MTG

Years ago, I built a series of 40 card constructed decks to gradually teach my boys how to play magic, basic archetypes, and metagame considerations. I don't have lists up online, but this is what I used:

• 1st mono-green stompy: creatures + giant growth. It runs llanowar elves, leatherback baloth, kalonian tusker, and a bunch of other vanilla green beaters that curve out at 4cmc. They learn how to play generally, but especially how to beat down, and time instants like giant growth

• 2nd suicide black: carnophage, sarcomancy, and other undercosted 2/Xs with downsides, plus removal, and card advantage like necropotence to teach about life as a resource and learn at true aggro deck and how much faster it can be than stompy

• 3rd sligh: aggro undercosted or hasty red dudes like jackal pup, fire imp, FTK, rakdos cackler, etc - plus lightning bolt and fireblast to learn about hitting to the face v. board control, punish decks getting greedy with their life, and get a feel for playing tempo-y type deck

• 4th tinker: tinker out blightsteel using lotus petals and mana rocks to teach all-in combo and how it beats aggro every single time

• 5th UW control with counters, card draw, and sweepers with serra angel and morphling as finishers to teach multicolored cards, control as a playstyle, inevitability, and how true control beats all-in combo every time

• The 6th step was whatever constructed decks I have.

I tried to use iconic archetypes my kids can learn with powerful iconic cards they can familiarize themselves with. Each deck is designed to beat the immediately preceding deck, but not every deck in the series.

I thought about throwing in a tribal deck, but I never figured out what it teaches better than what I've got.

It worked pretty well. They're better than average at understanding the meta game clock. I'm not sure it still holds nowadays and both of my boys drifted away from the game, which is fine..