Study Session
Previews for Secrets of Strixhaven begin tomorrow, so I wanted to use today's article to go back in time and talk about the creation of the original Strixhaven: School of Mages set. How did it come about? What decisions led to its creation? Are there cool stories I've never shared before? Today is all about Strixhaven's past in preperation for Strixhaven's present. This story is less about how the set was designed. You can read about that in my two-part article on the design of the set (Part 1 and Part 2). This is more about how the idea to make the set came up in the first place.
One of my roles as head designer is to find cool things we can do to make new Magic sets. Most ideas aren't big enough to fill up a whole set. When I find smaller ideas that would be a good addition to a set, I hold onto them, waiting to find the right place to use them. Looking back, I realized that the creation of Strixhaven: School of Mages was basically the story of having a whole bunch of different ideas that all coalesced into one big idea. Today, I'll tell you about a number of different ideas that all ended up in the same place.
An Enemy-Color Set
When I first got to Wizards in 1995, enemy-color cards were thought of in a certain way. Allies were the colors that liked each other, and enemies were the colors that had a core conflict. The colors of mana got along with their allies and fought with their enemies. In Limited Edition (Alpha), Richard represented this by having monocolor cards help their allies and hurt their enemies. Alpha had more cards where colors hurt their enemies rather than helping their allies, but both existed.
When Legends, Magic's third expansion, introduced multicolor cards, all the two-color cards were ally-color cards, and all the three-color cards were shards (a color and its two allies). There were zero enemy two-color and wedge three-color multicolor cards. The Dark, the next set, had the first enemy-color card, but there was literally one.
We made both ally- and enemy-color cards, but the allies were purposefully designed to be better, both in quantity and quality. We made more ally-color cards, and in general they were more powerful. We also gave ally-color decks better mana bases. I'm not exaggerating. You can go back and look at old sets. Enemy-color cards and decks were much worse.
The Invasion block was the start of what I call the third stage of Magic design. Bill Rose had just become the head designer, and his vision was that all blocks would start having mechanical themes. For his first block, he wanted to do a multicolor theme. The original plan was to make a set with ally-color cards consisting of three-fourths of the set and enemy-color cards making up the remaining fourth. Henry Stern and I (independently, interestingly enough) both approached Bill with an idea. What if we held the enemy-color cards for the last set? Third sets in blocks were always a problem, so maybe giving it something the rest of the block hadn't delivered on would help.
We did it, and Apocalypse was a big hit. It had a huge impact on me personally. So much so that years later when I became head designer, I started planning every block so that each set offered something new, allowing each set to have its own identity. The very first block I oversaw was the original Ravnica: City of Guilds block, which was going to be our second-ever multicolor-focused block. I decided early on to treat the ally- and enemy-color pairs the same. They would have the same number of cards and the same power level. They would be on equal footing.
That didn't mean all the bias toward ally-color pairs was gone. We still tended to start ten-card cycles by publishing the ally-color versions, and we were more likely to make sets with ally-color themes. I decided it was important to make another set about the enemy-color pairs. As head designer, I helped choose what sets to make. That didn't seem like that hard of a task.
My first opportunity was Dragons of Tarkir. The whole idea behind the block was that we were going to start with a three-color wedge set and, after time travel shenanigans, end the block with a two-color set. Great. That could be an enemy-color set. Then Erik Lauer talked to me. He asked if we wanted the first and last set of the block to draft differently. I said, yes, as the whole point of changing the timeline was to create a completely different experience. He then said we might want the last set to be an ally-color set.
Erik explained that a wedge set will have five enemy-color themes as back-up because when you draft enemy colors, you leave yourself open to two different wedges. If we wanted Dragons of Tarkir to be a different draft experience, we needed to avoid doing enemy-color pairs. Erik was right, so I changed Dragons of Tarkir to an ally-color set.
The next opportunity to make an enemy-color set was Unstable. My core design goal was to make a factioned Un- set. Perfect, I could make them enemy-color factions. I then realized that the steampunk mad inventor vibe I was using was the perfect opportunity to finally make good on the promise of Contraptions that we had made in Future Sight with the card
When we had designed
Once I had Contraptions, I knew I needed to reprint
I still wanted to make an enemy-color set. I just needed to find the right place.
An Instants and Sorceries Set
The design team for Alliances (Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Petty, Chris Page, and Joel Mick) were interested in finding a mechanical theme for their set. They chose artifacts.
I'm not quite sure which set to consider the first creature-focused set. I guess I would pick Fallen Empires, although Legends is a defendable choice. We would eventually make Legions, which was a set where 100% of the cards were creatures.
The first enchantment-focused set was Urza's Saga. The theme of "enchantments matter" ran throughout the block. But the Creative team decided to call the block "the Artifact block" for story reasons and R&D made a bunch of broken cards, many of which were artifacts or cared about artifacts, so the idea of the set being enchantment-themed went unnoticed by many. Years later, we made the Theros block, where the enchantment theme was a little louder.
It took me years to get the "land block" made. I realized there was a lot of potential in land-based designs, but most designers were skeptical. Matt Place, a former designer, used to make fun of me when I brought it up by saying, "Finally, a block where lands can matter." But I'm stubborn and persistent, and that block, which began with Zendikar, finally came to be. The Zendikar block led to, among other things, the landfall mechanic.
Even planeswalkers got a set. I remember the day Doug Beyer pitched me the story for the Bolas Arc. He explained how it would end on Ravnica with a fight between Bolas and his zombie army and nearly every Planeswalker that players knew. My response was, "Doug, I only get three planeswalkers per set." In the end, War of the Spark had 40 planeswalkers and we pushed the mechanical boundaries of what a planeswalker could be, making uncommon and hybrid planeswalker cards for the first time. We also allowed static abilities to become a staple feature on planeswalkers.
I bring all this up because there were two card types (not counting kindred or battles, the latter of which didn't exist yet) that had yet to have a set mechanically built around them: instants and sorceries. We had made archetypes that cared about them (often in blue and red), but they were never the focus of a whole set. The reason we hadn't done it was there were a lot of challenges in making a Limited environment that could cared about instants and sorceries. In a normal Limited deck, for instance, you usually included maybe six or seven instants and sorceries. That wasn't a high enough as-fan to build a whole Limited structure around.
A set based around instants and sorceries was something I knew we needed to do one day, but doing so would add a lot of constraints to the set's design, so it needed to be the right place.
A Different Kind of Faction Set
If I had to pick the first faction set, I'd say Fallen Empires. The whole set was about five monocolor groups that each had an internal fight stemming from their own civilization. Each group had a mechanical identity. But from the modern perspective of what we think of as a faction set, the first one was Ravnica: City of Guilds. As I explained above, the Ravnica: City of Guilds block was the first block to repeat a mechanical theme, so I was intent on doing something different. The Invasion block had been about playing as many different colors as you could, so I decided to make Ravnica: City of Guilds about playing as few colors as possible. For a multicolor block, that meant two.
I told the Creative team that I wanted to focus on the ten two-color pairs with equal weight. Brady Dommermuth, who was the Creative team lead, came back with the idea of Ravnica's guilds. I was so excited by the idea that I decided to build the block around it. Each set would focus on a number of guilds (the first set had four, and the two small sets had three). We would give each guild its own mechanical identity. The simplest low-hanging fruit for this idea was to give each guild its own keyword.
Ravnica: City of Guilds was a huge hit and became the template for the factionalized sets that followed it. The next set with factions, Shards of Alara, gave a mechanical definition to each faction, although only three of the factions got an actual keyword. Return to Ravnica divided up the factions a bit differently, but each faction got its own keyword. Khans of Tarkir was the next factionalized set and, again, it gave each faction its own keyword. When the timeline changed, the keywords all changed, too, but each faction still had one. Next was Ixalan, where each faction had its own keyword. Guilds of Ravnica was our third visit to Ravnica, and again, every faction got its own keyword.
There's nothing wrong with giving every faction its own keyword. There was a good reason I did it in Ravnica: City of Guilds, but the designer in me started to question if all faction sets have to have a keyword for each guild. Was there a way to build a faction set that didn't do that? I thought there was, but I'd have to find the right place.
A Magical School Set
When Odyssey came out, I spoke with Brady Dommermuth, who at the time was still an editor and hadn't yet joined the Creative team. He talked about how he felt the creative design of Odyssey didn't do a good job of matching the graveyard theme of the set. He talked about how a Gothic horror theme would have worked better. I loved the idea and said we should do that. It took a little while (today shows that some ideas just take time to make happen), but eventually we made Innistrad.
Innistrad came together so well and was so enjoyed by the audience that I became entranced with the idea of finding other genres to use for inspiration. The first genre I thought of was the fairy-tale genre, but that's its own story. I made a long list of genres that I thought would make for fun Magic sets.
An exercise of mine involves talking one on one with members of the Creative team. Jenna Helland and I had a great conversation about the magical school genre. It had the great mix of being the source of a lot of different types of stories and hitting upon a very resonant theme: school. It seemed like an idea that would make for a great Magic set. I just needed to find the right place to put it.
A Modal Double-Faced Card (MDFC) Set
Early in Innistrad design, I realized that we needed to do Werewolves well. The other monsters (Vampires, Zombies, and Spirits) were all things Magic had made cool cards for in the past, but at the time of Innistrad's design there had only ever been three Werewolf cards, and none of them were very exciting. We explored a number of ideas, but the one that worked the best was double-faced cards. Tom Lapille, a designer, had used double-faced cards in another game that Wizards makes, Duel Masters. He suggested we use them for Innistrad.
Once we decided to do double-faced cards, we started to explore their design space. We stumbled across the idea of double-faced cards where you could cast either side of the card, but it didn't transform. It essentially was a version of split cards, but one where the individual cards could be permanents, and actual split cards couldn't be permanents. We called these hypothetical designs "modal double-faced cards." We quickly realized that it was confusing to have double-faced cards work in different ways. Since one of Innistrad's core themes was dark transformation, we decided to use transforming double-faced cards (TDFCs). We could use modal double-faced cards later. You know, if we could find the right place for them.
The Right Place
In early Magic, the head designer would create a document called a five-year plan where they would map out their ideas for the next five years of blocks. I had a habit of submitting more than five years' worth of blocks. Eventually, we made a larger team to decide what sets we should be doing. That team would meet off-site for a couple days every other year and map out the next couple of years for Magic. Eventually, that turned into the Arc Planning team. That team is a collection of people from different parts of Magic, including me, that all come together to discuss what we should do next.
I believe this story took place at the tail end of the off-site meeting era. We started by having everyone throw out any ideas they had. Some were fully fleshed-out ideas. Others were fragments or cool ideas that needed something to go with them. Jenna and I brought up our idea of a magical school set. I talked about wanting to find a home for an enemy-color set. I talked about my interest in a new take on factions. Aaron brought up the idea of a set focused on instants and sorceries.
As we were tossing ideas out, Aaron asked me if there were mechanical things I wanted to do. One of the things I mentioned was modal double-faced cards. Transforming double-faced cards had gone well, and I knew there was plenty of design space in MDFCs. Aaron asked what kind of cards I imagined making with MDFCs. I explained they should be like split cards but bigger because they could be permanents. For example, we could put a creature on one side and any card type on the other side, like another creature, an artifact, an enchantment, a land, or even instants and sorceries.
And as soon as I said "instants or sorceries," all the pieces came together. If this was a movie, you'd have a close-up on my head and see an image of gears turning. MDFCs would allow us to have more instants and sorceries in the set, which would be the perfect mechanical tie-in for a set about students learning magic. A set about students learning magic was an ideal place to do a faction set. That faction set could be about enemy-color factions. Those enemy-color factions could be used to do a new take on faction sets.
It all came together in my head. I remember saying, "Okay, I have an idea." I pitched the combination of a magic school setting with enemy-color factions, a novel new faction structure, and an emphasis on instants and sorceries with MDFCs. We had collected jigsaw puzzle pieces, unaware that they all went together until they were all in front of us.
And that is how Strixhaven: School of Mages came to be. But how did Secrets of Strixhaven come to be? That's for next week.
Pencils Down
That's all the time I have for today. As always, I'd love to hear any feedback, be it on today's article, Strixhaven: School of Mages, or any related topic you'd like to discuss. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter) with feedback.
Join me next week for my Secrets of Strixhaven preview article.
Until then, may your ideas coalesce into something cool.