Portal (POR): The Beginner's Set Guide

Before Welcome Boosters and New Player Experience cards, Wizards of the Coast tried something more ambitious: an entirely separate set built from the ground up for new players. Portal, released on May 1, 1997, was that experiment - a 257-card set with its own simplified ruleset, designed to bring curious newcomers into Magic without the full weight of the core set's complexity landing on them at once.

It's a fascinating artifact from a very different era of the game's history, and if you've ever wondered why some older cards carry a 'P' symbol or why certain Portal cards took years to become tournament-legal, this is the place to start.

What is Portal?

Portal is a starter-level set released on May 1, 1997 by Wizards of the Coast. It carries the set code POR and contains 257 cards. It was not part of a block in the traditional sense - it existed in a separate product lane, alongside the main sets but not designed to interact with them competitively.

Wizards' goal was straightforward: give new players a format with simpler rules than anything in the standard product line at the time. The core sets of the late 1990s were still fairly dense with mechanics and terminology, and Portal was meant to be the gentler on-ramp - a place where someone could learn the fundamentals before graduating to the full game.

Format check: Portal cards were not originally tournament-legal in most formats. Over time, Wizards revised this, and many Portal cards were eventually made legal in formats like Legacy and Vintage where they would otherwise have been eligible by age. Check the current format legality for specific cards on Scryfall if you're planning to play them competitively.

Themes and mechanics

Simplified rules as a design philosophy

The defining feature of Portal isn't a single mechanic - it's an entire design philosophy built around removing complexity rather than adding it. The set deliberately stripped out several rules interactions that appear in the main game.

Instants, for example, don't exist in Portal. Instead, the set uses Sorceries with a special "Interrupt" label and Enchantments that function in simplified ways. Players couldn't respond to spells in the same way the full game allows, which removed one of Magic's steepest learning curves: the stack.

Creatures also couldn't block on the same turn they came into play - a rule that mirrors the modern summoning sickness convention, but was presented in Portal's rulebook in plain language rather than as a named keyword.

Keyword and complexity choices

Portal uses a limited set of keywords compared to contemporary sets. Flying, trample, and first strike appear, but many of the more intricate abilities that required careful rules reading were left out. The set's card text tends toward plain English descriptions of effects rather than the shorthand keyword vocabulary the main game uses.

This makes Portal cards feel slightly different to read even today - wordy in places where a modern card would just say "flash" or "haste."

Limited and Draft

Portal was not designed as a Draft or Sealed format in the modern sense. The product was sold as starter decks and booster packs, but the intended play experience was closer to learning the game with a friend using the included two-player starter set than to sitting down at a Friday Night Magic draft.

The Portal 2-Player Starter Set was a specific product designed to let two people learn the game together from a single purchase - a concept Wizards would revisit many times in later years with products like the Deckbuilder's Toolkit and Starter Kits.

If you did draft Portal today as a nostalgic or casual exercise, I'd expect the format to play slowly and fairly, with creature combat being the primary game plan and very little of the stack-based complexity that shapes modern Limited formats.

Notable cards and impact

Portal contains a number of cards that became notable specifically because of their unusual legal status. When Wizards retroactively made Portal cards legal in older formats, several of them turned out to have surprisingly powerful effects for their mana cost - designed at a time when power level was calibrated against simplicity rather than competitive play.

I'd recommend checking resources like Scryfall or EDHREC for the current competitive and Commander standing of specific Portal cards, since the set contains some genuine oddities that see play in eternal formats and Commander to this day.

Lore and setting

Portal's story and worldbuilding are relatively thin compared to contemporary sets - deliberately so. The lore served as a backdrop for teaching the game rather than as a rich narrative experience in its own right.

The set's name connects loosely to the broader Magic concept of a planar portal: a way to travel between planes without a planeswalker's spark. Planar portals in Magic lore can be created by planeswalkers, and historically both the Thran and the Phyrexians possessed the technology to build them. In Portal's context, the name functions more as an evocative metaphor for a gateway into Magic than as a deep lore reference - you're stepping through a portal into the game itself.

Lore aside: The card Planar Portal and the mechanic of portal travel appear across many sets in Magic's history, from Belbe's Portal to Portal to Phyrexia. The 1997 set and the in-game concept share a name but aren't directly linked by story.

Set legacy

Portal occupies a genuinely interesting corner of Magic's history. It was Wizards' most ambitious attempt before the modern era to solve a problem the game has wrestled with ever since its launch: how do you teach this game to someone who has never played it?

The answer Portal proposed - a parallel format with simplified rules - was ultimately abandoned. Later beginner products like Eighth Edition's "Easy Intro Packs," Duels of the Planeswalkers, and eventually the current New Player Experience all took different approaches. The consensus, broadly, seems to be that a separate simplified format creates more confusion than it resolves, because players eventually have to re-learn things when they transition to the main game.

But there's something I genuinely admire about the boldness of Portal's design brief. Rather than patching the existing rules, Wizards asked: what if we just built something different? The answer didn't stick, but the question was worth asking.

Today, Portal is primarily of interest to collectors and to players hunting specific cards for eternal formats or Commander. As a historical document, though, it's a fascinating snapshot of a moment when Wizards was still figuring out how Magic should welcome new players - a question the game is still answering, three decades later. ✨