Category: magic the gathering

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 lets your creatures cast copies of instants or sorceries printed on them under certain conditions, a bit like an inverted version of Adventure. All colors get some prepare cards, and some are 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 aggro beatdown decks that reward going on the offensive.

Witherbloom – Green/Black – Lifegain; Get rewards 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.

I went to two Strixhaven prereleases. Let’s get right into it. Here are the two 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 aggro deck.

Going in, I thought Secrets of Strrixhaven would be bomb-heavy, with a lot of removal. I think that was generally a correct read! What I didn’t fully anticipate was how that would impact game pace.

Event 1 – Lessons Were Learned

There’s not much to be said on this event 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.

Everyone had combat tricks, but no one wanted to drop their combat tricks first. And in a set where every color pair has a mythic flier, using hard removal on little guys feels like it might be a bad idea. So games tended to stall out until someone dropped a bomb.

For example, my first opponent had a Dellian Fel. As far as planeswalkers gon he is fairly vanilla. But it turns out that being able to gain life, draw cards, and 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 than 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. Primarily: 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 Strixhaven has a seeded pack for each college in each prerelease kit, and the Fourth Place (my store) allows trading sealed kits with other folks in the event before it starts. So 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

I was mostly right! I managed to 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 just a few good cards is much, much stronger than almost every college in this set, because it’s the only one that really gets rewarded for going on the offensive. Repartee and Prepared spells are just incredibly synergistic, much more than 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 ended up a with a better color of seeded packs.

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 friend’s pool yesterday. He rebuilt it into Silverquill, and… I got cleaned out again.

Some archetypes are going to be better in some 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 pool 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. Wizards said they did it to “reduce the number of cards that store owners have to care about, and to make things easier if release dates change” but like… they 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.

Recently I promised a friend that I would make them a single player Magic: The Gathering experience. This is funny for a lot of reasons. Mostly that the person in question is a game designer who loves single player games, and I’m a game player who hates them. But a promise is a promise, and so I spent a lot of time playing single player magic.

And I have some thoughts.

I’m going to detail those thoughts, various game modes, and my experiences with them. I’m pulling them from this list on Board Game Geek.

Also, in case anyone who made any of these ends up reading this: please keep in mind, I’m a hater. I already don’t like single player board games. I’m doing this mostly for research on my end. Don’t make changes to your mods to try to please me of all people.

The Wrath of Zorr

The first one in the list, Wrath of Zorr, is possibly the least interesting to me, both from a play and design standpoint. It’s a standard game of Magic where you roll against a series of tables, resolving effects and creating tokens for the AI opponent.

Notably, it appears to be from 2013. The problem with this is that creature power has been substantially pushed up since then. I was able to grab one of my commander precons, shuffle in the commander, and beat it to death with ease.

Zorr’s turn 3 best outcome is arguably to get a 1/1 flier and kill spell, or a 1/1 flier and a 2/2 bear, whereas a 3/3 for 3 is practically the floor for creatures in the precon I was using.

Wrath of Zorr also requires the player to make a lot of decisions about what to kill, when to attack or block, and redefines existing magic terms, notably completely changing what “Exile” means in context.

I suspect that 15 years ago with creature power level much lower, this could have been a more interesting experience. As it was, I found it dull and clunky.

Aaron’s Solitaire – Moonfrog Edition

Aaron’s Solitaire is another single player variant that uses a single deck between the human and AI player. The player plays a normal game of Magic, and the AI plays cards off the top of the deck for free.

Aaron’s Solitaire suffers a bit from the same problem, despite coming out in 2019: creatures are too strong when they aren’t controlled by mana costs. This time though, it happens in a slightly different direction, because it allows cards like this to pop out on turn 1.

Do you know what happens when this occurs? You lose.

Same for this guy.

Again, I didn’t find this mode to feel very much like playing Magic, and I didn’t exactly have a great time.

Horde Mode + Garruk the Slayer

Horde Mode was the first one of these I’ve played that offered something that felt a bit closer to standard Magic experience. While the player plays a standard game of Magic, the opponent plays with an 80 card deck, and that deck also functions as their life. On each of their turns, the AI player resolves up to the top 3 cards of their deck (Stopping early for mythics/rares/uncommons) and then swings in with everything.

I’ll give Horde Mode some credit here. It was more fun than the other modes. But it was still not very fun, because I found it to mostly be a deckbuilding puzzle rather than a gameplay puzzle¹, and the deck I built was this abomination.

Still, the deck as life was cool! I liked that.

Takeaways

Based on playing these, I came up with a few specific design goals for my single player variant.

1. The game should play like Magic (no custom cards, no redefining keywords, all rules work normally), but it shouldn’t feel like a standard game of Magic.
2. The player should have to make some interesting decisions about how to “play” the game. Meaning you shouldn’t be able to win with just deckbuilding. (Also, boardwipes and control lists should be at least somewhat pressured.)
3. The AI’s actions should not be super random, and if anything, should be telegraphed to player within reason.
4. The AI and player should be on roughly even power curves. The AI should be limited by mana costs to some extent.

Anyway, I made a prototype of it. The result was something I’m calling Spiderman Vs The Portal Master. It was well received, and probably violates a lot of copyrights. Given how well it went over, I’ll probably go back to it at some point and make a version I can release for folks to play if I find the energy.

1. And despite what some people think, I do think Magic is a game about piloting decisions, and not just deckbuilding. ↩︎

Ed Note: I wrote most of this back on Feb 27th, then got busy with a few things, and didn’t finish it until today.

Another Magic set, another prerelease. There seem to be a lot of those these days, don’t they? And apparently we have Secrets of Strixhaven in like 6 weeks? Jesus Christ.

Anyway, Teengage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ll be doing a little bit of UB ranting as I do this, but I mostly write these after-action reports for myself, and so other folks can take a look at my pool and prepare themselves for limited events, so let’s pull that pool up.

As a side note: only 5 people showed up for this release. This meant that each round, someone got a bye, which was a bit disappointing. At the same store, Lorwyn sold out.

Deckbuilding

I am deeply ambivalent about this deck. On the one hand, all of my strong bombs were black, I had 4 pieces of removal in black, and I had a reasonable amount of decent white stuff. Plus I had Quintessential Katana, which did a ridiculous amount of work.

On the other hand, post release I sat down and realized I had some pretty good red stuff. And as we’ll see, it’s not like the deck I made performed great, so it’s hard to feel like I really made the best choices here.

In any case, this was a set where I didn’t get a chance to test dummy pools, and I did less prep than I probably needed to. It will be borne out in the results.

So lets talk about the matches!

Matches

Match 1 was against Red/Blue artifacts. This got off to a good start, when I manged to take a fairly decisive game 1. Perhaps a bit too decisive, as I was confident going into game 2, and not as worried as I should have been when I lost.

And then there was game 3. Oh, game 3. Game three was a mess. I made several critical misplays, most notably where I whiffed a Make Your Move on a Ray Fillet, Man Ray that my opponent removed a +1/+1 from, causing both the spell to fizzle, and them to grab an extra card. This was compounded when they dropped a Donatello Mutant Mechanic that was I completely unable to remove.

End result was a board state where I was chunked down by artifact creatures until I died.

Game 2 was another match against… Red/Blue artifacts! This time I managed to win, but I’ll be honest, I don’t remember exactly what happened, and I didn’t keep great notes for this one. I do remember that I managed to play Armaggon, Future Shark to wipe their board.

Game 3 was… a bye. Yeah, remember when I said that we had a total of 5 people show up for this prerelease? This was the result. A 2-1 record, that really was more of a 1-1.

Overall Thoughts

I’m obviously unhappy with my performance in this pre-release. A 2-1 record isn’t great, I made a bunch of avoidable misplays that potentially cost me games, and then I got a bye so I didn’t even play a third match. I usually like byes, but only when I’m already winning and I get a break.

I’m also really unhappy with how TMNT plays in Sealed. I’m pretty sure I used the set mechanics less than I played games. Disappear and Sneak are cool in theory, but I had none of the core support cards like Dream Beavers to enable them. The end result was a very bland experience, one where I spent most of my time just playing a very dull game of Magic.

There’s a temptation to paint all of Universes Beyond with a broad brush, and while the product as a whole likely comes from a CFO’s desire to Scooge McDuck into a vault of money, the individual sets have been varied in quality. I’ve really enjoyed Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and Final Fantasy.

TMNT was not like those sets for me. It was a fairly mediocre experience.

Post Script: This is going up a bit later than I had intended, but since release I’ve done a few drafts, and… yeah, draft is better, but I still can’t say I love the set.

This set has convinced me that I’m probably good to skip most of the Universes Beyond sets for the rest of the year. There’s too many of them, and I’m just not interested in playing them in paper. If they’re actually good, I’ll just draft them. But I’m tired of pre-releases every 5 minutes for sub-par turnout.