The world has been unkind to Strixhaven. Our introduction to the plane came out at the end of the unchecked phase of the COVID pandemic, when isolation or illness and the drumbeat of necropolitical milestones had taken their toll, and, while well-received, the set didn’t innovate much about Magic. Even the Mystical Archive subset, while aesthetically and financially a bonus, was a victory lap, a greatest hits compilation with shiny new sleeve art. After several retrospective trips to Ravnica, with diminishing returns and a deflating climax in the quasi-apocalypse of War of the Spark, Strixhaven’s focus on color pairs felt like half of Ravnica in a less-developed world. Nothing has changed, except it’s now five years closer to the end. The fracturing of a certain wizardly school fandom and the dissonance of its imminent reboot, the grinding overture of American neofascism swelling to a crescendo, the global disarray and disordered structures of our world are the environment into which new Strixhaven cards have been printed.
Magic’s history has also been a bit unkind to Arcavios and Strixhaven. Ravnica was innovative in a way that echoes two decades later. Like any form of cultural success, though, this sets up a point of comparison that makes future art in the same mode fraught. It’s like reading George Saunders’ Vigil, which has some lovely turns of phrase and laudable humanism but ends up feeling like a diluted version of Lincoln in the Bardo with the same themes and eccentricities. This doesn’t diminish the joys of Lincoln or invalidate Vigil, but it does mean that someone coming to Vigil first will have a different experience than a reader who started with Lincoln in the Bardo and then awaited Vigil, as I did. That’s the value of art; it changes based on your perspective and your proximity to it.
If we’re being honest, I’ve been unkind to Strixhaven. The Elder Dragons left me cold and the schools mostly felt like diluted Ravnican guilds to me. Essentially, at the time of Strixhaven’s printing, Ravnica felt like The Beatles, while Strixhaven was The Monkees. That’s not as severe of a putdown as it appears—The Monkees sold a ton of records and Head is still a worthwhile watch as an artifact of a cultural moment. But they weren’t countercultural; they were a cultural product that rode the ripples of popularity of an emerging artistic movement and a global commercial monoculture. The Strixhaven schools aren’t bad, but they’re not innovative compared to something like Ravnica’s guilds or even Alara’s shards.
After all this unkindness, I want to pass out plaudits. Strixhaven and Secrets of Strixhaven are Magic: the Gathering sets that are nowhere near the bottom of Magic’s sets. Most of the schools do little to differentiate themselves from Ravnica’s guilds, but it’s not fair to punish Strixhaven for Ravnica’s successes. It feels truly incredible to first-pick a Cyclonic Rift and it’s been a blast to watch people lose to their own Armageddon outside of Cube. There are new cards, like Erode and Emeritus of Woe, that update iconic cards with new functions, and a Planeswalker in Professor Dellian Fel that was essentially designed just for me. They fixed the Enduring mechanic in Paradigm, and, while I find most of the set’s mechanics and keywords pretty uninspired, Prepared, like every mutation of modal cards that can serve multiple functions, makes the grade. You can tweak the qualifications to become prepared, as in Grave Researcher, and you can “reprint” iconic spells like Ancestral Recall without legal counsel scheduling an all-hands meeting. It solves the issues of Haunt and Cipher and adds more value to creatures without just making more Badgermole Cubs. It perfectly bridges Strixhaven and Secrets of Strixhaven design trends, too, as the Magecraft focus of original Strixhaven triggers off of prepared spells. It’s not especially elegant, and some of the rules text is hidden on the card—that is, it creates an exiled copy of the spell rather than being an Adventure-style mode of the card—but those are minor quibbles.
Mathemagics is a perfect Strixhaven card. It has a silly but clever name, an effect that inspires a chuckle and a round of quick calculations, and an allusion to combo classic Stroke of Genius. It’s also surprisingly effective, closing out Limited games and interacting with Resonating Lute to draw people out at a moment’s notice in Standard. It rides the creative line between Un- set and proper Magic set, but in a way that feels appropriate to the Quandrix and Prismari overlap.
Meanwhile, Glorious Decay is a perfect Magic card, full stop. The name, the art, the flexibility of effects—there is a reason I play Magic after all these years, and reasons why I’m lucky enough to play it (and to write about it) in a strong and supportive community. It’s because of cards like Glorious Decay—a still life captured on a playing card with a poetic and philosophic name that is still a playable game piece. This is something Magic offers that no other card game I’ve played matches.
Personally, Secrets of Strixhaven’s true success is in making Red-White compelling. Pre-Ravnica, that color pair cared about small creatures, burn, and tokens. In Ravnica: City of Guilds, that color pair cared about small creatures, burn, and tokens. In Return to Ravnica—you see where I’m going here. Boros is Lightning Helix, Boros Charm, and Assemble the Legion, all of which are excellent cards, but are very simplified and streamlined. There’s no engine here. Through Lorehold, though, we find something fresh and new, paradoxically themed around exploring the past.
The philosophy and aesthetics of Witherbloom are closely aligned to the Golgari. There’s less rotting flesh and dangling ferns, but the mushrooms and brackish mud and overgrown insects are still there. That’s not an attack on Witherbloom so much as a reminder of what a home run Ravnica was that, two decades on, we’re still having difficulty divorcing ourselves from the palette set in the Undercity. The Silverquill have a clever ink-and-nib motif that sets them apart from the Orzhov, but they’re still arrayed in monochromatic opulence among golden light. The overlap between Izzet and Prismari even extends to their hairstyles, it’s just the medium of magic is different. The Quandrix do standard Simic draw-and-ramp things, down to the Evolve-riffing keyword of Increment, it’s just that their medium is crystalline rather than cytoplastic.
But Lorehold iterates upon the Ravnican archetypes while exploring Red-White on a refreshing axis. If the Boros Legion was Sparta, then the Lorehold academics are the anthropologists and archeologists unearthing and cataloging Spartan relics. It’s a brilliant evolution, and that brilliance extends to the gameplay, where you’re discarding and exiling cards to fuel your archeologists and create Spirits of a vanished age. You’re still finding ways to overwhelm your opponents with small creatures and buff them for a quick win—I’ve lost to tight Lorehold decks on turn four in Limited—but the method of doing so feels completely different. Suspend Aggression actually feels like a Lightning Helix moment: with two sentences, it opens up new pathways for Red-White. You can save a creature in combat and “draw” a card, or you can temporarily exile your opponent’s threat to get in for damage while “drawing” a card. It is impulsive, flexible, and powerful, and that’s all we can ask for from Magic.
As with the original Strixhaven, I find the Elder Dragon cycle hypothetically exciting but not compelling to play or build around. That said, the borderless versions from iconic Magic artists like Kev Walker and Mark Zug are a great fusion of modern Magic designs and “classic” Magic aesthetics. Continuing that theme, the Mystical Archive subset/bonus sheet is, just as it was back in 2021, superbly executed. The Archive is exactly what I want out of Magic: aesthetically interesting takes on relatively simple cards, with the opportunity for new flavor text and context. Dominaria’s Armageddon becomes New Phyrexia/Argentum’s Armageddon, and instead of the Biblical allusions from Magic’s early days, we see the reflective but dissolute Karn surveying his shattered utopia. We have a flavor-agnostic and lovely version of Reprieve that takes the Silverquill in a surprisingly liberative direction. There’s a new version of Smallpox with absolutely killer art from Lorenzo Gaggioti and empathic flavor text that expands the scope of the Witherbloom College and the multiverse.
In general, the Strixhaven dyad, at their best, recontextualize Magic. Ken Shiozaki’s Stargaze and its new flavor text means I now have a fondness for a card that I’ve drafted a dozen times under duress at the bottom of the pack. Not only can we get a non-Aetherdrift-branded Stock Up, but it’s a fraction of the price of the original. Like the original Strixhaven, Secrets of Strixhaven and its Mystical appendage feel like two different sets reaching a synthesis, which is perfect for a magical academy-themed set.
Secrets of Strixhaven also succeeds in how it is setting up the future. With the preview panel at MagicCon Vegas, we know that Reality Fracture is bringing with it Hexhaven, the Jace-created warped analogue to Strixhaven, and we may have seen an early vanguard from that college with Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer. We expect Planeswalkers to shift colors periodically, as there’s two decades of history of that trend. Garruk shifts from mono-Green to Green-Black, Ajani from mono-White to White-Red back to mono-White, etc. But for Ral, a lightning-focused Izzet mage, to switch to mono-Black without a period of transition in between is startling. What we know about Zarek is that he’s a brilliant researcher dedicated to researching planeswalking who is married to a well-intentioned Orzhov advokist. Basically, he’s a Silicon Valley mid-level tech guy married to a lawyer. In Secrets of Strixhaven, though, he’s closer to Liliana of the Veil, forcing discards and reanimating Abhorrent Oculus or Grave Researcher before hitting an ultimate that’s a truly villainous take on his original ultimate. This could be disorienting or even alienating to Ral Zarek fans, except we know that the other shoe is about to drop with the release of Reality Fracture in October. That’s a story that Magic can tell better than most media: an evolution of a character that fuses storytelling with gameplay. Anyone who played tapping/zapping Ral in 2013 or 2019 is suddenly playing with a Surveilling/Lily of the Veiling imposter.
What this means is still up for future development, but how it feels is what matters now. Strixhaven is a lighter setting than some—the stakes are still high, with rampaging archaics and Foolish Fates, but the general vibe is neon and outsized, with betusked trolls brewing bogwater teas and paint-splashing Prismari mages graffitiing the walls. Ral, like Professor Onyx before him, stands out against the bulk of the set.
There’s a parallel that I imagine will become more direct as we get closer to Reality Fracture. Back during the initial Weatherlight Saga, Wizards printed Mirri, Cat Warrior, which was, for the time, quite powerful and popular. Eight years later, they printed Mirri the Cursed in the color-warping Planar Chaos, which brought back heroes and villains from The Weatherlight Saga as mirrors of their past selves. Mirri went from a primal but heroic Cat Warrior who sacrificed herself to save a loved one into a vampiric version of herself, with her stats flipped and her abilities updated from mono-Green to mono-Black.
It’s easy to imagine a hypothetical villain arc for Ral Zarek. He is, after all, an engineer who works for Ravnica’s equivalent of the tech oligarchs of our own world. But there’s no tension in our guest lecturer as presented; he is an eloquent and unconflicted Orzhovian logician and rhetorician. There was never a Grixis “Ral Zarek, Mercenary Researcher” or a Dimir “Ral Zarek, Scholar of Shadows” to bridge the gap between Izzet icon and Orzhov advokist. We all take on characteristics of our spouses, and Tomik is no doubt an influence, but we would expect Zarek to have been an enthusiastic embracer of the Prismari were he to land on Arcavios. This implies that he’s a completely different Ral, as borne out by the Vegas reveal of Chandra, Chill of Compliance.
After the warped whimsy of Lorwyn Eclipsed, it’s pleasant to spend some time on Arcavios and to see how the plane and the school of Strixhaven have rebounded after the Phyrexian invasion. It’s a smaller story, with the maddened archaics as the primary antagonistic force, but there’s a larger conflict coming. Before it arrives, it’s worth taking a moment and reviewing what works and what doesn’t, in much the same way as my professor friends rely on student feedback at the end of the semester. Secrets of Strixhaven feels like a 201 course–a follow-up class for those who have already bought in, but looking at the Charms and Erode and the Emeritus cycle, it certainly qualifies as a success.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize”, no matter the format.