I’ve been hanging out in New York City the last few months (complimentary) and have been itching to return to one of the many planes in Magic’s worlds. And with how much of a slam-dunk visiting Llorwyn was, can you blame me for being eager for another dip in fantasy-land? Well, with Secrets of Strixhaven, we’re once again back in an in-universe setting, and after attending a prerelease for the upcoming set, it’s bound to be a fun one to explore.
School’s back in session with Secrets of Strixhaven
If you’re new to Magic: The Gathering, or prerelease events in general, it’s basically an event you attend where you’re given a small box with a handful of booster packs and are given an hour to sift through the cards you received to build a 40-card deck. It’s easily one of my favorite ways to experience the game, as everyone is experiencing the new set at the same time as you, and you can feel the excitement in the air as people see what they got and contemplate what sort of deck they might build. If you’ve never been to one, I can’t recommend it enough, as it’s a great way to casually experience the game and meet people in the hobby.
It’s been a few years since we were last at Strixhaven University in the plane of Arcavios. This prerelease mimics enrolling in a specific school at Strixhaven by letting you choose from one of five prerelease boxes, each representing a school at Strixhaven. That means you’ll get to choose between Silverquill, Prismari, Witherbloom, Lorehold, and Quandrix. I was lucky enough to receive a box from my first pick, Witherbloom, and was surprised to see that these boxes worked a little differently. Unlike most prerelease boxes that feature six standard booster packs, these contained only five, leaving the sixth one as a specialized pack that contained cards exclusively in the colors of the school you chose.
As much as I love prerelease events, sometimes making a functioning deck in only an hour, especially when it might be the first time you’re seeing all these cards, can be a daunting experience. Even as someone who’s been playing the game for decades at this point, I’m still cutting it close to the wire when finalizing my deck at these events. Adding a pack filled with cards from the school you chose (in my case, Witherbloom) was such a great way for Wizards, adding not only some narrative flair to the prerelease experience, but also helping simplify the deck-building experience a bit. Picked a Red/White Lorehold box? Then that means when you’re done opening all your packs, you’re heavily encouraged to put away anything that isn’t part of those two colors. It’s a great way to guide players toward the built-in complementary colors so they can create something viable for the event.
As I dug into my cards, I familiarized myself with their new mechanics. Prepared was the big new one; creature cards that come equipped with sorcery or instant spells that you’re able to freely cast as long as the creature is “prepared”. A card like Lluwen, Exchange Student comes with the sorcery “Pest Fiend” that lets you create a 1/1 Pest creature token, for example. Despite the fact that Lluwen is on the field, I still need to pay the one mana to cast its spell, and she needs to be prepared to do so. Lluwen thankfully enters the battlefield already prepared, but once you cast their spell, they’ll be unprepared and unable to cast that spell anymore. Thankfully, Lluwen has the ability to prepare itself again by simply exiling a creature from your graveyard. Cards like Adventurous Eater, however, rely heavily on others that can prepare cards that normally can’t. Cards like Skycoach Waypoint, a colorless land that, when tapping three mana, allows you to prepare a card. It’s a fantastic new mechanic, made more so when you find out that they paired some insane spells like Ancestral Recall or Reanimate to cards in this set.
Five Schools, Five Playstyles
After finally building my deck, it was time to play against others. I, funnily enough, got paired up with my friend for my first match, where I got to get a brutal taste of Quandrix and its Increment mechanic. Increment makes it so that when you cast a spell, if the amount of mana spent on the spell is greater than the creature’s power/toughness, then that creature gets a +1/+1 counter added to it. As you can expect, the counters started immediately piling on his creatures, but what really did me in was the card Pterafractyl, a fractal creature that tapped for 2+X, and entered with X +1/+1 counters where X is the amount of extra lands you tapped for its cost. Being a green deck, he, of course, was able to amass ten mana by that point in the game and dropped an 8/8 flyer on me. Then he played two more. It was a pretty crushing defeat, particularly since I didn’t have anything to counter flyers with the cards I had pulled, but my last two games fared better.
I later played what was basically a mirror match with another Witherbloom deck, as we both were trying to outplay each other on life-gain and life-drain abilities. Infusion is the main mechanic in Witherbloom, focusing on timing your combos instead of outright playing them. Cards with Infusion will give you a reward if you gained life prior to playing the card, so something like Efflorescence will allow you to put two +1/+1 counters on a creature, but if you gained life beforehand that turn, it’ll also gain trample and indestructible. It’s a really interesting way to play that really makes you stop and think of the timing of when to play your cards to make sure you’re gaining life at the appropriate times to trigger your Infusion effects.
The other person I played against threw a Prismari deck at me, with its Opus mechanic that works similarly to Infusion. Cards with Opus make it so that when you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you’ll get some sort of bonus, but if that spell costs five or more mana to play, you’ll get an additional bonus on top of that. A card like Colorstorm Stallion is a creature that gets a +1/+1 counter till the end of the turn anytime you play an instant/sorcery thanks to Opus, but if that spell costs five or more, then you can make a copy of Colorstorm Stallion on top of that. Exhibition Tidecaller is a particularly mean use of this mechanic, as it’s a (very cheap) creature that, because of Opus, makes a target player mill three cards anytime you play an instant/sorcery. Play one that costs five or more mana, however, and that player now has to mill a staggering ten cards instead. This being a blue card, that means you’re likely slinging a lot of spells and triggering Opus a lot.
Against these two other opponents, I managed to pull a tie with both of them, and that was mostly thanks to cards like Witherbloom, the Balancer, and Professor Dellian Fel. The latter of which, a powerful planeswalker, in one turn, can give you an emblem that makes it so that anytime you gain life, your opponent will lose that much. In a Witherbloom deck, where you’re constantly gaining life every turn, you can see how silly this card can get. Witherbloom, the Balancer, is one of the five elder dragons from the set, and its cost is reduced for every creature you have on the field. Normally an eight-cost card, I was able to play it for two or three times I brought it out, and once on the field, it then makes it so your instants/sorceries become cheaper the more creatures you have out too, making some powerful spells practically free. My performance at this prerelease felt like the karmic scales went against me, as a way to balance me pulling cards like Witherbloom, the Balancer, and Professor Dellian Fel. If getting some amazing pulls in my packs is the cost of placing 52 out of 60, then it was worth it.
I had a complete blast with Secrets of Strixhaven and was excited that I got to play against most of the schools during the event, which made it that much harder to decide which commander deck I might want to check out down the line. The Prepared mechanic in particular is such a game-changer for the game as well, and I’m already considering which cards featuring that mechanic are gonna slot into some of my existing decks. Wizards is really off to a killer start to the year, with three really fun sets right off the jump, and I wholly recommend checking out Secrets of Strixhaven when it releases later this week.
