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One of the most enjoyable ways to engage with Magic: The Gathering is through drafting. This format values game knowledge and strategy, allowing players to compete without the need for expensive card investments. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for newcomers to dive into new sets.
While many expansions introduce fresh mechanics and interactions, Foundations embraces a more straightforward approach. It simplifies each color, providing an easy way for new players to grasp the essence of the game while letting seasoned players appreciate the nostalgic clarity of the color wheel. This guide will help you navigate your first pack selection!
Flying (White/Blue)
The Flying ability is primarily linked to blue but is also prevalent in white, featuring a host of Angels, Spirits, and Birds. Creatures with Flying cannot be blocked except by other creatures that have Flying or Reach, allowing your aerial forces to strike your opponent with minimal hindrance.
When crafting a sealed or draft deck, evasion is crucial; it’s your ticket to bypassing your opponent’s blockers. This deck style thrives on that concept, letting you concentrate on other aspects of deck construction without stressing over having enough evasive creatures to break through defenses.
The key uncommon in this archetype, Empyrean Eagle, enhances all your flying creatures by granting them a buff. While it can’t boost itself, you can easily draft a few copies to amplify each other.
Mixing in a bit of green is highly effective: Green brings +1/+1 counters and temporary boosts, making your flying creatures hit even harder, and adds ramp options to bring out your heavier hitters early. Just remember that green doesn’t have flying creatures, so it works best in a support role.
Graveyard (Blue/Black)
Black is closely tied to themes of death, graveyards, and reanimation, with blue complementing it by filling graveyards to trigger effects that rely on them.
An example of this synergy is Dreadwing Scavenger, which helps fill your graveyard while getting stronger as you stack cards in it. Drawing cards whenever it attacks can be potent, even if you need to discard one right afterward.
With a variety of combos available, you can either focus your strategy on one aspect or diversify your deck. Certain cards become easier to cast with a full graveyard, like Tolarian Terror, while others gain strength from forcing opponents to discard or mill cards.
Additionally, green makes a great splash into this color pairing: It complements black’s themes of death and rebirth, rewarding you for sacrificing your creatures. Green also supplies ramp, giving you options for casting heavier spells in case your graveyard strategy gets thwarted.
Raid (Black/Red)
The Raid mechanic rewards players for attacking every turn and provides bonuses when you play spells during your second main phase. It signifies that certain creatures have added effects triggered after you attack.
Perforating Artist deals three damage to each opponent at the end of your turn unless they discard a card or sacrifice a nonland permanent. However, this ability only triggers if you attacked that turn, so consistent attacking is essential to maximizing your gains.
Some creatures with Raid feature additional effects when they enter the battlefield, like Gorehorn Raider, which strikes a target for two damage after an attack. This serves as a reminder that you don’t have to do everything in your first main phase—delaying your plays can yield benefits.
This aggressive tactic encourages the use of combat tricks to ensure your attackers survive, enabling extra damage through buffing unblocked creatures. Green and white are both effective for combat tricks, making a splash of either color beneficial for access to instants like Giant Growth or Fleeting Flight.
Don’t underestimate Fake Your Own Death; it can eliminate an opponent’s blocker, activate your own enter or leave effects, and earn you a Treasure token—all for just two mana.
Power (Red/Green)
The combination of red and green forms one of the easiest archetypes to grasp: generate plenty of mana and hit your opponent hard. This archetype prioritizes creatures with a power of four or more, providing plenty of options for strong creatures, buffs to reach that threshold, and rewards for successfully landing hits.
Ruby, Daring Tracker is a prime example of this archetype: Not only does she produce both red and green mana, streamlining your big threats’ arrival, but she also powers up each time she attacks while a creature with at least four power is under your control.
Green is the top color for ramping mana, so look for spells to fetch additional lands and mana-producing creatures. While Llanowar Elves may not meet your target power level, they provide mana generation each turn, allowing you to deploy substantial threats more quickly.
This archetype often relies heavily on large creatures that other colors can easily remove, so it’s beneficial to have ways to protect them. White offers options for safeguarding your creatures along with useful combat tricks, while blue allows you to counter threats to your key creatures.
+1/+1 Counters (Green/White)
White and green have always shared a strong connection through growth and community. Both colors excel at enhancing smaller creatures, and this archetype embodies that principle.
Counters are permanent enhancements that allow your creatures to become more substantial threats, unlike temporary buffs that only last for the duration of a turn. Good-Fortune Unicorn propels this growth by granting a +1/+1 counter to each creature when they enter the battlefield.
Stacking +1/+1 counters is especially rewarding, particularly if placed on creatures with trample. Additionally, seek out cards that offer payoffs: Cards such as Inspiring Paladin and Gnarlid Colony provide extra benefits for your creatures adorned with +1/+1 counters, motivating you to distribute your counters instead of concentrating them on one creature.
If you do want to focus all your counters onto a single creature, consider adding blue to counter any removal spells from your opponents. However, a better strategy is to spread the counters across multiple creatures, enhancing your chances of surviving board wipes or burn spells from red, while also fueling additional aggression and haste.
Life Gain (White/Black)
White and black have a complex relationship, yet both share an affinity for gaining life. Once seen as a weak mechanic, life gain has evolved significantly, becoming a powerful strategy in limited formats such as sealed and draft.
White life gain generally comes in the form of healing or lifelink, both of which are found in Foundations. Lifelink significantly benefits creatures with higher toughness, such as Felidar Savior, or those with first strike, allowing them to block smaller threats while restoring your life total. Black often employs vampirism mechanics, stealing life from opponents or equipping creatures on the field.
Simply gaining life doesn’t secure victory, so find cards with payoff effects. Fiendish Panda grows stronger each time you gain life, making multiple life-gain effects highly valuable. Elenda, Saint of Dusk rewards you with increased power as long as your life total remains above your starting point.
Green complements this archetype well, providing short-term boosts and +1/+1 counters, allowing your creatures with lifelink to deal more damage and heal you further.
Spells (Blue/Red)
Red and blue are both colors that enjoy casting a plethora of instants and sorceries, and the Foundations archetype promotes this by rewarding you for playing numerous non-creature spells.
Instead of relying on the storm mechanic like many decks, Foundations centers around permanents that gain advantages from casting instants, sorceries, and other non-creature spells. For example, Crackling Cyclops becomes stronger for every non-creature spell you cast, while Balmor, Battlemage Captain boosts all your creatures.
Other permanents provide direct advantages when you cast spells, such as Mocking Sprite, which lowers the cost of your instants and sorceries by one generic mana. Thousand-Year Storm is the crown jewel for this archetype in limited formats, enabling you to unleash multiple cheap spells before dropping a massive bomb with several copies.
Should you focus on blue’s card draw, the primary weakness of this archetype is a lack of mana. Casting several cards each turn can quickly deplete your resources. Thankfully, green offers various sorceries to activate your effects while providing the additional lands you crave. However, if you acquire several mana rocks like Heraldic Banner, you can concentrate more on non-creature spells rather than relying solely on instants and sorceries.
Morbid (Black/Green)
The black and green pairing symbolizes the cycle of life: from death springs new growth, and regardless of what perishes, you’ll reap the benefits. The morbid ability indicates that theres a trigger on your end step if a creature met its demise that turn.
Black provides the necessary fodder for morbid cards, whether by eliminating opposing creatures or sacrificing your own. Being mindful of how many of your creatures you’ll have to sacrifice allows room for inclusion of creatures with recursion, like Reassembling Skeleton, which can return after each death.
Each time a creature dies, your morbid cards activate, offering triggers like drawing a card or gaining life with Warden of the Cycle. To enhance these effects, utilize instants or permanents that let you send creatures to the graveyard on your opponent’s turn, and seek out ways to resurrect all your fallen allies.
If decent recursion options in black are scarce, consider integrating white. White presents various options, along with the ability to create a multitude of small token creatures that can serve as blockers or be sacrificed for morbid triggers.
Aggro (Red/White)
Red and white come together to create a swift, aggressive archetype that can overwhelm an opponent before they fully establish their strategy. This is crucial since the deck often lacks sustainability in longer matches.
The aim of this archetype is to overrun the board with small, inexpensive creatures that can be buffed to launch significant early attacks. Combat tricks are abundant, so keep an eye out for instant spells that can give you an advantage during battles. After a couple of those plays, the opponent may hesitate to block even your smallest creatures.
Cards generating multiple tokens, such as Heroic Reinforcements and Prideful Parent, are essential. Just as vital are ways to whittle down your opponent’s life, like Impact Tremors, which inflicts one damage whenever you summon a creature. Having a few instances of this card can escalate your damaging output significantly.
Blue can assist in refilling your hand if you start running low on cards, while black can offer some additional recursion to turn a graveyard filled with departed creatures into a formidable army in a single move.
Ramp (Green/Blue)
Green and blue collaborate to develop a vast mana reserve, enabling you to cast big spells more rapidly and consistently compared to other archetypes. Moreover, they provide various options to maximize benefits from playing lands, primarily through landfall triggers.
Landfall is an ability that activates when you put a land into play. At first glance, it may seem limited, as you can only play one land each turn; however, there are several ways to manage more. Cards like Springbloom Druid and Burnished Hart can fetch multiple lands, dramatically accelerating your mana supply and trigger potential.
Grappling Kraken exemplifies this archetype’s capabilities: While it’s large and costly to cast, it doesn’t pose an issue if you’re consistent in playing additional lands. Once it enters the battlefield, you can keep activating landfall effects, tapping your opponent’s creatures and inflicting stun counters, highlighting the control aspect inherent to blue mana.
This archetype can face challenges during the early game, so consider incorporating extra removal from black. White can provide inexpensive blockers, but Llanowar Elves can fulfill that role without needing an extra color while also generating mana.
