Lost Mine of Phandelver
The dungeon mechanic's core design tension is spending a resource you never pay for: venturing costs no mana, no card, only the trigger you attach it to, so the whole class of cards had to be balanced by making each individual room modest and the path through them slow. This one is the beginner's dungeon, and it plays like it. The branching structure is where the actual decision lives: Cave Entrance forks toward a Goblin body or a Treasure, and every route eventually funnels into Temple of Dumathoin to draw a card, so the question is never whether you reach the payoff but what you accumulate on the way down. A creature-forward game leans through Goblin Lair and Storeroom's +1/+1 counter; a game that wants to grind takes Mine Tunnels for ramp or Dark Pool to drain a life. Because venture only advances one room per trigger, the value is deliberately smeared across many turns rather than front-loaded, which is what keeps a free effect from being oppressive: you have to keep generating triggers to see the reward, and the game rarely waits that long. Compared to the other beginner dungeon, this one is the wider tree, offering fewer strictly-best lines and more genuine reads on the board state, which is exactly the pedagogical point of an object built to teach players that a small choice repeated is still a choice.
