This month Magic: The Gathering will take players back to class in its next full set, Secrets of Strixhaven, and it has many longtime players feeling the excitement of the first day of school all over again.
Since its debut in 2021’s Strixhaven: School of Mages, the titular setting has become a beloved part of Magic: The Gathering‘s original lore: a massive academy where potential mages hone their craft, featuring five unique colleges with their own philosophies and main areas of study, and sometimes visited by Planeswalkers from across the Multiverse. This first set was an instant hit, and fans have been eager to head back ever since.
A lot has happened since then, in terms of both the MTG story and the game’s ecosystem. In-universe, the Phyrexians invaded practically every plane in the Multiverse and the status quo was forever changed. In the real world, the game was invaded by Airbenders, Spider-Men, and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, and for a while there we were drag-racing and blasting through space. What a difference five years make.
But what’s so exciting about school anyway? Here are five reasons why we’re eagerly waiting for the bell to ring on Secrets of Strixhaven.
A Fresh Take On Wizard School
Strixhaven is an intriguing institution in Magic: The Gathering‘s Multiverse: located on the plane of Arcavios, where the leylines of mana have a unique flow, it’s a repository of magical knowledge founded by five elder dragons, where fledgling magic-users come to harness their gifts and conduct research. Outside the game’s terminology, it’s a wizard school, which was always a ripe trope for fantasy adventures long before a certain series of novels took the world by storm.
In the five years between the first set and Secrets of Strixhaven, magic schools have seen a low-key renaissance in popular culture. “Dark Academia” is a rising trend in literature, rivalling “romantasy” and lit-RPGs like Dungeon Crawler Carl for shelf space in bookstores’ bestseller sections. Even anime and manga are getting in on the trend in series like Jujutsu Kaisen and Mashle: Magic and Muscles. (Frieren’s ceaseless quest for quirky magical grimoires helps a bit too).
The design team on Secrets of Strixhaven has invested considerable effort in making the set reflective of the general (and nearly universal) school experience.
Beyond appealing to other trends in pop culture, however, a magical academy is a perfect fit for a series like Magic: The Gathering. In a game where players take the role of mages who traverse the countless planes of existence seeking knowledge and dueling each other, it’s a potent playground for mechanics, creatures, and narratives. It makes perfect sense that such a place exists somewhere in the Multiverse, and that planeswalking mages would benefit visiting it.
Better still, the design team on Secrets of Strixhaven has invested considerable effort in making the set reflective of the general (and nearly universal) school experience. Among the cards we see students procrastinating on assignments (on a card literally called “Procrastinate,” featuring an art student asleep at their canvas), working on group projects, having stress dreams (featuring the same aforementioned student), and graduating. In narrative, the students are learning vastly different topics from real world academia, but there’s a refreshing relatability here that’s rarely seen in the game.
The Return of Published MTG Fiction
Story has been a fundamental element of Magic: The Gathering since the early days. Many years ago, it was common practice for each new set to have a companion novel that told the story behind the events depicted on the cards (not literally, but close enough in most examples). Over time, however, this practice fell by the wayside, and arguably when we needed it most, in the Scars of Mirrodin and Zendikar blocks. Since then the game’s story has been told almost exclusively in free short stories published on the official website.
There were downsides to the old method, especially when the quality varied or even tanked abruptly. The web fiction method is certainly more accessible than traditionally-published fiction, but for many fans it lacks the same appeal.
Fortunately, there is an official companion novel for Secrets of Strixhaven, called Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos, by Seanan Mcguire. The story follows Eula Blue, a young mage from the plane of Capenna, who receives an unsolicited offer to study at the academy and sets out through the Omenpaths to embrace her magical destiny.
- Hardcover Book
- McGuire, Seanan (Author)
It’s the perfect time to revive this old tradition. With so much changed in the game’s narrative status quo (including those Omenpaths, which allow non-Planeswalkers to reach worlds beyond their own), I found it refreshing to crack the cover of a new hardcover book and immerse in the story the old-fashioned way, just as I did when the original Kamigawa block drew me into the game. There’s an influx of new players thanks to the Universes Beyond initiative, and this approach offers a traditional way to get them invested in the lore.
(Plus, the investment in a proper novel helps counter some of the concerns that MTG‘s original lore could be falling by the wayside. Huge swaths of the playerbase are concerned their game is being sold off in favour of soulless crossovers in the name of corporate synergy. Reviving “the Old Ways,” especially with a passionate author from the web fiction at the helm, is like a gesture of goodwill.)
Fresh Two-Colour Focus
With the return to this setting comes the return of the five colleges, and Secrets of Strixhaven has plenty of tricks up the sleeves of its wizard robes for each of them. Like the Guilds of Ravnica, each of these groups is associated with a pair of mana colours (specifically the “enemy colours,” pairing each colour with its opposite), but the resulting factions are wildly different from their Ravnican counterparts. Red-white Boros Legion from Ravnica is a militant faction that upholds law by blade and magic in the name of harmonious coexistence; the red-white Lorehold College, however, is invested in studying artifacts and learning from the past.
Ravnica’s colour pairs are popular, but the setting itself can be a little overused, so Strixhaven’s alternate option can feel like a holiday by comparison. The colleges’ identities radiate through their associated cards while still bringing lots of utility to formats beyond sealed play. The original set offered plenty of go-to cards to formats like Commander, and Secrets of Strixhaven should be no different.
Each pair/college gets a signature mechanic to reinforce their identity. Silverquill and Prismari get effects that trigger when casting instants or sorceries, rewarding their main spellslinging playstyle; Witherbloom rewards the player if they’ve gained life that turn with the “infusion” ability; Lorehold has the return of flashback, allowing its students to call cards back from the graveyard; and Quandrix gets increment, which buffs a creature if the amount of mana spent to summon it is greater than its power or toughness, thus playing into the math-focused school’s skillset.
The Emeritus Cycle
While Secrets of Strixhaven‘s focus is on two-coloured combos, it’s still packing some serious monocoloured power in a new creature cycle featuring Emeritus mages. These creatures feature a new mechanic called prepared, which allows them (as in, the creature itself, and not you, the player) to use the inset spell printed on their card. They enter the battlefield prepared, meaning they can cast the associated spell at any appropriate time, and most have the means to “become prepared” again. (Think of it like an alternate version of tapping a card.)
This effectively “hides” the spell within the creature card. You can’t search your library for an instant or sorcery and select one of these creatures, because the inset spell is a part of the creature—so vice versa, an opponent can’t search your library specifically for the Demonic Tutor spell inset on the Emeritus of Woe and make you discard this valuable tool.
“The artwork on the original Mystical Archives run was stunning, and based on the cards we’ve seen so far, Secrets of Strixhaven is already continuing that trend.”
But perhaps the biggest appeal of this new Secrets of Strixhaven mechanic is one particular instance of it: the Emeritus of Ideation. The blue member of this cycle is packing nothing less than Ancestral Recall, one of MTG‘s infamous Power Nine cards: spells from the game’s earliest sets that proved so powerful, they were banned from virtually every format. Wizards of the Coast has an official policy naming a list of Reserved Cards that “will never be printed again in a functionally identical form,” meaning it can never print a card with “the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness.”
The Emeritus of Ideation includes Ancestral Recall as its prepared card, but having the spell tied to the creature exclusively makes it a functionally different printing and curbs its power. It’s not an instant that draws three cards for one mana, it’s more like an activated effect on a 5/5 creature, and a player has to exile 8 cards from their graveyard to re-prepare it. The creature itself will be valuable alone, but the Power Nine prestige will make it one of the most exciting cards one can pull in Secrets of Strixhaven.
(Speaking of the Reserved List, a new Special Guest version of the Library of Alexandria—not a Power Nine card but very close—will be available on Magic Arena as of Secrets of Strixhaven‘s release, exclusively playable in the Timeless format.)
The Mystical Archive Reopens
One of Strixhaven‘s signature elements returns in Secrets of Strixhaven: the Mystical Archive, the bonus sheet feature.
From a flavour perspective, the Mystical Archive itself lies within the school’s biggest library, the Biblioplex, and is said to contain a copy of every spell ever created in the Magic: The Gathering Multiverse. For the game itself, the Mystical Archive is a special Showcase style that presents iconic spells from MTG history as they would be represented in the Biblioplex’s scrolls, generally depicting the first time each spell was ever cast.
The artwork on the original Mystical Archives run was stunning, and based on the cards we’ve seen so far, Secrets of Strixhaven is already continuing that trend. The treatment on the cards themselves really pops in person, between the stylized frames and the reimagined visuals.
Best of all, each Secrets of Strixhaven Play Booster will contain at least one of these variants, while Collector Boosters will hold at least 3, so they won’t be quite as rare as their status implies. While being reprinting in this style doesn’t make the cards Standard-legal, these variants are a great way to trick out your favourite decks in other formats, and give a little history lesson in the process.
