Somebody wants me to teach them Magic, but all I have are cube cards. I will not acquire new cards. Anybody have advice?
General Cube as a teaching device
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
Maybe I should just make 5 monocolor decks.
Ask your local store for the tutorial decks wizards ships out every year; they're 40-card core set peasant decks, one for each color, and they're supposed to be free. I use them to teach people all the time, and they're pretty great at reflecting each color's abilities.
Honestly I have attempted to make tutorial decks out of my cube and it just wasn't very friendly at all. For some reason keywords make the game harder to learn, so try to use as few of them as possible. Don't drop interactions like fetchlands + landfall on them, keep the games as basic as possible. Another method I've used is completely stacking decks and/or playing with open hands so you can walk them through everything.
Honestly I have attempted to make tutorial decks out of my cube and it just wasn't very friendly at all. For some reason keywords make the game harder to learn, so try to use as few of them as possible. Don't drop interactions like fetchlands + landfall on them, keep the games as basic as possible. Another method I've used is completely stacking decks and/or playing with open hands so you can walk them through everything.
Yep, make five monocolour decks. Thirty cards apiece is more than enough. I would try to keep all of your creatures and spells as vanilla as possible, because there's going to be plenty of information overload just from learning the basic game structure and rules. Card complexity and strategic evaluation isn't something that newcomers will want to process for the first couple of games. At the same time, having a handful of bombs - Serra Angel! - increases the all-important fun factor, which is really what you want to be emphasizing about Magic to keep them coming back, moreso than the basic ruleset.
If you can, you should just pick up a whole pile of recent core set commons and uncommons on the cheap, and have them handy for these exact situations. Teaching a couple of people in my office how to play with a stack of M13 filler cards has made it so that we now have enough players to run a work Magic club, wherein we cube draft.
If you can, you should just pick up a whole pile of recent core set commons and uncommons on the cheap, and have them handy for these exact situations. Teaching a couple of people in my office how to play with a stack of M13 filler cards has made it so that we now have enough players to run a work Magic club, wherein we cube draft.
CML
Contributor
Between everything being "fair" and every type of card being encompassed Cube is the perfect venue for teaching MTG. As I tutor more and more, I become more firmly convinced that "starting with Legacy" is a far better way to teach friends than "starting with Duels," so to speak, and though the latter is a better marketing strategy, who cares, it's your Cube and your friends, after all -- that's why we're here.
Edit: if it doesn't work have him buy some Duel Decks. I typed "him" but your ambiguously gendered pronoun makes me suspicious this is a girlfriend
Edit: if it doesn't work have him buy some Duel Decks. I typed "him" but your ambiguously gendered pronoun makes me suspicious this is a girlfriend
I don't know what this is.