MTG: The Blighted Grove Campaign
CompletedMost people teach new players by throwing them into Commander with 100 unique cards. That's terrible. Instead, I built a five-night campaign that's a hybrid between a Magic tutorial and a D&D adventure, using Bloomburrow starter kits as the base and layering custom proxies on top as they level up.
The setup: Bailey and Divya become the Embers of the Veil, defending their village from a spreading blight. Each night introduces new mechanics through the story rather than a rulebook. Custom cards with their names and faces on them. They play 2v1 against me running the blight.
How it ended. All five nights, done. They lost the finale, and the reason is the funniest thing I learned running this: they were scared to attack. Both had wide, genuinely threatening boards, more than enough to close it out, and they kept holding back because swinging felt risky. Five nights of teaching mechanics, and the instinct they were missing was not a mechanic. It was permission.
What happened next is the actual win. We rolled straight into four-player Commander games with real decks, because they now had the fundamentals. We are planning more, and they want to build and edit their own decks, which was never a stated goal and is a much better outcome than finishing the campaign.
Total cost: about $100 in proxied cards.
The five nights, the custom cards, the AI art that went wrong before it went right, and what I would change are all on the AI + Magic page.