Another month, another Magic: The Gathering set. This month, it’s Secrets of Strixhaven. The OG Strixhaven was a magic school themed set with a focus on instant and sorcery spells. Secrets of Strixhaven is another swing at those themes, bringing back the same colleges of magic with new mechanics.
Set mechanics, and other context
Secrets of Strixhaven’s marquee mechanic is prepared. This is a mechanic that allows creatures to grant you copies of spells you can cast in various conditions, a bit like an inverted version of Adventure. All colors get some prepare cards, with some being a bit better then others.
Here are the schools, and the single color mechanics!
Quick Overview of the 5 Archtypes in Secrets of Strixhaven.
Lorehold – Red/White – Flashback/Repartee, Graveyard manipulation payoffs
Prismari – Red/Blue – Opus/Increment – Payoffs for casting spells, bigger payoffs at +5 mana.
Quandrix – Blue/Green – Increment – Get +1/+1 counters, and slow the game down a bit by flicking things back to your opponents hand.
Silverquill – Black/White – Repartee – Very agro beatdown decks that reward going on the offensive.
Witherbloom – Green/Black – Lifegain – Be rewarded for gaining life. Gain more life. Stall out the game until you have advantage.
Also, this set brought back common two color tap lands, and Terramorphic Expanse, so splashing a third color is fairly reasonable.
Okay, context out of the way. I went to two Strixhaven prereleases, and those two events are what this writeup is gonna be about!
Because this event is covering two events, I’m gonna try to get right into it. Here are the pools.
Event 1 Pool – 1 win, 2 draws. – Witherbloom splashing blue
Event 2 Pool – 3 wins, went to top 4. 2-1 in semis, knocked out 0-2 in finals – Quandrix splashing black
Pre-Event Prep
I didn’t do any test pools this time around, which came back to bite me. Secrets of Strixhaven sealed could turn into some really grindy matches, and if I’d known that earlier, I might have adjusted my strategy.
I also might have recognized that Silverquill was the agro deck.
I did think the set would be a fairly bomby set, with a lot of removal. I think that was generally a correct read! What I didn’t really see was how that would impact game pace.
Event 1 – Lessons Were Learned
There’s not much to be said on this event/pool that isn’t really said by the pool itself. In matchups into non-Silverquill decks, games tended to get slowed down, mostly by small deathtouch creatures. Burrog Banemaker, and Noxious Newt were responsible for a lot of this.
The main reason for this was that everyone had combat tricks, but no one wanted to drop their combat tricks first. And in a set where every color pair had a mythic flier, using hard removal on little guys felt like it might be a bad idea. So games tended to stall out until someone got some sort of bomb out.
For example, my first opponent had a Dellian Fel, who as far as planeswalkers go, is fairly vanilla, but it turns out that being able to gain life, draw cards, destroy creatures, while having a synergistic emblem you can get on your second turn after playing him is pretty good! I’ve also seen a few other matches where the paradigm cards just kinda shredded people, mostly Decorum Dissertation and Germination Practicum.
Anyway, I wasn’t the only person getting match draws. The friends I went with also got some, and other folks also drew. It was pretty weird honestly.
Long term readers will know that I consider anything less then complete victory a loss (this is not a good character trait!), so having “lost” like this, I wanted redemption.
Event 2 – Back to School
I’d learned a few things at the first event, the biggest one being that I needed to find a way to aggressively close games out before they went to time.
Usually in a sealed event, there aren’t many ways to influence your pool, but because Strixhaven has a seeded pack for each college in each prerelease kit, and the Fourth Place allows trading sealed kits with other folks in the event before it starts, I swapped my Witherbloom kit for a Quandrix one.
Witherbloom wasn’t “bad”, but it wasn’t good. Even running pretty half of the rares, they just didn’t do enough to actually win me matches, so I needed an additional source of bombs, and I thought Quandrix could do that for me, with cards like Pterafractyl and Fractal Mascot
This mostly proved to be true! I managed to fairly convincingly smash my way through my first two rounds, then struggled a bit in round 3 before managing to take the win. This put me into top 4, where I pushed through semis to finals.
And then I got absolutely butchered in the finals. Some of this was the Silverquill deck I was playing into, some of this was just making a large number of blunders. I’m of the opinion that Silverquill with a few good cards is just much, much stronger then almost every color in this set, because it’s the only color that really gets rewarded for going on the offensive. Repartee and Prepared spells are just incredibly synergistic, much more then having some +1/+1 counters, or a bit of lifegain. And with games stalling out, cards like Summoned Dromedary and Inkling Mascot just do so much.
Overall Thoughts
I generally liked Secrets of Strixhaven, that said, I have some thoughts about the seeded packs.
I haven’t minded seeded packs previously. Both Khans and Avatar used them, and I thought they were pretty good. To be more specific: I didn’t feel like I lost games in those sets because my opponent had a better “kit” by type then I did.
That’s not really true of Secrets of Strixhaven. Both events I went to, Silverquill just absolutely cleaned people out. I did some free play against a friends pool yesterday, he rebuilt it into Silverquill, and… I got cleaned out again.
Some archtypes are going to be better in given formats, and some pools are going to be stronger. But it felt like some Strixhaven sealed pools would always go to time, and some would absolutely run over anything in their way with value commons and uncommons, and you could sway your odds if your pools was Silverquill seeded.
I didn’t like that much.
Also, bring back foil year stamps on promo cards, I know you can do it Wizards. And I know you said you did it to “reduce the number of cards that store owners have to care about, and to make things easier on having products slip” but like… ya’ll are doing special versions of Japanese only alt arts exclusively found in collector boosters.
You can add a single special card to prereleases, you cheap weasels.