So I barely know anything about MTG but I want to get cards for myself and a couple friends. What's the easiest way to get into this? (I know there's the video game but I wanna go real cards). I see there are two deck starter kits which seem cool, maybe I get one of those for each of us and then some booster packs? Like $30 per person is what I'm going for. Are the starter decks balanced against each other? Is there other stuff I should know?
Yeah a starter kit with the pre-built decks is good to get a feel for things. Fairly similar price point to trying out any other board game.
Instead of buying boosters, what I did was buy a couple cheap bulk common/uncommon lots off of ebay. When it's all new to you anyway that's pretty much the same experience as boosters, except so so goddamn much cheaper lol. Even better if you can get a box of freebies from a shop like other people suggested. Then you just fuck around tweaking your starter decks and eventually cobbling stuff together from scratch.
I'm not a competitive gamer at all so I never did any tournament stuff, it was essentially just my friend group having a big communal crate of cards on the shelf to play with sometimes.
So after reading more about the various game formats, I've learned that I apparently invented "cube draft" from first principles lmao