While some players don’t like how Magic: The Gathering has leaned into Universe Beyond sets based on other properties, Wizards of the Coast has continued to tap into existing fandoms as a great way to court new players. But while a passion for Marvel’s Spider-Man or Final Fantasy can inspire collectors to pick up some cards, Magic also needs players to learn an extremely complicated game if they’re going to get hooked enough to buy other sets. The company has devised an excellent way to do that with the Avatar: The Last Airbender Beginner Box.
Wizards has come up with many solutions to onboarding players over the years, like the starter-level Portal sets, Starter Kits that include pre-made decks, and preconstructed 60-card Welcome Decks. The Avatar Beginner Box uses the same format as the Foundations Beginner Box, focusing on teaching the game in a step-by-step way while also exposing players to all the archetypes and mechanics they need to be familiar with to dive deeper into the Avatar set.
The box comes with two prearranged decks meant for your very first game – representing a duel between Aang and Prince Zuko. These mono white and mono red decks are the simplest in the set, emphasizing creatures without any abilities, like Capital Guard, or others that just feature core keyword abilities like Defender or Vigilance.
A pair of booklets take you through each turn with the decks, explaining the rules but also offering strategy tips for when it’s wise to block and attack. They also include some amusing banter between the characters at play, including Zhao, Iroh, Katara, and Sokka. A third booklet offers quick rules references and dives into more complex concepts like the stack. All the books end with two lovely pages of art.
After a first play, those decks can be blended with the box’s eight others using the Jumpstart format. Each represents a different key strategy for the set, like focusing on powerful blue spells with waterbending or buffing your black creatures with counters. I gathered together three casual Magic fans who love Avatar: The Last Airbender and hadn’t tried the Avatar set yet, and we were impressed with how quickly we could start playing solid decks that showed off how well the set melds flavor and mechanics.
We picked our decks randomly and the combinations aren’t all created equal. Blue-red (Izzet) decks are dominating competitive play right now, so the fusion of the red firebending deck with the blue noncreature spells deck was unsurprisingly the most dominant deck at the table. The green big creatures deck, white allies, green earthbending, and black counters deck all employ +1/+1 counters and play well together but are much weaker combined with different archetypes.
The mana bases of the decks all work well thanks to the Jumpstart lands that enter play tapped and then can be tapped for their primary color or a color you choose when they come into play. The set also came with all the tokens we needed while using a wide variety of Avatar art for the same creature types.
The wide variety of strategies reinforces the importance of numerous mechanics in the game, from having an answer to flyers to keeping excess lands back in your hand when facing a black deck that might make you discard. It does a particularly good job of teaching the Avatar-specific mechanics, showing off the versatility of airbending as both an offensive and defensive trick and the power of turning your lands into attackers.
Priced at $30, the Avatar: The Last Airbender Beginner Box is a perfect holiday gift for an Avatar fan curious about Magic or even a lapsed Magic player looking for an easier way to ease back into the game than having to build their own deck or spend an hour drafting one. It left me eager to play more with the Avatar cards, which I suspect is exactly what Wizards of the Coast intended.
