Teaching people how to improve is something that everyone has an opinion on. Technical play, deck building, entire websites loaded with content, decklists, and message boards dedicated to explaining how and when to play what card, in what format, in what archetype. It can be overwhelming.

Now, imagine you had to explain what a great Miracles or combo deck was all about to someone who didn’t know what the stack is, or priority, or mana. How somebody learns Magic is important to how they interact with the game, and its community. Furthermore, how they learn impacts whether or not they choose to continue to interact with it on a regular basis.

Many new players tend to be between the ages of 12 and 20. They heard about Magic on the internet, or saw a friend play it. It looked fun, and they wanted to give it a try. A lot of your work in getting someone, even a young child, to sit still and pay attention is done for you already. The problem boils down to how you, the teacher, think and talk about magic. Will you describe Magic as a game about card advantage and arithmetic? Or as a game about inter dimensional wizards and dragons who breathe lightning? Will you bring up the stack? What about infect?

Magic is an old, dense, and most of all complex game. It survives solely because new players regularly enter the fold, despite how high the barrier to entry is. Here are some tools to ensure that the friends, loved ones, and strangers that you welcome into our strange little club will have a positive and productive learning experience the first time they shuffle up to sling some spells.

1: Understand and Articulate the Inherent

I want you to do a little thought experiment. Think about the number one. Visualize it in your head. Imagine what the number one looks like. Now, describe the number one to yourself, out loud, not just its features as an image in your head, but as a concept. How will your description of the number one inform how you describe the number two, or three, or six hundred and seventy two? Once you’ve described whole numbers, how would you describe a fraction?

This kind of quantifying of abstractions that seem rote is something I need to remember to do each time I sit down to teach somebody how to play MTG.

If you’re reading this you probably play a lot of Magic. You know how to manipulate and interact with the rules of the game to your advantage. You understand how mechanics interact with each other on a fundamental level. But, to teach somebody how to play for the first time, you need to remember how counter intuitive magic can be.

What is tapping?

When can I untap?

What are the phases of a turn and what happens during each of those phases?

What is the difference between putting a counter on something, and countering something?

These are the questions you will be asked. You have to answer, in detail, if they are going to grasp the basics of the game to a point where they can go off and play on their own. You will be there to help them grow as a player. Anticipating and understanding these idiomatic questions can greatly improve your success rates when articulating the finer points of Magic’s most complex systems.

2: Play with the Right Deck(s)

The worst thing you can do to a new player is let them use a good deck in their first game. Imagine you’re a kid who wants their driver’s license, would you feel comfortable learning in a Formula One car? You’d probably crash it. Even if you survived, you would have learned nothing about driving a car properly. Magic, like driving a car, is a complex task that people often forget is complex. Most local gaming stores have small 35 card decks purpose built for low complexity, low variance, match-ups ideal for learning how to play magic. I recommend playing with an invisible Telepathy in play. Explain to your opponent that usually a player’s hand is hidden information, but that for the purposes of learning, you’ll both play with your hands laid out on the table. This is done so that you can better teach them how a given scenario should, or could, play out.

3: The Turn

Untap
Upkeep
Draw
Main
Combat
Main
End

When I took over the Apprentice League at Face to Face Games Toronto the first thing I did was concoct a print-out explaining, in detail, each phase of a turn in Magic. I did this so that each new player could study it, and have all the information laid out in front of them as they learned; sort of an “open textbook” approach.

Each time you take a turn with your opponent, vocalize each phase of the turn and go through all the steps you are taking and allowed to take. The turn structure is an excellent backbone to build your experience around. I’ve found an early command of the turn phases makes for better technical play earlier and more often.

4: Not All at Once

The first thing anyone who teaches magic to new players on a regular basis will tell you is that it’s never a good idea to try and explain all the rules at once. The rules reminder cards that come in intro decks don’t explain even a third of the rules. In the Duels of the Planeswalkers video game, ostensibly a tool for teaching people how to play Magic, the entirety of the rules are not explained until you have completed the full campaign. Since Magic is so dense, it is not expected that every rule or interaction will come up during a given game, and so it’s reasonable to ease people into the rules over multiple games. This reinforces my conviction that playing with “real” decks is the wrong move when teaching anybody how to play Magic.

5: Your Attitude Matters

Magic is a huge game, and largely considered one of the best. It’s complex and interesting in ways that few other games are. It’s always growing, not just in terms of new sets and mechanics but in terms of its players. New kinds of players, from all walks of life, are coming to Magic in order to find a community where they can make new friends and be represented in the fiction. Just like the cast of Magic’s lore, there are players of every racial, economic, sexual and political walk of life. They should all be welcomed and accepted. If I could only give you one piece of advice on how to make sure the person you teach Magic to wants to come back and play again, it would be this: be kind, patient and enthusiastic. Vocally or violently reprimanding misplays and getting frustrated reinforces that mile-high barrier to entry. Remember, the person sitting across from you, reading every card painstakingly, and asking every silly, obvious question over, and over again, is interested in Magic because they want to have fun. You already know how to have fun playing Magic. They need to find that fun on their own terms, and in their own time. The way you talk about Magic, the way you interact with them, and the way you handle their first experiences will dictate whether or not they decide that Magic is worthy of their time.

Conclusion

The least obvious thing about Magic is why it’s so great. Outsiders looking in are often most befuddled, not by the huge list of rules, but by Magic’s power to connect, and enchant so many people over so many years, for so many different reasons. When you sit down to teach a person how to play, you are an emissary of our community, and I hope you’ll take that role seriously. Understand how important it is to the future of this game we all love.