Foundations Online Casual Monoblack Starter Deck

 This deck can use more Phyrexian Arenas, more sacrifice outlets and more of Ravenous Amulet to trigger lots, but otherwise, it has a solid mana curve, with the exception of Rune-Scarred Demon, which I would exchange out for a 5 or 6 mana creature that would hit the board a lot more often.

Here are some solitaire board states. 

From the triggers come life gain (and life loss to opponent), and, most importantly, card draw.

It's great to tutor with Rune-Scarred Demon, but it's just too late of a tutor in a real game.

Foundations Online Casual Monoblue Starter Deck

 This deck is not tribal. There are Wizards and Pirates decks, but I don't see one of these tribal decks coming out of only Foundations cards.

It's a mono-blue deck and so it is accurte to model it in solitaire into turns 6,7,8. The decks works on lowering the cost of instants and sorceries, and also having enough of them in the graveyard to lower the casting cost of Tolarian Terror. Mocking Sprite and Archmage of Ruins lower the costs, and Lunar Insight is a very powerful draw engine.

Foundations Online Casual Cat Starter Deck

 This deck is from the made-up selection online to get started with Foundations deckbuilding. All of the cards in this deck are in Foundations. I will refine it as I add more cards to this limited cubing fun exercise.

Here are a few solitaire games showing turn 5 board states. Banner of kinship comes in too late to be a good anthem, yet it can be used for any creature type. Helpful Hunter drawing a card on entry turns out to be very useful. This is just the start for this deck. It needs better lifegain.

Foundations $10 in online tickets Starter Collection

 There is no starter collection product online. I therefore got me $10 worth of tickets, and got a representative starter collection. I got 11 Mythic Rares.

I got 103 rares.

I also got 200 uncommons and 235 rares, for a total of 549 cards. I am only missing one uncommon and one common from the ones available online. There are some cards in the non-pack products that are not available online.

I also have all of the reprints in other sets online but I will only use these cards as a limited deckbuilding exercise.

Yet another Vintage Solitaire deck for Magic Online

 It could be a lot faster, yet I made it with several win conditions and it has a wide range of turn wins: as little as three turns with the average being seven. I use several solitaire rules to give the experience some variance: no mulligan and only basic lands. Here is the deck. Near the end of the gameplay I took out Djinn for another clone, but the change in gameplay is minimal. Also, only the 'draw three, return two' (the 2nd ability) for JTMS can be used.

Djinn out, second Clone in, for the final state of the deck.

There are some turn ones loaded with mana thanks to Black Lotus and/or how many Moxen are in the opening hand.

The one hydra enables some early wins. Before I added it, every game was a turn six or turn seven if Blightsteel Colossus did not get lined up perfectly.

Here is a sample of typical wins by turn. Lining up green into Elvish Piper and dropping a big critter is the most streamlined win, but there are many routes to victory. Here is a turn three win, obviously enabled by Black Lotus.

Here is a Black Lotus-enabled turn 4 win.

And another Black Lotus-enabled turn 4 win, this time with several Moxen and even more mana to load up the Hydra.

Turn five Blightsteel Colossus via Elvish Piper. No need for Black Lotus for this one. Infect did it all.

Another turn five win, this time with a 10/10 hydra.

Turn six Blightsteel Colossus via Elvish Piper. 

Turn six via Elvish Piper plus Hydra (since it has Haste). 

A late Blightsteel (turn seven).

Cloned Blacksteel Colossus (for fun, one is enough to win) turn seven.

Turn seven with Elvish Piper. The second big critter was not needed, just here for fun.

There are slow games. Here is a turn eight end. The deck has enough power (no kidding, as in Power 9 power), tutors, and so on. It's rare to go more than eight turns.

Cubing with Foundations (Early Thoughts)

 I have continued to play Magic Arena but since the last core set was issued, I have not thought about collecting paper Magic or cubing with paper Magic. I love core sets, which I guess makes me a minority in the Magic playing community given the two times Wizards has gapped core sets since Origins. Yet finally someone came to their senses and we will soon have a new core set, Foundations. Here are some previews.

Not only is this set featuring many classics from the previous core sets, it is also featuring reprints from non-core sets (which is the usual fare). Progenitus with the original art is easily the best pick. It's a singularly Johnny card and I am a Johnny, and that artwork is amazing. 

I would like to cube Foundations by itself, but I would also like to add my own list to the cube from Tenth Edition, my favorite Magic set of all time (did I mention that I love core sets?). On paper, the price of the most expensive cards, which are those that are more expensive than the pain lands, is a small number (thank you Wizards for the perfect reprint policy). Here they are.

This means that even the most expensive cards are not prohibitively expensive. Remember, this set has 363 cards (383 when you include the lands), and that is 121 each of commons, uncommons, and rares. I have all of the commons and the uncommons, but I am missing probably 30 or 40 of the rares. So that's what I have now as far as affordability of the paper cards. I already have a good selection, but I will never have enough Xth edition cards, and that means that I will be buying a few more. 

In Magic Online, I am in much better shape. I have at least one of every non-land card.

And so there is a physical cube and an online cube. It's early days since Foundations comes out roughly three weeks from today. A new core set, finally!!!