This is meant to be played as a Battlebox.

That means each player gets ten lands in exile at the start of the game, one of each basic and a set of allied color guildgates. Both players grab a stack of cards from the Battlebox to form their deck and start with 4 cards and 20 life, no mulligans. A player's deck can't run out, if it ever does they just grab more cards from the battlebox. You can play one land per turn from your exile zone. Other than that it is magic as normal.

This battlebox is meant to be for beginners to help teach them the basics of playing Magic. As such the aim is to have a very streamlined experience that is straightforward and easy to understand but does touch on many of magic's fundamentals.

TLDR: Essentially I was trying to build a Battle Box that allowed new players to play “real” Magic while keeping things simple and grokable so I didn’t have to keep explaining what each keyword meant every other turn.

Why use a Battle Box as a teaching tool though?

No mulligans (I always hate teaching brand new players and then trying to explain one of the more complicated decisions they’ll ever be making before they’ve even played a single turn)

No mana screw or flood, everyone gets a good game of Magic for their introduction to the game (Nothing sucks worse than trying to teach the game to someone and then watching them be stuck on 2 lands for the whole game)

New players get to try all the different colors to get a feel for what they like

So I set out to make my “teaching” Battle Box with the following design restrictions

#1 No Vanilla Creatures

French Vanilla (only keyword abilities) creatures are fine, but actual plain stat-sticks with no abilities are a little too boring. I want this to be "new player friendly", but my friends are all avid gamers and certainly capable of handling some basic abilities. Sometimes I think people make "new player decks" a little too simple, making the game feel boring. That would be fine when teaching children or people totally unfamiliar with games, but that is not my target audience.

#2 No cards without reminder text for their keywords

This was a very difficult restriction. As Magic players we have internalized so much of this stuff, it is almost like a second language. I was constantly reading cards and going "That's nice and simple.", only to realize it had two different ability keywords with no explanation as to what they did. It was hard finding copies of cards that actually told what things meant on them, and I wanted to at least let new players start with the concept of "Reading the card explains the card."

I have also noticed when teaching new people, keywords are something they struggle with constantly. The game is frequently stopped while they ask "Now what does Vigilance do again?". Even after you've told them what Scry does 3 or 4 times, they still have to ask the next time they see it. This has given me a greater appreciation for WotC's arguments as to why they don't go Keyword crazy. They are very nice for enfranchised players, but they are a real barrier to entry for beginners.

Obviously, once they've played this Battle Box a few times, they'll stop having to read the reminder text for Flying or whatever, and then they'll be ready to move on to more advanced cards.

#3 No tokens of any kind

I wanted this box to be small and transportable. I've also noticed new players struggle with board states that are in any way complex, especially if they include tokens for which you don't have the actual token card.

I did decide that I wanted to allow +1/+1 and -1/-1 Counters though, both to introduce them to the concept and allow for some recursive creatures. Also, plenty of small white and black dice easily fit in the box for them.

#4 Introduce as many of the central concepts of MtG as possible

This included the five major card types: Creature, Sorcery, Instant, Enchantment, and Artifacts. No Planeswalkers or Battles, those can come later and I don't really consider them "core" to Limited Magic.

This also meant trying to introduce a wide swath of effects. Removal spells, combat tricks, Auras, Equipment, Vehicles Counterspells, Bounce Spells, burn, Activated Abilities, etc.

It did mean I tried to include all the evergreen keyword abilities (provided they had reminder text). I also added some of what I consider to be "honorary" evergreen keywords like Cycling, Flashback, and Kicker (again all with reminder text), both because the first two play really well in Battlebox and because so many other mechanisms in MtG riff off of them (Hence the old joke, every mechanism is just Kicker or Flashback…).

I have seen projects like these that don't include Instants for example, or Counterspells, etc. Again, I think that is fine when you are teaching children or people new to gaming, but I would argue you aren't really playing Magic at that point. It is more like a weird version of Hearthstone or some other game. So much of what makes Magic great is the fact that both players are playing the game all the time, no matter whose turn it is. From blocking to Instants or activated abilities both players have lots of decisions to make even on their opponent's turns which reduces downtime and enhances player engagement.

This also has the advantage of helping the new player to learn what playing Magic is actually like. Lessons like "I made a block I thought was safe but my opponent had a Combat Trick." or "My opponent tried to put an Aura on their creature but when I played a removal in response it killed the Aura before it could land." are vitally important for new players to learn.