In the predawn hours throughout April, I’ve been catching up on the excellent web serials and spoilers for the soon to be released Secrets of Strixhaven. This was the only time in my day left available to me — the days when I could jump on a cards before it spiked due to a flashy new design are long behind me now —as the rest of my day is spent in the classroom, performing the myriad of tasks necessary to being a halfway competent teacher maintaining a semi-reasonable sleep schedule.
Secrets of Strixhaven is a return to Arcavios and, from the imprecise and shifting barometer of online conversation, eagerly anticipated compared to Wizard’s original attempt at a magical school. Along with the set, which revisits the school’s five colleges teeming with juiced cards and finnicky pieces of spell work, is a brand-new novel by Seanan McGuire. The first story in the Blind Eternities on honest-to-God paper since War of the Spark: Forsaken in 2019, Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos reintroduces Magic’s take on a school of wizardry, building on everything that came before.
What struck me when reading the set’s stories and spoilers is how SoS connects past and present Magic design. Modern Horizons, at one point, was the preeminent opportunity for modern designs to echo totemic cards and fan favourites, though these have been put on hiatus alongside remastered sets for the foreseeable future. Instead, Strixhaven collects a range of wizards and assorted spellcasters preparing some of the game’s most iconic spells. I can’t afford a Replenish, but I could always pick up a copy of Eiganjo Dynastorian.
Special Guests live up to their name as lecturers holding sessions on their original iterations. If you happen to be a new player coming in through a recent prerelease or you’re picking up your first commander deck, there are enough overt gestures to the card’s inspiration that I doubt you’ll fell lost. And the game is all the better for it.
Magic can’t survive alone on those who always bemoan the death of Magic.
The original Strixhaven debuted in 2021 and along with Eldraine, is one of the more recent planes WOTC has decided needs a second look. Players who started with the original are experiencing the feeling of returning to a plane and seeing what has changed, what has been omitted, and gaining a deeper understanding of this corner of the multiverse.
I’m a player who never felt much affinity for the Ravnican Guilds. Call it bad timing, but there wasn’t the same allure to Selesnya or Boros as I felt for the clans of Tarkir or the other factions that have sprung up through weaving a narrative into the game’s colour pie.
Silverquill, Prismari, Witherbloom, Quandrix and Lorehold. Five colleges reinterpreting the enemy colour pairs with varying levels of success — you’ll never convince me that Quandrix isn’t just Simic with a graduate degree. For the moment, I’m not particularly interested in the mechanical divergences the various colleges have with the guilds established in Ravnica, but where they sit philosophically. Colour pairs can and should be more than a single archetype, and pushing these limits allow for players to expand how they think about the game’s grounding mana system without breaking the architecture completely.
SoS doubles down on the feeling, offering callbacks and novel permutations of previous designs rather than senseless crossovers or a pick-a-mix of beloved characters thrown together on an unfamiliar plane. Yet this approach also stands apart from the recent revisits to Tarkir and Lorwyn. Trying to measure the expectations of these previous blocks in a single set each, left some players feeling dissatisfied. There were plenty of gems and clever nods to be sure, but the set designers often spread themselves too thin trying to wrangle all the necessary pieces that players think make a set represent Tarkir or Lorwyn. Occasionally these sets felt like Now that’s What I Call Tarkir more than a new chapter in the plane’s history.
In Strixhaven’s case, instead of throwing away the concept after an underwhelming first shot, it’s heartening to see that Wizards tried again. The colleges feel more nuanced, the world richer and an interesting solve for Magic’s approach to their multiverse problem.
If you set aside fondly remembered Core sets, Magic has had troubles with their multiverse. The advent of the Omenpaths has created the possibility for crossovers between a mind-boggling number of planes — rather than limiting the world hopping to planeswalkers. When Omenpaths were first announced there was a vocal contingent of players who feared constant crossovers and discordant collaborations were on their way. Part of this future was borne out by stumbles like Thunder Junction and Aetherdrift, but their doomsayers were, on the whole, overstating their fears.
It might be a touch too early to call, but Strixhaven may be the balance that designers, players and vorthos alike were looking for in the game. The idea of the school as a multiversal nexus point for arcane study is far more interesting than when cohorts were limited to students from Arcavios.
The new Lorwyn Five and the cast from Omens of Chaos were invited to Strixhaven from across the multiverse, single-character cameos without a tortured excuse on how they ended up enrolling. Instead of Tibalt finding himself pledging to Lorehold, new characters from familiar planes are the links binding the Blind Eternities together. If a similar strategy has been applied to Thunder Junction maybe the story would have turned out better — though I’ll save the speculation on paths not taken for Reality Fracture. If Wizards of the Coast want a more cohesive multiverse, then nexus points like Strixhaven are necessary from a narrative and design standpoint.
If core sets are retired and Modern Horizons is on the shelf, what better plane to revisit Magic’s history than one devoted to the study and workings of the arcane. I much prefer the power nine tied into card design over cowboy puns and tropes from mystery novels. This is how we should connect newer players to fondly remembered moments of Magic’s history. Bring these designs forward rather than reminding them of what they were too late to experience.
Ideally this doesn’t become an overreliance on the past, a clever design turn can become a belaboured mechanic if it overstays its welcome; but hopefully prepare and similar tricks become another tool in the designers’ belt for future sets. Balance between the old and the new, what is on the horizon and what came before, won’t be hit with every set. When it does, however, you get a story like Secrets of Strixhaven, appealing to invested players and the newcomers preparing their opening hand.