Eyes of the Watcher

Go-Shintai of Lost Wisdom (Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty No. 55, Illus. Johannes Voss)

I really like the muted colors in this piece. I've seen some people say that they find this piece scary, but that's not the word I'd personally choose. For me, the mood is closer to feeling somber or forlorn, like you're standing on this lonely beach all on your own, lost in thought.

In MtG, the "mill" effect in this card's rules text tends to be code for things being forgotten or otherwise removed from memory, a person losing their mind. Go-Shintai of Lost Wisdom uses the imagery of water flowing out of the paper-person's head into the floating shrine to illustrate this, as well as the act of using its own body to create paper-cranes. However, if the flavour text of the card is any indication, in this case, this isn't supposed to represent a "bad" kind of forgetting:

It seeks those driven by curiosity and offers enlightenment.

Going by this, the "Lost Wisdom" in this card's name isn't wisdom that's in the process being lost, but the opposite - wisdom that's being found in the form of enlightenment. Or maybe it has a double meaning, in the sense that in order to gain enlightenment, you first have to forget your preconceived notions about the world and surrender your understanding of the world as you know it, which can seem daunting and, yes, even scary.

Puppet Conjurer (Shards of Alara No. 82, Illus. Steven Belledin)

I've been thinking a lot about Alara lately. After Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Lorwyn Eclipsed, it's the only new plane from Magic's 2000s era that we haven't returned to yet. The Conflux presented a radical change for the plane. Similarly to Kamigawa, it offers strong pre-existing concepts and visuals, but also a lot of room to play around with them. This makes it a very exciting candidate for a return (more so than planes like Lorwyn, which did change, but in a less drastic kind of way).

One interesting thing for a "side story" set on a merged Alara could be the fate of its homunculi. On pre-Conflux Esper, they basically were cyborg slaves and considered a lesser form of life (despite being capable of independent, conscious thought). Puppet Conjurer makes this very clear - it refers to the homunculi as "puppets" and the flavour text talks about the wizard "crushing his imperfect creation and starting anew", which is represented visually by his hand hovering over one of the homunculi like the claws of some bird of prey.

Knight of the Skyward Eye (Shards of Alara No. 15, Illus. Matt Stewart)

Out of all the Shards of Alara, Bant is my favourite concept-wise (closely followed ... or maybe tied with? Esper). The combination of Arthurian legend with a Mediterranean / Northern African-inspired setting feels very unique. I love how this illustrations nails the monk/knight hybrid look. In the original Alara block, the Order of the Skyward Eye was a faction manipulated by Nicol Bolas to spread fear across Bant, so they don't really get portrayed in a positive light. Knight of the Skyward Eye makes me want to read some pre-Shards of Alara short story or novella focused on the Order that explores all of their aspects. Obviously, knightly orders in the real world come with a lot of baggage from today's perspective (mostly the Crusades, both in the "Holy Land" / Middle East and in places like the present-day Baltic Countries). Bant with its "what if medieval chivalry was more like its romanticised / idealised version" balances this out a bit while still allowing for interesting conflicts.

Much like in the real world, it seems like the Order of the Skyward Eye would be very conservative (probably even more so considering the plane has an actual caste system added on top of the medieval-inspired chivalric society stuff). There are examples of female knights on Old Alara before the Conflux (Jhessian Outrider, the knight on the art for Akrasan Squire, Knight of the Reliquary, and of course, Elspeth), so on its face, it doesn't seem like gender plays a big role. It'd be interesting to dive into the other exclusions and repression the Bantian religion comes with (any religion is bound to have some of those). It could also be interesting to see how the merging of the Shards impacted Bant's religion and caste system in the middle and long term.

Flashback (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 115, Illus. Flavio Greco Paglia)

I've seen this illustration cause some discussion on the Vorthos subreddit. The "winged head" statue depicted here looks remarkably similar to the Theran goddess Nylea. As a planeswalker, Quintorius has "free access" to Theros, and it seems like a plane that he'd be very interested in. So this might be the head of a Nylea statue?

However, there are also things that point to the contrary. First off, the head in this illustration is surrounded by the faux cuneiform featured on many Lorehold cards, and it seems to be tied to the scrolls swirling around it. This makes it seem like a figure or piece of art from Arcavian history. A similar statue head also appears in the art for Aziza, Mage Tower Captain as well as Staff of the Storyteller (although in both instances, the statues have an additional pair of wings that's not present in the illustration for Flashback). This makes me think that the statue isn't supposed to be literally Nylea. If it was, I think this card's flavour text would at least strongly imply it, but its just a bit of generic fluff. My theory is that the "statue head with two pairs of wings" appears somewhere in the style guide for Secrets of Strixhaven, and the illustration for Flashback is a case of the artist taking some creative liberties and removing one wing pair, leading to an "accidental" similarity to Nylea.

Emil, Vastlands Roamer (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 0146, Illus. Kai Carpenter)

For most of the illustrations that I post about on this blog, there's something about them that intrigues me because it hints at the worldbuilding, the way mana works on any given plane, its history, etc. Some of cards, however, I just find kind of funny. This is one of them.

It's not about the illustration itself - it's a perfectly fine piece of fantasy art, although I don't feel particularly drawn in by it. What amuses me is the name. "Emil" is such an ordinary name from where I come from that it feels weird seeing it on a card depicting a wizard accomanied by fractal wolves? fennec foxes? scrambling along some vines on floating fantasy rocks. It's like seeing a character being named "Steven, Farbog Muckwader." By the way, either Emil is an amazing free climber, or he's living really dangerously here. Look at how high up he is! Where are his climbing ropes? How did he even get up here? (He probably used some space-warping Quandrix spell.)

The epithet is funny, too. Vastlands Roamer. I realise that it's just one of those Magic card naming conventions that describes what a character generally does, like healer, warrior or debater. But imagine having a conversation with this guy. "So what do you do for a living?" - "Uhm, I'm a Vastlands Roamer? Like, I roam ... a lot." Amazing.

Planar Engineering (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 0158, Illus. Liiga Smilshkalne)

Umbral Expanse (Secrets of Strixhaven Commander No. 0060, Illus. Florian Herold)

I was a bit late to the start of Secret of Strixhaven spoilers, and when I first started looking at them, a good chunk of cards had already been spoiled. One card that immediately stood out to me was Basic Mountain No. 0279 by Florian Herold, a new addition to MtG's roster of illustrators. And I've been delighted to see that he didn't get just one card, but quite a few of them - the Mountain, Erode, Witherbloom Charm and this card (as of writing this on April 7th). From what I've seen online (Instagram and Reddit), the art seems to be pretty popular and well-received. I'm a big fan, too!

Just like his other pieces, I believe this is oil on wood panel. The matte, slightly pastel-y colors immediately give the illustration that analog appeal that most "efficiently-created" pieces of digital fantasy card game art are missing. While the details aren't actually all that similar, this piece reminds me of Fountain of Cho from Mercadian Masques. The fact that it doesn't show any Silverquill architecture or students despite being associated with that college (or rather, the Forum of Amity, which I guess is it's own thing but very much related to Silverquill) is another thing that makes this illustration feel "older" than it is. Also, the use of colour (especially yellow/gold) combined with the simple, but bold forms of the trees, the suns (?) and the fog at the bottom gives me vague Vienna Secession vibes. It really feels like some kind of Symbolist painting from around that time.

Honourbound Page (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 0019, Illus. Paolo Parente)

OK, I'll start this one off with a nitpick. The design for the Silverquill faction / college in Strixhaven features a lot of fountain pen imagery (especially fountain pen nibs). It's the official symbol of the college and is all over their clothing, architecture, and tools. In this illustration, we see a Silverquill mage wielding some kind of fountain pen nib rapier / polearm / wand hybrid, using it as a catalyst to create beautiful light calligraphy. However, if you've ever used fountain pens, you might notice a discrepancy here: The nib looks like a standard "rounded" nib, meaning that it's topped with a (tiny) ball of metal that allows you to draw lines of even width. You could never produce calligraphy like the swirling forms in this picture with a nib like that! It would have to be an italic or stub nib, which is flat or slanted at the top. But well, I guess I'll have to label this "artistic license" and move on.

Instead, I want to use the rest of this post to talk about another point: The relationship between the Strixhaven colleges, the subjects that are sudied there, and their colours of mana. I came across a discussion of this on the Vorthos subreddit on the other day, and thought that it was a really interesting topic to write about.

Conclusion first: The types of mana used in each Strixhaven college and their domains of study are used as tools, not embodiments of those subjects. This is also the biggest difference between the Ravnican guilds and the Strixhaven colleges. The guilds embody their two-color combination: For example, the Simic Combine is the result (or rather, the answer) to the worldbuilding question "what would an organisation that fuses the philosophies of Green and Blue in the Magic universe look like?" The Strixhaven colleges, though, are different: Their fields of study (in the case of Silverquill, writing and poetry, social sciences etc) aren't represented by their colours of mana. Instead, they are simply (colour-agnostic) objects, and the colours are used as tools to study / analyse / dissect / (re)construct them.

It's easy to look at the Strixhaven factions and go, "oh, so history / archaeology is red-white, math is blue-green, art is red-blue, got it." But that's not really how it is. Each of these subjects is far too diverse to be represented by a single two-color combination. They have merely been fitted into these rather narrow boxes - because the set needs structure and has to be "grokkable" for the players (from a worldbuilding / doylist perspective), and because the collision of the planes that formed Arcavios and the founder dragons and their lasting influence (from an in-universe / watsonian perspective).

For example, even on Strixhaven, there could be a mono-green-aligned historian, or a black-white aligned artist. These kinds of characters just don't get shown because it would go beyond the scope of what the world has to do as a vehicle for an expansion of a trading card game. In an earlier post, I talked about how Strixhaven makes me align with color combinations that I don't usually consider myself to be very close to (the "Mardu" wedge, specifically). But that doesn't mean that I have "always been Mardu" in some way. (*2) It just means that because of the circumstances that shaped Strixhaven as a plane, on this world my interests or dispositions happen to align with other colours than they usually do.

This kind of use as mana-colours-as-tools (instead of mana-colours-as-embodiments) gives Strixhaven a good deal of conceptual depth ... a depth that it could build on a lot more if it wasn't so restricted by its fate of being just another setting for the MtG trading card game. (By this I want to say: I want to see more MtG writing that explores these areas, the areas that the trading card game, because of its release schedule or set / play design constraints, can never explore).

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(*1) The faction design of the Silverquill college already allows some overlap here by "assigning" some forms of art, like calligraphy and poetry, to this college.

Kirol, History Buff (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 0198, Illus. Bryan Sola)

In my last post I talked about how the design of the inklings from Silverquill, this time it's back to Lorehold. Where Silverquill mages use pens, ink and paper as spellcasting mediums, Lorehold frequently uses scrolls and tomes - presumably ancient ones that they unearth during their archaeology fieldwork. Kirol is carrying one on their back here, and other examples abound ... for example, the scroll-based magic gatling gun shown on Lorehold Command or the art of Quintorius, Loremaster (where the scrolls look more like condiment squeeze bottles).

Most of the scrolls contain writing in some kind of magical faux-cuneiform that seems to have been widely used in Arcavios's history and is being studied extensively by Lorehold students (see Professor of Symbology). It seems to be equivalent of Latin in our world: An ancient language or script that served as the lingua franca for multiple different cultures. In illustrations, it also makes for some nice visual effects, especially when infused and "animated" with magic. I really like how the individual glyphs dance around the bottom of the column in this illustration, scattered, but still forming a cohesive arc and motion.

What disappoints me a bit, though, is that despite almost every second Lorehold illustration showing this apparently very important language, it is never named or mentioned - neither in the story, nor in the Planeswalker's guide (as far as I'm aware). It exists solely as a visual code to to communicate to the player that these characters are learning an ancient language. We have two sets worth of Strixhaven stories now, so you'd imagine that it'd at least get namedropped in passing ... but nope.

Inkling Mascot (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 0196, Illus. Inkognit)

As far as visuals and character design is concerned, the Silverquill inklings are the college mascots that got the biggest upgrade in Secrets of Strixhaven. Their original design was very straightforward: Silverquill mages use ink, so their familiars are just living blobs of it, done. Their impish appearance and demeanor made them feel very skewed towards the black mana side of the college. They were probably the least "balanced" out of all the mascot character designs.

Secrets of Strixhaven changes this. Instead of being amorphous blobs of liquid, Inklings are now beings on ink and light. The ink functions as the creature's "body", and the light, drawn in calligraphic strokes, forms the outlines and details that hold it all together. Other examples include Scriv, the Obligator (which also incorporates paper into the design) or the ink-birds seen in the art of Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer and Kilian, Decisive Mentor.

Graduation Day (Secrets of Strixhaven No. 0016, Illus. Brian Valeza)

This card shows a character from the Silverquill college graduating from Strixhaven university. That raises the question: What do these people do once they finish university? The setting is so focused on that institution, and the surrounding world so sparsely detailed, that it feels weird to even ask that question.

The Planeswalker's Guide for this recent set mentions that many students "return to their communities" after graduation, essentially becoming "town mages" there. But looking at how many people are attending Strixhaven university, it feels like there are entirely too many wizards for this to be the one post-graduation career path (except for staying in school and becoming a professor, of course). Another path that's mentioned is "traveling the plane in search of ever-greater magic", which seems like a niche thing that only a handful of ex-students would do (I can imagine Witherbloom or Lorehold people living in the wilderness for extended periods of time, but Silverquill - not so much).

Yesterday's post was leaning negative, so to counter it out I'll just post a list of my personal favourite Secrets of Strixhaven illustrations. I do lists like these for almost every new set, but so far I've only ever written them into my notebooks. I might do individual posts on some of the pieces from this list, but not all of them. Some of the pieces just look nice and there's not a whole lot to write about.

Main Set + Commander

Umbral Expanse (Florian Herold) *1

Inkling Mascot (Inkognit)

Talisman of Curiosity (Qistina Khalidah) *2

Proctor's Gaze (Danny Schwartz)

Mind Roots (Elliot Lang) *3

Restoration Seminar (Rimas Valeikis)

Staff of the Storyteller (Lorenzo Mastroianni)

Planar Engineering (Liiga Smilshkalne)

Geometer's Arthropod (Joe Slucher)

Tome Blast (Filipe Pagliuso)

*1 - Also Mountain No. 0279 by the same artist. I guess an unwritten rule of these top 10 lists is that I try to not have any duplicate artists, so if I really like multiple pieces by the same one, I choose a "representative." *2 - Also Talisman of Conviction and Talisman of Creativity. *3 - Also Wander Off and Essence Scatter.

Mystical Archive

At first I was thinking about including Mystical Archive cards in the regular Top 10, but they would've taken up too many slots, so they get their own list!

Winds of Abandon (Zuzanna Wużyk)

Brain Freeze (Benjamin Ee)*1

Shamanic Revelation (Lorenzo Gaggiotti)

Hop to It (Alex Stone)

Return the Favor (Aitor Sebastián)

Daze - Japanese Version (Ayami Nakashima)

Disdainful Stroke - Japanese Version (Mayu Nakagaki)

Dismember (Matthew G. Lewis)

Pongify (Dominik Mayer)

Subterranean Tremors - Japanese Version (Masumi Ishikawa)

*1 - Also Expressive Iteration.

I just finished reading Secret of Strixhaven's main story! Or rather, listened, for the most part. I only read one of the story articles, for the other five I used the built-in podcast feature for the first time. I found some of the voices (Kirol and Sanar) to be somewhat grating, but it's nice to be able to absorb the story while grocery shopping or heading somewhere on the train/bus. So, without further ado, my thoughts! (Warning: Spoilers.)

"Together as One" by Nestor Ossandon Leal

Overall impressions

If I had to choose only one word to describe how this story felt to me, it'd probably be "haphazard." I actually didn't know how many main story articles there were, so after listening to Episode 6, I thought "well, let's see what happens in the next one..." and was dumbfounded when I found out that that was it! The story just ends, it's not even a real cliffhanger.

In a way, the story reminded me of the second and third movies in the Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them franchise. One joke about these movies is that they're called Crimes of Grindelwald and Secrets of Dumbledore, but don't show any specific crimes of Grindelwald or secrets of Dumbledore. The titles are purely vibes-based. The same applies to this story. What were the secrets of Strixhaven? The Archaics? Everyone knows about them. Their strange behaviour? That was something completely new to everyone on the plane, including people like the oracles, and definitely not a secret that anyone kept. So what gives? Just like Lorwyn Eclipsed wasn't really about an eclipse, this one was another misnomer. It feels like they just want to cram the name of the plane in there so that people know that a new set featuring [current plane] is out. But even then, they could choose a more fitting name, no?

Another parallel between the Fantastic Beasts movies and this story is how things just continue to happen, in a weird, contrived-feeling sort of way. Maybe it's just because I listened to the stories while doing other stuff, but there were more than a few moments (like the random fight with the Daemogoth or Chandra teaching ex-Oriq people in the wilderness) where I found myself asking what the fuck is even going on right now? The group of Archaics pictured on Arcane Omens being inside of the bones in Titan's Grave felt like the scene in Crimes of Grindelwald where the Lestrange Tomb is conveniently connected to the amphitheater where Grindelwald is holding his wizard nazi rally, just in time for the final act of the movie. Yeah, I know that ultimately everything is "conveniently arranged" in stories to make the story happen, but ... why do it like this? Just like the second Fantastic Beasts movie (and in true form for Magic online fiction), this is just a symptom of trying to fit a novel's worth of stuff into a way too crammed space.

"Tam, Observant Sequencer" by Jodie Muir

The Strixhaven cast

This story featured the same five main characters as the Lorwyn Eclipsed story, which was nice, honestly. Certainly better than having to introduce a completely new cast again. That being said, as of the end of this story, most of them are still very flat. Turns out that five characters are a lot for the Magic story format, especially when yet another world-shaking event has to play out while their characters develop.

We got one episode of character fluff (Episode 1), which more or less just reminded the readers of the general tropes the characters represent. (*1) In the following episodes, the character who got the most development was Lluwen. (*2) In general, I liked where this story took him (the differences between the Lorwyn and Arcavios elves are an interesting source for character conflict). There was a bit of relationship building with Tam, although I don't know how much of that matters now that Tam has been isekai'd or something. The other bit of relationship building was with Kirol, which amounted to throwing a bone to the shippers before their screen time ran out. Who knows when we'll see these characters again. Will we see them again? The most I can imagine is them getting a cameo in Reality Fracture where they're holding hands. This jerky building of romantic tension is another element that ends up feeling pretty strange when the stories are this condensed.

Runner-up for character development would be Tam, but she more or less continues to be a mystery box, an extended Reality Fracture teaser. Aside from a few more cryptic mentions of her "teacher" (along with a brief appearance in the final episode) and vague allusions to her origins, there's not much to go on and I'm mostly just waiting for the mystery to be lifted at this point. In this way, Tam reminds me of Credence in Crimes of Grindelwald, where the big reveal at the end was (warning, spoilers) that he's actually a Dumbledore (*3). But just like the reveal in that movie, Tam's mysterious origins just had me going "huh. That could be a thing, I guess. Or not" for some reason. I'm not invested enough to get excited about it. In the last episode of this story, Tam has a "memories flashing before her eyes" moment where she remembers all the good times she had with her university friends. I wish we'd actually seen these things happen; they lack any sense of impact when they're "backfilled" like this.

Dellian Fel ... certainly was a character that showed up. Honestly, I had to look up his name right now despite just having finished the story. He was that pale. He's a Professor Snape kind of guy, complete with a long-dead love who's memory he's still tormented by. One question: Why did they bother to give him a planeswalker card? There's nothing he couldn't have done in this story if he'd just been a random plane-bound Strixhaven professor. Needless to say, I expected him to matter much more, but he was mostly just a vehicle for Lluwen's character development, pure side character material. If that's all that was needed, they could've at least have him be a cool freak like Moseo, the bird skeleton warlock who "shucked his flesh" to combat Phyrexia's influence (very metal).

About the Archaics: I found them really intriguing in the first Strixhaven set. They are supposed to be these wise and mysterious beings and the future incarnation of the oracles, but in this story they (or rather the main one, I guess) mostly acted like wounded animals, screaming, thrashing about and wallowing in pain a whole bunch. I think they could've played a more interesting role.

"Heated Argument" by Aleksi Briclot

Ajani and Chandra, and (probably) Jace

You might've noticed that I found the writing for the Strixhaven cast to be less than optimal. But I wanted to like them, at least, and cared for them, in a way. The "old guard", though ... let's just say that I had to really try and not completely check out whenever the story returned to the Ajani POV. I recognize that this is very much a "me problem", but I find most of these planeswalker characters to be profoundly uninteresting. Part of the reason might be that I just haven't kept up with them after the wrap-up of the March of the Machines story. But boy do I really not care for what Chandra is up to, or Ajani, or what kind of scheme death-defying, reality-breaking Jace is concocting.

Chandra felt especially weird in this story. She came to Arcavios because she kept having weird headaches and visions, and suspects that Jace is behind all this (*4). But apparently once she arrived on the plane, she randomly decided to hang out in the wilderness and teach some ex-Oriq people pyromancy, which (it seems like) she would've kept doing for a while at least if the other characters hadn't run into her? I know that she's supposed to be neurodivergent in some way, but man, that's a stretch. Aside from functioning as a way to insert Chandra into the story, the ex-Oriq people don't have a real function here. They serve as the example of a small aside about how everyone deserves second chances, which is cute, I guess, but ... does that have to be here? Just cut it out and have Chandra happen to be in the same town near Titan's Grave where the students go. It's not like the story needs filler material, there's already more than enough to work with!

The Chandra-Ajani conflict was a "bashing action figures together" situation for me. I know that a lot of Vorthoses care about the internal lives of these characters; I don't. My main interest are the planes/worlds of Magic. When a story is set on Arcavios, I want to get to know that setting better through the characters that inhabit it, the overarching plot is secondary to me. The planeswalkers are too removed from the lived reality of the plane, and they mostly care about things that have nothing to do with the place they're currently in.

The way the overarching plot is handled also makes these stories feel less like self-contained stories and more like an unending chain of teasers for the next set. When the Lorwyn story started, Wizards wanted people to already be excited about Strixhaven (via inserting the students as the main characters), and now that we're finally on Strixhaven, they want people to be excited about Reality Fracture. Also the constant beating around the bush with the use of phrases like "the snarl that was not a snarl" ... Christ on a bike. I get why they do this, but every time it's a disappointment for me. It's like when the riser before the dubstep drop is stretched out for way too long. Just give me the actual music, not a never-ending lead-up to something. But alas. The release schedule of the card game doesn't allow for anything else, and it will never change.

In addition to all of this, the structure of the overarching plotlines is too repetitive for my taste. I've only read the Lorwyn and Strixhaven 2.0 stories after taking a break after March of the Machine, but I'm already getting a bit tired of the "we gotta save the world" type of storytelling again. It's always the same - oh, a new (old) world, how interesting. Could there be something going on here? Time for our heroes to investigate! Uh oh, there's definitely something going on, and it's real bad ... oh no, something crazy just happened and now it's total mayhem everywhere! Quick, get to the thing / person before X happens, or the world is going to turn upside down! I know there's really only a handful of story archetypes that all fiction follows, and Magic as a fantasy card game is even more constrained, but come on. No wonder that I prefer the side stories. (I haven't read the new ones from Strixhaven yet.)

"Banishing Betrayal" by Craig Elliott (why does Jadzi look like an old man here?)

Conclusion

So yeah, this one was a whiff for me. I think the problems that I have with it mostly follow the same patterns as the problems I was having with the Lorwyn story, but the difference is that I really like Lorwyn, so it was easier to arrange myself with what I was given. But with Strixhaven, that wasn't the case. There's still the side stories (which I'm going to read next), and the Omens of Chaos novel. I feel like the novel should be closer to what I'm looking for in terms of Magic story, without all the constraints that make the main stories so consistently frustrating for me. It seems to be geared towards a "young adult" audience, but I think I'll still get a digital version of the book just to check what novel-length MtG fiction can do in 2026. After all, it's been a while since the disaster that was War of the Spark. So all hope isn't yet lost!

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(*1) One small moment I enjoyed was Abigale "complimenting" Kirol's (clearly very crude) drawing by stating that she didn't know he had also been considering Prismari as his main college of choice. It feels like a very Silverquill thing to do without being too mean.

(*2) Listening to the dramatic reading of the story, I was disappointed that they didn't use the Welsh pronunciation of the "Ll" sound. It's probably so that people don't get confused, but then again they didn't have to name him Lluwen. Come to think of it though, the Lorwyn story might have already started this if Kirol was calling Lluwen "Lulu" there, too ... I don't remember.

(*3) I don't know if I keep thinking of these Fantastic Beasts parallels because the first Strixhaven set was often referred to as Magic's version of Harry Potter, or because they are actual parallels. Probably a bit of both.

Excavated Wall (Strixhaven: School of Mages No. 255, Illus. Zezhou Chen)

Secret of Strixhaven spoilers have started, but many of the artworks that have been posted so far are weirdly cropped, so I'm going to use an illustration from the first set for this post.

Strixhaven is a bit of a mixed bag for me. Before the first set came out, I was a bit dismissive of the concept, but as the set was being spoiled, I found myself surprisingly enchanted by the worldbuilding. All of the colleges (except for maybe Witherbloom) offer new and interesting interpretation of their respective colour pairs, and some of the university-themed cards are simply very relatable. And like for every faction-heavy set, there's the "personality test" aspect to it: "Which college / guild / clan / whatever do you belong to?"

What I find interesting is that the Strixhaven colleges pull me towards color pairs that I don't consider myself to be particularly close to. In a vacuum, I think of myself as a blue-green-red person. But as someone with a background in cultural studies and anthropology (and a fan of glyphs, symbols, calligraphy, and all sorts of writing), I'm most closely aligned with the Lorehold and Silverquill colleges.

Overall, I think Lorehold is my personal favourite of the five and the one that I would've picked if I was a denizen of Arcavios. Aside from aligning well with myinterests, in gameplay terms, I really like how it brings a fresh new angle to the red-white color pair. Lorehold is portrayed as a very action-oriented faction, but personally, I tend to prefer the quieter-feeling cards, like Excavated Wall. The use of colours and lighting in this piece is superb. It exudes a peaceful, meditative atmosphere that makes we want to spend an afternoon among these ruins, all on my own, in silence, dusting off some reliefs and scribbling down field notes. Some other Lorehold artworks with this quieter kind of feel (although Excavated Wall is the prime example) are Ageless Guardian, Pilgrim of the Ages, Professor of Symbology, Lorehold Excavation, and Thrilling Discovery.

As for the negative side of the "mixed bag" that I mentioned, I think that Strixhaven dips a bit too much into the tropey side of things ... a general, lamentable tendency of Magic sets from the past ten years or so. Factions in MtG tend to start off on the relatively open-ended side and then get increasingly pigeonholed / flanderized with each return set. The Strixhaven colleges, however, already felt pretty exaggerated and cartoonish during the first visit.