Secrets Of Strixhaven is here to remind you of some basic facts about the world: Wizards-in-training is a pretty cool idea, Magic: The Gathering is a really fun game, and Magic world design is really neat when the designers get to run with it. These things, in a vacuum, should probably not be lighting a critic up, but after several sets that have felt a little more lackluster than they should, it’s genuinely delightful to play many games of Magic that remind you why the game is so strong. And some of that has to do with wizards.
The mana system of Magic is dependent on the idea that there are at least five types of magic in the world that pull on different resources. The colors of Magic all have their own identity—red is brash and unpredictable; black is avaricious and willing to sacrifice—and it’s through tracing those identities, and building decks around their strengths, that players can get to the customizable fun of the game. It is crucial to know that sometimes those colors can feel very out of whack with how they’ve played over the past 30 years. For example, in Edge Of Eternities it felt as if Magic had been crammed into a space universe; if the color identities happened to rhyme with whatever was happening in the game it was all good news, but there wasn’t much that made that set feel fundamentally tied to some of (what one would think of as) the core identities of Magic.
Secrets Of Strixhaven is a home run in that regard, though, and it’s pitched to players through the exploratory way that the set is built. Set on the world of Arcavios, Secrets is a big schematic presentation of all of the weird things that can happen on a magical plane that is centered on, well, magic itself. The people who are born here grow up to be wizards. The animals are magical. Rocks seem to be magical, and based on the games I’ve been playing, basically anything can magically punch anything else (if they don’t manage to get set on fire first).
Core to this story is Strixhaven University, a magical school that has different divisions that focus on different kinds of magic. It rhymes an awful lot with a magical school from a book series that might not have much to offer to the much bigger, wonderful universe of Magic, and it is actually good to see that toned down in this release with the focus instead being on the arcane natural world that surrounds that university.
That world is perfectly folded into the color identities of Magic, and that interleaving means that Secrets is the new essential set for the game. It is the best introduction, and encapsulation, of what the colors of Magic do and how the game functions that has been released in quite a while. There is a profound simplicity to playing Noxious Newt into Tenured Concocter. The newt produces mana, and the concocter allows a player to get some benefit if it’s killed. These are essential, baseline green identity functions, and while there’s nothing exciting about a game doing its basic functions, the way that Secrets presents them to players gives it a particular uncomplex thrill, like eating a really solid baseline hot dog.
Secrets Of Strixhaven accomplishes the goal of being a very solidly executed set that evokes some of the baseline core values of Magic better than a lot of other recent sets because it allows you to do a lot of Magic things. That sounds absurd, but the set’s unique game mechanics are all centered not on doing unique things but instead accruing more value and more coherent, colorful benefits. For example, the new Preparation cards double down by allowing you to play two cards in one. A creature card will have a Preparation ability, and when that creature is prepared (by hitting a certain requirement), then that Preparation ability allows you to cast another spell that is written on that creature. These spells are sometimes iconic to the history of Magic, and this set allows you to cast honest-to-god Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt under the right conditions. It’s leaning into history and the big, badass things that Magic has let players do over the years, making the wizarding plane feel deeply connected to the spells of Magic’s past.
Ostensibly, Secrets Of Strixhaven is also a two-color set, meaning that the wizard schools are split into two-color combos like the black and white Silverquill or the green blue Quandrix. Like in the previous set centered on this plane, these schools are well-drawn and clear. Quandrix is summoning up creatures, getting lands on the board, and drawing a lot of cards, where Silverquill is constantly garnering marginal benefits and slight advantages until the opponent is defeated. These continue to be clearly communicated, and their set-specific mechanics like Quandrix’s Increment (which makes creatures bigger as you play more expensive spells) and Prismari’s Opus (getting a benefit when instants and sorcery spells are cast) are pleasant to strategize around, although all of them pale in comparison to Preparation (discussed above) or Converge, which rewards players for making decks with as many colors as they can in them.
Sometimes Magic seems like an overworked product, in the sense that many recent sets have felt like they’ve had some slack in them. The past year or so has been met with massive sales but sometimes ropey play, as if there was just enough juice to get the product over the finish line and nothing more. This might simply be the player speaking, given that the pace of release for Magic at this moment feels overwhelming and hard to keep up with. All of that said, the card design of Secrets Of Strixhaven and the limited environment that it produces makes for extremely fun drafting and some very delightful core Magic. This is the kind of set you can use to reintroduce lapsed friends to the game, or it’s the kind of thing where you can pick up some of the cards, slot them into old decks, and feel like you’re getting the fantasy at the center of the Magic experience injected right into your head.
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