How Strixhaven, Magic’s answer to Harry Potter, happened

On the one hand, after several years of similar crossovers, a Magic x Harry Potter team-up seems inevitable. On the other hand, even after being beaten into submission with crossovers for everything from Transformers to My Little Pony, the news that the Wizarding World (and all its baggage) might be coming to Magic was enough to send certain parts of the fanbase into a tailspin.

It didn’t take long for Wizards to push back. In a Reddit thread discussing the news, the official company account chimed in: “The Magic Multiverse has its own school of Magic at Strixhaven with plenty of secrets still to explore. Our Universes Beyond roadmap currently doesn’t have us visiting any others.” (The current internal Magic roadmap extends into the early 2030s.)

While that response clearly leaves some room for future backtracking, it was enough to calm the nerves of most Magic players. More importantly, it was also a reminder that not only does Magic have its own Hogwarts-style wizarding school, but it’s way cooler than the one Harry Potter and his friends attended.

Originally introduced in April 2021, Strixhaven is Magic’s spin on the magic school genre, with a few subtle changes that help distinguish it from the competition. For one thing, it’s a college, not a secondary school.

“We made it college because a lot of the magical school of genre stuff tends to be a little bit younger in age,” Magic‘s lead designer Mark Rosewater tells Polygon. “I thought it’d be cooler to go a little bit older.”

Strixhaven was also founded by five badass dragons (more on that later). Perhaps most importantly, the students of Strixhaven study more than just magic.

“One of my personal pet peeves about the genre is, they always study magic, but they never study real subjects,” Rosewater says. “They have potions class and they have charm class, but what about math? Do they have to study math!?”

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Harry and Ron might not know their multiplication tables (Hermione probably does), but the students of Strixhaven certainly do — at least if they’re enrolled in the mathemagics-focused Quandrix, one of five distinct schools that make up the wizarding university.

To mark the fifth anniversary of Strixhaven: School of Mages (and just ahead of Magic‘s return to this world with the latest set, Secrets of Strixhaven), Polygon caught up with Rosewater and two of his colleagues to uncover how Wizards of the Coast came up with its own answer to Hogwarts, and how that original vision is evolving in Secrets of Strixhaven.

The Origins of Strixhaven

Like most new Magic sets, Strixhaven wasn’t born out of a single great concept, but a combination of several good ones.

“A lot of times we get ideas and the idea needs more ideas to sort of glom onto,” Rosewater says.

In this case, one of those ideas was about a magical school, which Rosewater and his colleague Jenna Helland had been kicking around. At the same time, they also wanted to test out double-faced cards where the player could cast either side for a different outcome, and they wanted to make a set focused on instants and sorceries (rather than creatures). Finally, and perhaps most important, they wanted to explore enemy factions.

Magic is defined by its five colors (white, blue, black, red, green), displayed in a circle on the back of every card. The placement of each element in that circle is significant, with adjacent colors functioning as allies, while the ones that don’t are considered enemies. This mattered a lot more in the game’s earliest iterations, where allied colors joined together much more often than enemies did (today, it’s largely a free-for-all), but the color wheel is still a guiding ethos for Wizards of the Coast.

The result was five magic schools, one for each of the enemy factions:

• White-red became Lorehold, the history department
• Green-black became Witherbloom, a college of science focused on controlling life and death
• White-black became Silverquill, focused on the power of words
• Red-blue became Prismari, a school of the arts
• Finally, blue-green became Quandrix, where wizards could finally study math

Breaking down the schools of Strixhaven

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Deciding which school would study which subject didn’t happen at random. Instead, Rosewater and his team thought carefully about what subject made sense for each enemy faction and how that translated into the mechanics of the game. They also tried to avoid too much overlap with the 2005 block Ravnica, which established names and identities for all 10 color pairings.

Rosewater explains: “Instead of the factions being about what they have in common, which is how we had done Ravnica, what if it was about their conflict?”

Take Quandrix, for example. In Magic, blue cards are often defined by a quest for knowledge and a talent for invention and controlling the environment. Meanwhile, green is associated with nature, the cycle of life, and a belief in the larger machinations of the universe. This tension between controlling your environment and submitting to it wound up lending itself to the study of math.

“There’s this classic math argument: Did we discover math or did we create math? That’s the perfect green-blue argument,” Rosewater says. “Green believes they just discovered the thing that’s been there since the dawn of time, and blue is like, ‘No, no, no. We created it.'”

Silverquill followed a similar logic. In Magic, white cards often focus on enforcing societal structure for the good of the group, while black emphasizes the individual. That same logic was applied to the study of words and writing, which can be used both for self expression or to push society at large in a specific direction.

“What is the role of language? Are you helping the group or are you helping the individual? That felt like a white-black conflict,” Rosewater says.

In practice, this led to Silverquill spells that can either hype up your own creatures or cut down your opponent’s army.

Others were more obvious. Green and black represent life and death in Magic, respectively. So Witherbloom leaned into that cycle, giving players the ability to both gain life through spells and creatures — and take it away for extra value.

“They’re very obsessed with studying the cycle of life,” Rosewater says, “but they’re studying opposite sides of it.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge was Lorehold. When red and white team up in Magic, the result is typically fast-moving aggressive decks full of small creatures. Wizards wanted to take Lorehold in a different direction, and instead turned it into the history college with a focus on interacting with the graveyard. For Rosewater, the difference between white’s emphasis on order and red’s typical focus on pure instinct overlapped well with a debate within the study of historical events.

“There’s two different takes on history,” he says. “One is very big picture; that it doesn’t matter what the individual does, you have to look at the large scope of it. And the other side is, No, it’s about the individuals. That felt like a really neat dichotomy for history.”

Lorehold was particularly difficult to pull off. “We really push white-red to a place it doesn’t naturally want to be,” Rosewater says, admitting that the color combination quickly bounced back to its old aggro ways right afterward. “You don’t see a lot of graveyard sets outside of Strixhaven for red-white.”

However, that doesn’t mean Wizards didn’t learn anything from the experience. “Frankly, Strixhaven is where we learned a lot about the leaves-the-graveyard theme, so much so that we just did it in black and green in a bunch of other sets,” says Reggie Valk, another set designer on Strixhaven.

Finally, there’s Prismari, which the team originally envisioned as a hard science school to balance Witherbloom’s soft science. Then, Doug Beyer, the creative lead on the set, suggested making red-blue into a performing arts school instead.

Rosewater says this was the perfect encapsulation of the conflict between blue and red in Magic. “Prismari is all about: What’s the point of art? Is it to make you think or to make you feel?” Mechanically, this translated into big, splashy spells with spectacular payoffs.

The dragons

Image: Wizards of the Coast

As for those dragons, the five schools of Strixhaven needed a backstory. Who founded them? At the time, Beyer suggested it might be cool if the founders were ancient beings who were still alive. After that, it was a short walk to dragons.

“We do a lot of focus testing with the audience,” Rosewater says. “Of all the creature types we do, dragons are one of the top most favorite.”

Laura Bond, who worked as a game designer on the original Strixhaven and as set design lead for Secrets of Strixhaven, adds that the complex structure of the school required an equally complex creature type.

“We created a school that’s all about being in conflict with itself,” she says. “The characters were definitely designed to be kind of in conflict, which really makes them very complex in a way that only elder dragons can possibly be.”

Bond adds that at the time the Strixhaven sets take place, the dragons are no longer directly involved with the school. “That also gives us a lot of freedom to just say they get to be as cool as they want to be and don’t need to be beholden to the actual school itself.”

Return of the bonus sheet

Image: Wizards of the Coast/Piotr Dura

These days, each new set includes a “bonus sheet” of older cards printed with fresh art and hidden away in various packs. But in 2021, that wasn’t the case. One previous set, 2006’s Time Spiral, had introduced “timeshifted cards.” For Strixhaven, Wizards revived the concept and solidified it as a Magic staple.

The idea came from development lead Yoni Skolnik, who leaned into the idea that students at Strixhaven studied the most powerful spells from across the Magic multiverse. “What if we had all the spells from across the multiverse? It just was a really cool pitch,” Rosewater recalls.

Wizards called it the Mystical Archive, and it was a runaway hit. “Strixhaven was the top selling set, ” Rosewater says, “and one of the reasons for that is the bonus sheet, the Mystical Archive.” The bonus sheet has been a feature of Magic ever since, and returns in Secrets of Strixhaven with another trip to the Mystical Archive.

From lessons to prepared

One other way Strixhaven differentiated itself from Ravnica was by focusing on one mechanic across all five schools, instead of a special one for each color pairing. That mechanic was learn and lessons. The former was an ability printed on certain creatures and other spells, which allowed you to grab a lesson card from “outside the game” (aka, your sideboard) and put it in your hand.

The concept came from a larger issue with making a Magic set built around instants and sorceries: how do you make those the focus while also including enough creatures? When designing a new set, Wizards has a term called “as fan” used to describe how many cards of a certain type a player sees as they open up a booster pack and fan out the cards.

“If your ‘as fan’ isn’t high enough, you can’t mechanically care about it,” Rosewater says.

Learn/lessons got around this by letting Wizards print creature cards that summoned an instant or sorcery to your hand. However, when the company prepared to return to Strixhaven five years later, it decided to ditch learn and give each school their own unique mechanic instead. The spirit of the idea lives on in Prepared, however, a new Magic ability based on an old unused concept.

While designing the original Strixhaven, Rosewater came up with an idea for “mechanical scrolls,” basically artifact tokens (like treasure or food tokens) that could be sacrificed to trigger a spell. Ultimately, the scrolls got cut from an already busy set, but Rosewater left a note for his future self that if Wizards ever revisited Strixhaven, they should try again. Mechanical scrolls became prepared, an ability that lets creatures cast an instant or sorcery printed onto their card as long as they meet certain criteria.

“I’m excited that we got to do some things we had made the first time around that we didn’t get to use,” Rosewater says.

The future of Strixhaven

Image: Wizards of the Coast

It only took five years for Wizards to return to Strixhaven, which means at this rate, we may revisit the magical university again as early as 2031. By then, maybe the campus will expand to include even more schools, offering a home for the five allied color pairings. Then again, maybe not.

“When we built the schools, we didn’t save anything,” Rosewater says. “It’s not like we said, ‘Well, we’re going to build some schools and then save some subject matters.’ We used all the buffalo and we didn’t really save anything for us to make more stuff.”

Fair enough, although I can think of a few ways to expand Strixhaven. Don’t some wizards have to study engineering? (That feels like white-blue to me.) Or psychology? Or law? Maybe Strixhaven could even open a vocational school for magical plumbers, construction workers, and chefs.

After all, if it comes down to a choice between milking Magic‘s own wizarding school for all its worth or Universes Beyond Harry Potter, then sign us up for Strixhaven community college.