The product opening continues today with a less-than-exciting arrival: the Beginner Box.

I am not a new player. I was fortunate enough to be shown how to play MTG in-person by friends who were already familiar with the game. However, this product is a pretty good solution for anyone who wants to learn to play solo. Not sure why you would want to do that, but to be fair I know a lot of folks whose eyes glaze over when you start explaining the rules of a card game to them.

In any case, this is not a product review. My main purpose for ordering this box is for the exclusive (and very underwhelming) cards that can be found inside. Mostly this box contained a lot of bulk TLA and TLE that I had to sort through. It also came with two cardboard play mats and a bunch of "front cards": card-shaped tutorial objects that are not actually playable. These will sit at the end of my binder system, alongside the similarly-useless theme cards that come out of Jumpstart packs.

The most fascinating exclusives come from the two pre-constructed Aang and Zuko tutorial decks. These decks are designed to be stacked in a particular order rather than shuffled. This way, the written tutorial can be easily followed to emulate a scripted game. What's interesting about these tutorial cards is that they are essentially copies of existing cards from the set, distinguished only by their card number and the small line of text along the bottom that confirms the stacking order for reassembling the tutorial deck.

Together, these tutorial reprints form a contiguous block of 40 cards at the tail end of the TLE set. Slotting these in has given rise to the most ridiculous binder page to date: a full page of nothing but Mountain and Plains basic lands.

It was nice to complete such a large chunk of the collection, particularly at such a good price. The Beginner Box is cheap, though it's really only worthwhile for completionists or players completely new to Magic.