School's in Session, Part 2

Last week, I introduced the Secrets of Strixhaven Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams, previewed two new cards, and started the story of how the set came to be. Today, I'll introduce the Secrets of Strixhaven Set Design and Commander Design teams and walk through the evolution of the Secrets of Strixhaven through set design.

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Meet the Faculty

Before I get into the story, I want to introduce the Set Design and Commander Design teams. Their bios were written by that team's lead designer.

Spilling the Secrets of Strixhaven

At the end of last week's article, Vision Design handed off Secrets of Strixhaven to Set Design. Here's what we handed off:

• Five enemy-color factions based on the five schools of Strixhaven
• An "instants and sorceries matter" theme
• New mascot tokens
• Magecraft
  • "Whenever you cast or copy and instant or sorcery spell"

• Prepared spells
• Extra Credit
  • "If this isn't the first spell you cast this turn"

• Classes

Set Design started by tackling probably the biggest challenge of making a return to Strixhaven, making sure the structure of the set could support an "instants and sorceries matter" theme. As I explained last week, themes that care about a certain quality have to make sure that the as-fan (or the percentage of a thing that shows up in the average booster) was high enough that it was able to mechanically matter.

Strixhaven: School of Mages used several tools. One was making more spells that create tokens. These could go into the creature slots of a player's deck while helping up the as-fan of instants and sorceries. Vision Design had brought them back but changed the creature tokens. Set Design would keep those but make some changes to what the creature tokens were. More on this below.

The other tools from Strixhaven: School of Mages were Lessons and learn. Learn lets you fetch a Lesson from outside the game, which increases the density of instants and sorceries. Vision Design talked about the learn mechanic and decided they didn't want to bring it back. The "extra credit" mechanic went on instants and sorceries that have the Lesson subtype for backward compatibility with Strixhaven: School of Mages.

In its place, Vision Design put preparation cards and prepare spells in the set. These had the similar quality of allowing you to have permanent spells that come with an instant or sorcery. Set Design liked prepare spells. They didn't change their core function, but they designed a lot of individual cards, even making a mythic rare cycle. I previewed one last week.

The challenge was figuring out how the prepare spells wanted to play. How often should the preparation card enter prepared? How often should you have to jump through a hoop to get the prepare spell? How often should the spells be repeatable? When should we use classic Magic spells? How much text can we fit on one prepare spell? What should the frames look like? Prepare spells were a new space, so there was a lot to figure out, but the essence of how they fit into the set structure never strayed from Vision Design's structure.

The biggest change to the set came from Set Design trying to find one more way to increase the number of instants and sorceries. Most of the previous strategies had been about finding a way to turn cards into instants or sorceries or creating spells that come with a bonus instant or sorcery, but there was another way. Magic has mechanics that let you cast spells more than once, the most famous being the flashback mechanic. It only goes on instants and sorceries and lets you cast them a second time. It was such a useful tool that the Vision Design team for Strixhaven: School of Mages put flashback into their set.

Flashback wasn't deciduous yet, but because including flashback in Strixhaven: School of Mages seemed like a no-brainer, we added the mechanic. The set was codenamed "Fencing." "Golf," the next non-core set, was Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. Original Innistrad was very famous for having flashback. We chose not to use it when we returned in Shadows over Innistrad, but R&D had, in retrospect, decided that was a mistake. When we returned for a third time, we decided we needed to bring back flashback and planned to include it in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.

I thought it was fine for both Strixhaven: School of Mages and Innistrad: Midnight Hunt to have flashback. It's a cool mechanic with a lot of design space, and I believed the two sets would use flashback quite differently, both mechanically and creatively. It turned out I was in the minority opinion, so I removed flashback from Strixhaven: School of Mages. While it was a nice fit, we had enough going on to accomplish our goals.

The Secrets of Strixhaven Set Design team made the same discovery we did five years earlier. Flashback is perfect for Strixhaven, especially in Lorehold. This brings me to another story.

One of our goals when designing Strixhaven: School of Mages was to show we could make a two-color faction set that wasn't Ravnica: City of Guilds. To do this, we structured the set differently. Rather than giving each faction its own mechanic, we created mechanics that spread across all five factions. Each one used it differently to show their contrast. We then made sure that each school had an archetype that deviated from what the same color pair on Ravnica did.

Boros (red-white) is associated with aggression, so we were interested in showing a different aspect of the color pair. Because Lorehold was the history school, we were interested in having that faction care about the graveyard. White has some mechanical connection to the graveyard (it's third behind black and green). Red has very little connection to the graveyard. Making red-white care about the graveyard was a challenge. We ended up focusing on caring about things leaving the graveyard. It's one of the reasons flashback was so attractive.

When Strixhaven: School of Mages came out, the fact that red-white had such a different play pattern was a big hit with the players. Red-white aggro is probably the two-color archetype we hit most often, so the change of pace was popular.

Going into Secrets of Strixhaven, there were high expectations for Lorehold to deliver on something which was difficult for red-white to normally do. Realizing that flashback would be perfect for Lorehold in a set that really needed support for an "instants and sorceries matter" theme got Set Design to the exact same spot the Strixhaven: School of Mages Vision Design team had gotten to. But this time, flashback was deciduous and no one was worried about other sets using it.

Originally, they put flashback in all five colors, with red and white getting just a little more. But as time went by, they realized that it would work best if it was just a red and white thing, which made them question the idea that mechanics weren't divided up by faction. Strixhaven: School of Mages didn't give each faction a mechanic to try and separate the set from Ravnica's version of color pairs. But Strixhaven is a popular setting (at the time it came out, it was the all-time best-selling in-Multiverse premiere set), and Reggie's team wasn't worried about the comparison to Ravnica. What if they made flashback a Lorehold-only thing and gave each faction its own mechanic?

Finishing Schools

If Lorehold had flashback, what mechanics could each of the other schools have? The first thing Set Design did was look at the various ways the different schools were handling magecraft. Silverquill had some cards that care about casting an instant or sorcery that targets a creature. Prismari had spells that give you a bonus if your instants and sorceries have a mana value of 5 or more. What if the team removed magecraft from the set and turned those subsets of spells into their own mechanic? Silverquill's cards became the repartee mechanic, and Prismari's cards became opus.

For Witherbloom, Set Design looked at the black-green archetype in Strixhaven: School of Mages. Because Witherbloom focused on biology, we leaned on cards that care about life. Green is good at gaining life, black is good at spending it, and combining those elements felt like a new place to take black-green. Caring about life seemed like the right approach, but the team was curious if there was a mechanic that could lean on it. After some experimentation, the team settled on an ability word, infusion, which cares about whether you gained life this turn. Some infusion cards trigger on multiple turns, while others enhance a spell or effect.

Quandrix proved to be the most challenging school to find a keyword for. In the end, they settled on increment, an ability word which was a riff on the evolve mechanic from Gatecrash (designed by Ethan Fleischer for the Great Designer Search 2). Creatures with evolve got +1/+1 counters whenever a larger creature entered. What about the same thing but caring about bigger spells getting cast? That was spell-centric and aligned with math.

Set Design considered whether they wanted to turn "extra credit" into a school mechanic. In the end, they removed it from the set. They also decided to get rid of Classes (although two ended up in the Commander decks).

Next, Set Design looked at the mascot tokens. Here are the mascots as they appeared in Strixhaven: School of Mages:

Here's what Vision Design handed off. Our goal was to create a new token for each school:

• Silverquill: 2/2 White and black Inkling creature token
• Prismari: 3/3 Blue and red Elemental creature token with flying
• Witherbloom: 1/1 Black and green Pest creature token with "Whenever this attacks, you gain 1 life."
• Lorehold: 2/3 Red and white Spirit artifact creature token with "Whenever this attacks, exile target card from a graveyard."
• Quandrix: 0/0 Green and blue Fractal creature token

While we changed other features of the tokens, we kept the names the same. Most of these changes were small tweaks. Inklings went from 2/1 to 2/2 and lost flying. Elementals went from 4/4 to 3/3 and gained flying. Pests had their ability changed from gaining you life when they die to gaining you life when they attack. Spirits went from 3/2 to 2/3, became artifact creatures, and gained an attack trigger to exile cards from the graveyard (to play into Lorehold's theme of rewarding you for cards leaving your graveyard). Fractals stayed the same.

Here's what was published in the set:

Elementals, Pests, and Fractals stayed as they were handed off. Inklings got flying back but dropped to a 1/1. Spirit tokens went from being 2/3 artifact creatures to 2/2 nonartifact creatures and lost the attack trigger.

The final two mechanics were both added in set design and were inspired by the past, one a straight return and one a tweak.

Every set must have antagonists. For Secrets of Strixhaven, that was the archaics. Archaics are huge colorless creatures that are alien and inscrutable. The Creative team kept getting the same response: "You mean like the Eldrazi?" No, they were different than the Eldrazi, but trying to make cards for them very much felt like we were going down the same path as the Eldrazi.

Someone on the Creative team suggested that instead of archaics lacking different colors of mana, they should be drawn to it. What if the archaics wanted you to play with a lot of different colors? This made them feel like the opposite of the Eldrazi. We used a mechanic from Battle for Zendikar that didn't appear on Eldrazi but did on the Zendikari denizens who fought them. Converge cared about how many different colors of mana you used to cast the spell.

Set Design added converge to archaics and cards that care about the archaics. It added a nice throughline to give the antagonists of the set some flavor and mechanical cohesion.

The other mechanic came about because Set Design was trying to create a mythic rare cycle of sorceries. It was an "instants and sorceries matter" set. Was there a way to make super-splashy spells, something that felt at home at mythic rare? As they explored ideas, they stumbled across a cycle of rare sorceries from Saviors of Kamigawa.

The epic mechanic was designed by Brian Tinsman. He was trying to do the same thing as the Secrets of Strixhaven Set Design team: make splashy high-rarity sorceries. The epic mechanic, which only appears on these five cards from Saviors of Kamigawa, lets you cast the spell every turn for the rest of the game. That sounds pretty amazing. The problem is that epic comes with the drawback of not being able to play any other spells for the rest of the game. Brian had made a really exciting ability and attached a very unexciting drawback.

Set Design saw the epic spells and considered doing the same thing without the drawback. Epic became paradigm. The one other addition to these spells came late. During vision design and set design, we wrestled with whether we wanted the Lesson subtype in the set. We knew we weren't doing learn, but having Lessons in the set would make those cards compatible with the learn cards from Strixhaven: School of Mages. They would also play nicely with the "Lessons matter" cards in Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™.

At the time of the vision design handoff, the spells with "extra credit" were Lessons. When that mechanic was removed, Set Design tried putting the Lesson subtype on different spells. In the end,the only new Lessons they made were the paradigm spells.

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School's Out

That is the story of how Secrets of Strixhaven came to be. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article, any of the mechanics I discussed, or Secrets of Strixhaven as a whole. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week when I share the vision design handoff document from Secrets of Strixhaven.

Until then, may you have fun learning all about Secrets of Strixhaven.