How Will Secrets of Strixhaven Expand Strixhaven’s Mechanics?

I often explain to people that Magic as a hobby is more about studying than it is playing games. 

You can spend countless hours improving your knowledge, even as a veteran planeswalker – looking up cards, reading about combos, pondering the possibilities of your deck. Perhaps that passion for learning is what makes the multiversal wizard school Strixhaven, and its colorful cast of student-mages, so enjoyable for many players.

The new Secrets of Strixhaven will be the first sequel to its 2021 debut, and I’m very interested to see how the design team decided to handle that follow-up. Strixhaven did a great job establishing unique mechanics which showed the differences (and similarities) between the rival wizard colleges. 

Will Secrets return to the same design space and really cement that as Strixhaven’s identity? Or will this be a chance to see a different side of Arcavios and its scholarly inhabitants?

EDUCATED GUESSES

A quick disclaimer: as with my past predictions articles, the rest of this article is 100% speculation. I don’t claim to have any special inside access at Wizards of the Coast, and I try to avoid any unofficial leaks. I’m merely imagining myself Lead Designer for a day – and seeing if the ideas I come up end up being anywhere close to the official version!

Predicting completely new mechanics from an unknown set may sound like dumb guesswork, but we’re never working completely in the dark here. Magic mechanics usually follow the flavor of the set, and we already know a lot about Strixhaven from our earlier visit there. 

One easy slam-dunk prediction to start with is that the set will be heavily biased towards instant and sorcery cards, to emphasize that this is a plane of mages. While the rules may say any non-land card is a spell, decks that rely on lots of instants and sorceries just feel more wizardly as opposed to summoning a bunch of creatures to fight for you. 

That idea of a “spellslinger” playstyle is deeply entrenched in the Magic zeitgeist, and making it the central focus across the entire set really grounds us in Strixhaven just like artifact-themed mechanics do for Mirrodin. Likewise, we can safely expect to see a lot of the five main “spellcaster types” among the creatures – clerics in white, shamans in red, warlocks in black, druids in green, and wizards in blue.

LESSONS LEARNED THE HARD WAY

But Arcavios isn’t just home to spellcasters – it’s home to student spellcasters. That academic atmosphere is integral to the identity of the plane, and set mechanics are a key way to ensure that flavor comes through in the cards. 

From preview images of the set’s packaging, we know that SoS will feature a new mechanic called prepare – as in “preparing for an exam”. 

That name instantly makes you think of mechanics like plot or foretell, where you pay a cost in advance to ready a spell for later use. If prepare works in a similar way it would fit well into a Standard which already has a focus on casting spells from exile. The same cards which support adventures, plot, warp, and airbending could also synergize with prepare.

But I’d argue that making yet another mechanic along those lines would be going back to the well too soon. Also, simply paying the cost of a spell in advance doesn’t quite capture the specific vibe of cramming to prepare before an exam or practical test – surely we can do better?

OG Strixhaven introduced Lesson cards as part of its academic theme; spells that could start the game in your sideboard and be added to hand mid-game using the “learn” keyword. Lesson cards are actually back in Standard right now, appearing in Avatar: The Last Airbender. But Wizards seems to have thought better of the whole sideboard premise – there’s no learn keyword in Avatar, and the Lesson type ends up only mattering when other cards specifically care about it, like Gran-Gran.

I predict that Secrets of Strixhaven is going to change that state of affairs. Not only will the new set feature additional Lesson cards of its own, I think that predict is going to be our replacement for learn: a keyword that lets you search for a Lesson not from your sideboard, but your library. 

Admittedly, straight up tutoring any Lesson in your deck to hand does seem a bit too potent, even if it required you to discard the way landcycling or transmute does. But what if you had to commit to your choice of Lesson a turn ahead of when you could actually use it? 

Think about it: when you’re studying for an exam, you don’t actually know what the questions are going to be – you just try and study material you hope will be on the test! It would be super flavorful for prepare to say something like “search your library for a Lesson card and exile it face-down. You may cast that spell from exile starting from your next turn.” 

It’s important that the choice of Lesson should be hidden from your opponent to help differentiate prepare from plot. It also creates the potential for fun mind games instead of just forcing the opponent to awkwardly play around whatever spell you revealed.

There are a few other ways Wizards could balance this kind of mechanic besides a turn delay. Perhaps you only get to search for Lessons from the top 10 cards of your library, which also saves time on shuffling. But I feel confident that Lessons are going to define SoS just like they did Strixhaven, and the prepare mechanic will give us a new way to use them.

BACK TO THE OLD ALMA MATER

The other key element of Strixhaven’s identity, both in lore and on the tabletop, is that students commit to one of five distinct colleges that make up the school. 

Each college is tied to one of the five “enemy” color pairs, and represented by several legendary creatures: the founding elder dragons who lent each college their name, the named students from Strixhaven who now return to their colleges as alumni, and a new lineup of five fresh students (who we already met back in Lorwyn Eclipsed).

With their unique uniforms, attitudes, logos and mascots, these factions were instantly recognizable and caught on with players better than any factions since the guilds of Ravnica. But while each college in Strixhaven did break out of the expected playstyle for its colors, they didn’t actually get named signature mechanics to call their own. 

I think that’s about to change in SoS. Having unique abilities for each college will help differentiate the mass of similar-looking wizards, and show players what makes a deck specifically “Lorehold” or “Quandrix” instead of just WR or UG. Here’s what I predict for each college’s unique mechanic:

Silverquill (WB)

Eloquence – Whenever this creature becomes the target of an instant or sorcery spell, trigger an effect.

Sometimes new mechanics don’t reinvent the wheel so much as codify what’s already there. The idea that the common ground between white and black spellcasting is targeting creatures – whether to help or harm – is a genius one, and ideally the new mechanics for each college will still synergize with their original cards. Changing the wording of heroic to be compatible with copied spells makes this mechanic unique and aligns it with Strixhaven mechanics like magecraft.

Lorehold (WR)

Excavate – When this effect triggers, choose two card types. For each type chosen, you may exile a card of that type from your graveyard. If you do, return target noncreature card from your graveyard to your hand.

I love the Lorehold take on WR as history-loving archeologists – albeit the rather reckless, relic-grabbing, adventuring kind of archeologists who made the field famous in the 19th and early 20th century. I feel like they have to get a recursion ability as their mechanic, but casting from graveyard directly doesn’t have that “this belongs in a museum!” feeling. 

On the upside, returning spells to hand is a small enough reward that you could have it trigger from all sorts of conditions – especially with the little added cost of needing to dig away some rubble to find your prize!

Prismari (UR)

Collaborate – As you cast this spell, you may tap any number of untapped creatures you control. Trigger additional effects based on the number of creatures tapped this way.

Prismari students are performers and creatives as much as they are wizards. They prize improvisation, inspiration and spectacle, competing with each other even as they cooperate to put on a bigger and better show. 

My idea for their mechanic would appear on instants or sorceries, and be templated like Tiered spells from FINAL FANTASY – but with the tiers corresponding to the number of creatures collaborating on the spell. This gives Prismari a unique way to cast more “big” feeling spells without them all costing tons of mana.

Quandrix (UG)

Thesis {n} – As this creature enters the battlefield, you may exile an instant or sorcery card from your hand with mana value {n} or less. You may cast that spell from exile by removing {n} counters from this creature in addition to its other costs.

Quandrix college is full of math-wizards who take a particularly scientific approach to sorcery, with lots of references to research projects and the “eureka moment” when your findings crystallize into something usable. I think this mechanic captures all of that and ties it into the very UG themes of +1+1 counters and steadily growing board-states.

Witherbloom (BG)

Compost – Pay {X}, exile this card from your graveyard: Create X 1/1 black and green Pest creature tokens with “When this token dies, you gain 1 life”.

As the sustainability-focused gardeners and waste technicians of Strixhaven, the Witherbloom have to figure out efficient ways to dispose of experimental material. Their mechanic could be as simple as keywording the “if you have gained life this turn” triggers from their Strixhaven cards, the way morbid does for creatures dying. But I prefer my idea: instants and sorceries with an alternative form of scavenge that lets you turn them into Witherbloom’s ubiquitous Pests!

ACADEMIC PROJECTIONS

Coming up with an entire set of mechanics focused on spellslinging instants and sorceries – the kind of theme that’s normally assigned to one draft archetype – sounds like a tall order. That’s not even considering the requirement to have each mechanic match the identity of a made-up college that’s blending stereotypes from a specific field of academia with a high-school-movie clique. 

And yet, it’s not actually that hard even for a rank amateur like myself – so long as you have the guiderails of color pie and flavor to lean on. Secrets of Strixhaven may end up looking nothing like my guesses today, and I won’t be too bothered if that’s the case. But I’m pretty confident that at least some of my predictions will be on the money. Remember to check back on this article in a couple of weeks and praise (or jeer) my prophetic abilities as appropriate!