How to teach someone Magic: the Gathering
I got asked to explain how to teach someone Magic: the Gathering. I have taught many players, and here’s what I found works best when you’re starting from literally nothing. I hope you find this guide useful.
Magic is a hyper-dense game. There are 10x as many rules to teach as a starting player needs to know. If you’re introducing someone with zero experience with Magic, start with the bare minimum. The hardest thing about learning Magic is the sheer volume of rules. It is much harder than you’d think to present the game as too simple, but it is incredibly easy to overwhelm someone new with a barrage of rules and mechanics and vocabulary and interactions and and and and and. Magic is really complex, so the key is starting slow and simple.
Lesson 1: The most basic fundamentals
Make two 30-card monocolor decks with only basic lands, creatures, and sorceries. No other card types to start with! You want the decks to be pretty low power level, evenly matched, with a good mana curve, have some simple ways to draw more cards, and include a few exciting but simple cards (Pelaka Wurm, Goliath Sphinx, Sunblast Angel, Rune-Scarred Demon, Thunder Dragon). Use those decks to teach the major essentials:
-parts of a card
-turn structure
-the mana system
-the different zones (except exile and the stack. save those for later!)
-how to cast spells and execute other common game actions
-very basic rules (one land per turn, how to attack and block, etc)
-essential vocabulary (destroy, untap, discard, draw, sacrifice, damage, target, etc)
Keep creatures simple: mostly vanilla and french vanilla, and a very few with enter the battlefield triggers. Avoid repeatable triggers. Use only one or two different keyword abilities per deck and stick to the really easily understood ones that don't break other rules: trample, lifelink, deathtouch, flying, defender, and reach are great introductory keywords. Avoid cards and mechanics that are exceptions to normal rules--as simple as they seem to experienced players, using vigilance, haste, first strike, hexproof, prowess, protection, menace, indestructible, and other creature mechanics make it harder to learn the essential game rules and get the hang of everything 'normal' these mechanics disrupt (tapping, timing, combat damage, targeting, lethal damage, power/toughness, etc). Don't even mention the stack. Don't use any creatures with activated abilities. Only teach the three card types in the starting deck. Use clear, straightforward, flavorfully resonant sorceries: Concentrate, Enlarge, Sever Soul, Righteous Charge, Flame Wave.
It is actually pretty useful to stack the top 10 or 11 cards of their deck the first game so they get a reasonable good flow of lands and spells they can cast on the first few turns (don't let mana screw or flood be their *very* first experience with the game, lol). Practice a few games with those decks, let the newbie stop whenever they want, try to let them win at least one game. Offer to switch decks so they can get a feel for the other deck they’ve seen you play and because seeing how an experienced player uses the same cards they were just using can be helpful, too. Unless the new player is super eager to keep playing, take a break here and call it a day before moving on to the next lesson.
Lesson 2: Enchantments and new Keywords
When the new player is ready to play again, play a game to refresh the skills, vocabulary, and information from the first lesson. After a refresher game or two with the basic decks, if it seems like they mostly get the rudimentary game mechanics (not strategy--that’ll come later), explain enchantments by showing some auras and non-aura enchantments, add about 3 of each and 3 lands to both decks, add one sorcery or creature that can destroy enchantments to both decks, then shuffle up and play some more games. After creature, land, and sorcery, the easiest card type to explain using flavor is enchantment, and they are a very helpful bridge to understanding artifacts and equipment. Play a couple games with the decks until the new player gets some hands-on experience using enchantments and figures out how both types work. Then swap out a few vanilla creatures for ones with new keyword abilities that come up a lot: haste, vigilance, first strike, hexproof, menace/intimidate/fear (depending on what era of cards you have). Play a few more games with these decks, then probably take a break before advancing to the third lesson.
Lesson 3: Instants and the Stack
Next time you play, if things so far are going well, play another game or two to refresh their memory of what they learned so far, then introduce instants. Instants are a fundamental step up in how games flow and open up a lot of strategy doors. Start with very simple but useful, interactive instants: giant growth, disperse, murder, lightning strike, disenchant. This is when you finally introduce the stack, and it will probably take some getting used to because it’s just a weird game mechanic, but necessary to how the game truly works. Some things have easy flavor to help you explain: “things with deathtouch are extra deadly,” or “things with wings can fly over things without wings.” The stack has no flavor to help you explain, it’s purely a bunch of game rules. This is also a good point to swap out the simplest vanilla creatures for a few slightly more complicated ones that can help players get excited and interested, cards that are easy to fall in love with and show off the most iconic things a color does: Overrun, Vampire Nighthawk, Mind Control, Ghostly Prison, Flametongue Kavu. Play a few games with just simple instants, sorceries, enchantments, creatures, and basic lands. The mechanics and strategies and gameplay here represents a huge amount of what Magic is about, and after a few games with these decks, your protege should have a pretty good foundation.
Recapping what you taught them
Take a few minutes to talk through what they’ve been learning and put it into context. Ask them if they are seeing how the three major tangible resources (mana, cards, and life) interact. By now they probably are starting to ask strategy questions, which is great! Explain in simple terms the single most fundamental pillar of Magic strategy: card advantage. Illustrate with different kinds of card advantage: Divination & Mind Rot, Flametongue Kavu, Second Thoughts, Cloudkin Seer, etc. Give some general pointers they can apply in most games, like the more mana you use during each of your turns the better, and think through what creatures live or die in combat if you attack or block a certain way before you decide to do so.
If your pupil is really showing interest in the strategy, now is a fine time to explain the essence of the five colors and basic strategy of the five major deck archetypes. I’ve outlined a really simplified version of each below. But if they aren’t especially showing interest in this, it’s fine to save these explanations for later:
White wins because it’s tougher than you. Blue wins because it’s smarter than you. Red wins because it’s faster than you. Green wins because it’s bigger than you. Black wins because it wants it more than you.
Aggro (aggressive) decks deploy as many cheap, fast threats as early as possible to kill the opponent before they can get set up. They excel in the early turns of the game. Control decks prevent and disrupt the opponent’s game plan, build up card advantage, and win with just one or a few powerful, expensive threats. They excel in games that go long. Midrange decks deploy a mix of mid-sized threats and efficient answers, out-classing aggro decks and pressuring control decks. They’re at their best in the midgame. Ramp decks seek to increase their mana supply faster than the opponent in order to dominate them with more powerful spells than their opponent can afford. They effectively reach the later turns of the game sooner than the opponent. Combo decks combine cards that interact to generate an effect more powerful than the sum of their separate pieces, often winning immediately. They want to find assemble their combo pieces as fast as possible before dying to more conventional strategies.
Where to go from here
If they are on board, learning well, and enjoying the game so far then it’s probably you have successfully recruited another Magic fan! If your card collection allows, there are some very common but tricky game elements it’s best if you’ve avoided until now: activated abilities and artifacts, +1/+1 or -1/-1 counters, and multicolor cards. If lessons 1, 2, and 3 went well, it doesn’t matter much which order you introduce these four new game elements. But consider if anything is giving them trouble. If your padawan is struggling with the instants and stack, more practice with that is helpful before introducing activated abilities. Similarly, someone having a hard time with combat math might benefit from more practice with that before learning counters that modify power/toughness. For someone not totally comfortable with how the mana system works, hold off before you introduce multicolor cards and 2-color decks.
The game mechanics I’d suggest learning after these are a teeny bit more complicated, but very common and just about essential for getting into the game at this point: the exile zone, tokens, and cards that care about creature type. It’s also a good time to start slowly introducing mechanics that make the actual gameplay better and more enjoyable: scry, cycling, modal cards, cantrips, tutoring, and color fixing. Getting mana screwed/flooded, not having useful cards, and not having the right colors of mana can make a game very frustrating. These mechanics make those common unfun situations in Magic much more avoidable by helping your rookie player draw the right cards in the right order in more games, which will in turn make learning the game a much happier experience.
Things new players don’t need to worry about
Some parts of the game are just too complicated to bring up with someone just learning Magic. You will make learning the game easier for a rookie if you just don’t even bring these up until they really have the hang of the game.
-Planeswalkers: They are so much more complicated than any other card type, but they are very cool.
-Legendary: this adds so little from a game-play standpoint and is (just in mechanics) basically all downside and extra rules for negligible payoff.
-Layers: while necessary for the game to work, put off explaining the layer system as long as you can. It boggles and frustrates, and is a pain to remember, even for people playing for a year or longer.
-Formats: it’s easy for new players to worry about card legality and formats, but just focusing on what cards and gameplay are exciting and fun will reel someone in better without touching on this for a while. Compounding a new player’s efforts to learn basic rules with format-specific rules like Planechase, Archenemy, Commander, etc won’t help either.
-Multiplayer: As tempting as it is to throw people into multiplayer games to play up the social aspect, many new players can find this overwhelming. A common new player response is to just give up trying to understand what’s happening in a game if there are too many cards to read and track, or play is moving too quickly. Patience on this.
-Infrequent, retired, or complex mechanics: stay focused on practicing the basics and the evergreen mechanics (the ones in every or almost every set). Learning the core of the game is easier when you aren’t overloaded with new vocabulary. You can teach someone better without adding in proliferate, exalted, flashback, bushido, hybrid, escalate, or suspend. Protection has come back to the game and is starting to show up more, and regenerate is on tons of old cards that show up in reprint sets and Commander, but both of those mechanics are much denser than mechanics like double strike or scry.
-Deckbuilding: this can be a daunting challenge that turns many new players away and often rubs in their face the parts of the game they are the least proficient in. You should do most or all of the deckbuilding or use precons for someone just learning the ropes unless they express a lot of interest in doing this themself.
I hope this guide helps you, but it is only a guide. Remember to teach following the interest and excitement of a new player. Magic is an awesome game, but lots of people find different things to love about it. Finding what your newbie loves is what will hook them into the game, so look out for that as they learn. And when you find things that especially delight them, show them more so they know whatever it is they love is something Magic is full of!
