Master of Landfall will teach you to watch out for triggers on the battlefield, and how even the most innocuous aspect of the game, playing lands, can break open the roof of Magic's complexity ceiling. However, I have faith in you all to master each of these and have an absolute blast doing it!

Now go forth and master the Foundations of Magic or simply get yourself a refresher. Either way I look forward to pointing back to this set for the next five years for players old and new.

---

Read more: