Starter 1999 (S99): Set Guide & Card List

Some sets are built to push the competitive meta. Starter 1999 was built to bring someone to the table for the very first time - and that's a harder job than it sounds.

Released in July 1999, Starter 1999 (set code: S99) was Wizards of the Coast's follow-up attempt at a truly entry-level Magic: The Gathering experience, picking up where the Portal series left off. The set contains 173 cards and was designed from the ground up with brand-new players in mind: simpler card text, gentle mechanical complexity, and a product structure that held your hand through your very first game.

It wasn't a Standard-legal set at release. For years it existed in its own space, purpose-built for teaching. It wasn't until October 20, 2005 that Starter 1999 was officially legalized for Legacy and Vintage - the two formats that welcome the widest historical card pools.

What is Starter 1999?

Starter 1999 is a starter-level Magic set, a now-obsolete product category that Wizards used through the late 1990s to onboard players who weren't ready to crack a booster pack and dive into the deep end. Think of it less as a set in the traditional sense and more as a complete game-in-a-box with its own card pool.

The set sits in a lineage that includes the Portal sets before it and Starter 2000 after it - each one an iteration on the same core question: what's the simplest version of Magic that still feels like Magic?

Format check: Starter 1999 cards are legal in Legacy and Vintage (as of October 20, 2005), but not in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern. If you pull out a card from this set, those are the two Constructed formats where it belongs.

How the set was packaged and sold

The flagship product was the Starter game box, a 2-Player Starter Set containing two pre-built decks designed to play well against each other right out of the box.

What made this unusual - and honestly pretty clever - is that the decks came pre-sorted. If you didn't shuffle them, the cards would deal out in a specific order designed to walk two complete beginners through a sample game, step by step. You didn't need to already know Magic to play your first game of Magic. The rules in the box did the teaching.

Once both players had worked through that guided first game, the idea was simple: now shuffle the decks, and you're off. By that point, you knew the turn structure, what lands do, what creatures do, and how combat works. The training wheels came off naturally.

This is a genuinely thoughtful piece of game design - building the tutorial into the product itself rather than expecting new players to absorb a rulebook cold.

Themes and mechanics

Because Starter 1999 was aimed at players encountering Magic for the first time, the set deliberately kept mechanical complexity low. The goal was to teach the fundamentals - lands, creatures, spells, combat - without overwhelming new players with layers of keywords and edge cases.

The design philosophy followed what the Portal series had established: clear card text, straightforward effects, and a focus on the core game loop rather than intricate interactions. This isn't a knock on the set; it's exactly what it was supposed to be.

Lore and setting

As a introductory product, Starter 1999 didn't tie itself to a specific plane or ongoing story the way contemporary sets like Urza's Saga (1998) did. The set was meant to be a self-contained entry point, so the card selection skewed toward broadly accessible fantasy imagery rather than deep Dominaria lore or planeswalker storylines.

If you're looking for rich worldbuilding from this era, the contemporaneous Urza's block sets are where that story was playing out. Starter 1999 was the door you opened before you got there.

Set legacy

Starter 1999 occupies a quiet but meaningful corner of Magic's history. It represents a real attempt - Wizards' second major one after Portal - to answer the question of how you bring someone into a 30-mechanic card game without losing them in the first five minutes.

In terms of competitive impact, the set was never a major force. Its cards were designed for clarity, not power level, and the formats it's legal in (Legacy and Vintage) are defined by decades of much more powerful cards. You're unlikely to find Starter 1999 cards slotting into top-tier Legacy lists.

But as a piece of game design history, it's genuinely interesting. The pre-sorted two-player experience was a smart solution to a hard problem, and the broader starter-level product line it belonged to was Wizards working out, in real time, how to grow the game's player base. That effort eventually evolved into the Welcome Decks, the Starter Kits, and the various onboarding products we see today.

In that sense, Starter 1999 is part of a lineage that still matters - every time a new player sits down with a ready-to-play introductory set, there's a little DNA from this 1999 box in what they're holding. ✨