How easy is it to start Magic from scratch?
Magic the Gathering is actually one of the easiest TCG to get in.

It has entry products aimed at beginners or people trying to get in mainly :


Construction Kits
Give a lot of lands (you need them for basically anything) and
quite a lot of cards of each color and some of each dual color. The
power level isn't especially high, but it also contain boosters. All
in all, a very fine way to start a collection. There's a leaflet in
the kit with advice on "How to build a balanced deck ?" which will help you to
tinker with the deck on your own.
Planeswalker decks
Give you access to every card
types (or so) there is in magic, you've got some unique cards and
staple commons/uncommons. The decks' plans are usually quite
straightforward and made with playability in mind, they aren't
competitive, but they surely can be played as in.

N.B. Premade decks in previous times were either stupidly powerful or
contained especially potent cards (e.g. Rats deck of Kamigawa, Elf deck
of Lorwyn etc) or gimmicky at best (all the other Kamigawa decks
etc). The cards in it weren't especially useful outside of the deck's
theme, so it was kinda hard to learn Magic with them. Nowadays you've
got planeswalker decks. 
Challenger decks
Tournement ready decks. These products usually are quite competitive and allow one to see the meta and explain how the deck works, usually they are quite    instructive. 
Game Night
Contain 5 decks made on a theme based on the color (graveyard is actually
useful + zombies for black etc). These decks aren't
especially powerful but are made for beginners to "feel" what each
color is about, as well as get a taste for multiplayer. I found it quite instructive.


The main difference between Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh is the resource management, you can play as many monsters as you want every turn, but you need to pay the cost. Which depends on the land cards. All in all, the Magic rules are quite simple, 
 but card interaction isn't. You'll understand quite all of it very quickly by playing.

MTGArena (the latest video game version of Magic) is also a very good way to learn the rules, and get a feel for how phases work and how the game plays out. The theme decks that are given in the beginning are not very strong though, and some of them are barely playable as is. MTG Arena is a Free-to-play version of Magic so it is the easiest version to try things out in.