After weaving through the intricacies of Lorwyn Eclipsed Limited and enduring a month of pizza and nunchaku diet thanks to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I am very excited to dive into Secrets of Strixhaven.
Magic: The Gathering’s previous homage to this famous school of magic — Strixhaven: School of Mages — was one of my favorite sets in recent years. As a Limited and Pauper player, I truly enjoyed the Learn and Lessons mechanics. It added a lot of depth and flexibility to gameplay, and it was also a rare flavor hit. Lessons featured prominently in Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I was looking forward to getting some good Learn cards in the latest set. But, as Albus Dumbledore once said, “Don’t count your owls before they are delivered.”
Alas, there will be no Learn cards in Secrets of Strixhaven. Polygon attended a preview press event for the set, and we can confirm that this time around, the young wizard prospects won’t be doing much learning. Executive producter Athena Foelich confirmed this, noting that while the set does feature a few Lesson cards, Lessons itself is not a featured mechanic. “The whole idea of these [Lessons[ is that they kind of mimic the idea of a final capstone or a thesis that you might write in your college career,” she said.
The whole “academics” dynamic is instead explored with the new Prepared mechanic, which is interesting on its own and comes attached to some of the most powerful effects in the history of Magic. What’s better (or worse) than one Ancestral Recall in Standard? Two, of course. The set also features distinct mechanics for each of Strixhaven’s five colleges of magic.
While I’m looking forward to opening an Emeritus of Ideation in Draft or Sealed (it’s never going to happen, but hope is free), I’m still disappointed by the absence of Learn cards. This mechanic allows a player to do one of two things when casting a card with the Learn keyword: they can discard a card to draw a card, or they can search their sideboard for a Lesson card and add it to their hand. While the first effect is useful, the second one is surely the most powerful. It adds some flexibility to deckbuilding that reminds me of old classics like the Wish cycle. When Strixhaven: School of Mages came out, strong Learn cards like Eyetwitch and Sparring Regimen appeared in powerful Standard decks. One card, Divided by Zero, proved to be too powerful and had to be banned, but the mechanic was far from oppressive or problematic.
The lack of Learn cards will make the Secrets of Strixhaven Limited experience worse than I hoped. In Limited, players are forced to operate with (you guessed it) more limited resources in the form of a 40-card deck rather than 60. Learn lets you expand your pool of resources to include whatever “silver bullets” you might have in your Sealed pool, so that’s incredibly useful. For example, you could fetch an Origin of Metalbending to deal with pesky enchantments or artifacts, or a Pest Summoning to weather the aggression of an aggro deck. Learn is one of the main reasons why the original Strixhaven Limited is so fondly remembered, and it will be sorely missed.
Moreover, with the fresh batch of Lessons from Avatar, I was looking forward to some new Learn cards to spice up Pauper. While there are good Lessons at the common rarity, like Abandon Attachments, Firebending Lesson, and Waterbending Lesson, unfortunately, common Learn cards aren’t very good, or at least they don’t make the cut in the surprisingly high Pauper power level. (The only notable exception, First Day of Class, is used exclusively in a Moggwarts combo deck.) I don’t know how many school-themed sets Magic has planned for the near future, but I’m afraid I will have to abandon my dreams of affordable education. After using New York twice as a setting, this is probably the next-closest Magic has gotten to depicting the real world.
I’m not sure why the designers decided to leave Learn out of this new set — probably to make it feel different from the original Strixhaven. Not all hope is lost, however. There is another famous school coming to Universe Beyond, one where gifted children learn to use their powers for the good of the world. Maybe the next lessons we will learn in Magic: The Gathering will be about how to wear a yellow spandex costume.
