These bios were written by Annie Sardelis.
Annie Sardelis
(Vision Design – Lead)
Strixhaven school: Witherbloom
Shortly after working on the Duskmourn: House of Horror Vision Design team and a few Commander decks, I was back on main sets starting with this return to Strixhaven. I love the trope space of Strixhaven and the challenge of making school fun. Unsurprisingly, our explorations of mechanics about “doing your homework” did not get very far. I hope you enjoy this new iteration of this beloved setting.
Eric Engelhard
(Vision Design)
Strixhaven school: Quandrix
Eric, while leading Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, emerged from the sewers to lend us a hand. Having just worked on a set with five primary archetypes, he helped navigate the areas where our five schools could overlap for players to make Draft deep and interesting. Eric is also really good at Limited formats, which is a boon for being on the team, but bad for me in the MTG Arena queues.
Daniel Xu
(Exploratory Design, Vision Design)
Strixhaven school: Prismari
Daniel Xu is a wizard at designing rare cards. He pitched the first version of the cycle of legendary Elder Dragons that give your instants and sorceries a keyword. He also wasn’t afraid to design some of the craziest two-color instants and sorceries that Secrets of Strixhaven was hungry for. If I’m not sure a new mechanic can make for exciting high-rarity cards, Daniel is my go-to person to ask.
Dan Musser
(Vision Design)
Strixhaven school: Graduated!
Dan Musser worked as a manager and designer for Play Design. He was my study buddy when it came to filling out the vision file and balancing card rates. I learned a lot about how to build a set from scratch from Dan, which helped me gain experience to confidently step into the role of lead set designer (which you’ll see later this year)!
Mark Rosewater
(Vision Design, Exploratory Design – Lead)
Strixhaven school: Prismari and Silverquill double major
Mark and his team created a bunch of mechanics in exploratory design, including prepared spells which I instantly was drawn to. Having this novelty from the start allowed us to focus on what it means to create a return to Strixhaven that both matches players’ expectations and has a few surprises. Mark is great at navigating this balance through his experience and was a great mentor on my first return-to.
Lauren Bond
(Vision Design)
Strixhaven school: Silverquill
Lauren was the narrative design lead for Secrets of Strixhaven. As the creative behind the story arc culminating in Reality Fracture evolved, she worked with us to make sure we had a good set-up set and a great set to experience on its own merit. I love how Arcavios has evolved outside the walls of the school, and that’s in no small part due to Lauren and her team.
These last three bios were written by me, Mark Rosewater.
Mark Gottlieb
(Exploratory Design)
Mark started at Wizards many years ago as an editor but quickly transitioned to becoming a designer. He has led or co-led the design of numerous sets, including Mirrodin Besieged, Gatecrash, Commander (2013 Edition), Dragons of Tarkir, Aether Revolt, Streets of New Capenna, Jumpstart 2022, Murders at Karlov Manor, and Lorwyn Eclipsed. I always enjoy having Mark on my design teams because he has a very analytical mind and always approaches problems from a unique perspective.
JC Tao
(Exploratory Design)
I worked with JC on Unfinity. That was the first time I led a set design team, so I leaned on him to help with play balance. We started working on prepared spells in exploratory design, so it was nice having someone with play-balance experience to figure out how to balance cards that came with an extra spell.
Jacob Mooney
(Exploratory Design)
Jacob was on the Casual Play Design team. Social play is an important part of the game, so it’s valuable to have someone with that perspective when you’re exploring a new design space.
Trade Secrets of Strixhaven
As I wrote about last week, the original Strixhaven: School of Mages was a means to hit various ideas that had been floating around for a while in design. The set was a huge hit, and we knew we wanted to return pretty quickly. About five years is the shortest window for returns, and that’s only for very popular settings after we visit them for the first time.
When we do a return, there’s a spectrum of how close the return is to the original. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is an example of a set that veered pretty far away from the original, especially on a mechanics level. Return to Ravnica was a return that stuck pretty close to how the original was done. From the very beginning of exploratory design, we knew that Secrets of Strixhaven was going to be much closer to the Return to Ravnica end of the spectrum than Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
As is normally the case with a return, we start by looking at the major things the original set did:
Instants and sorceries matter
Double-faced cards
Enemy-color factions
Lessons and learn
Magecraft
College mascot creature tokens
Mystical Archive
We put each item into one of three categories:
1. Must Do
These items are core to what Strixhaven is about. If we’re returning to Strixhaven, these are essential.
2. Might Do
These are things that players generally liked and worked in Strixhaven: School of Mages, but they aren’t essential for a return to Strixhaven.
3. Won’t Do
These are things that weren’t popular or things we didn’t feel were important to bring back.
Instants and Sorceries Matter
(Must Do)
Magic has numerous settings with strong artifact themes, several with strong enchantment themes, and a few that care about lands. Strixhaven: School of Mages was known as the set that cared about instants and sorceries, and that’s not a theme we tend to build settings around, so it’s pretty core to Arcavios and Strixhaven’s identity.
Double-Faced Cards
(Won’t Do)
While Strixhaven: School of Mages did some novel things with double-faced cards, they were far from a highlight of the set. Yes, they did provide one way to get more instants and sorceries into a deck, but they brought along complications and just weren’t something we felt players would expect.
Enemy-Color Factions
(Must Do)
Like “instants and sorceries matter,” the enemy-color colleges are an iconic element of Strixhaven. Yes, we could visit other parts of Arcavios (and this set does that more than the last visit), but it would be hard to reference Strixhaven in the name without having the schools be a core part of the set.
Lessons and Learn
(Might Do)
One of the challenges of an “instants and sorceries matter” theme is finding enough ways to get the as-fan of instants and sorceries high enough to matter. Lessons and learn was one of the ways we did that in Strixhaven: School of Mages. After much discussion, the Vision Design team decided it was something we could do but not something we had to do. The learn mechanic requires a lot of structural support to work, and the set already had plenty of moving pieces to balance. We also realized that we could do Lessons as an instant and sorcery subtype without having learn in the set. And yes, we were aware that Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ was using Lessons.
Magecraft
(Might Do)
In Strixhaven: School of Mages design, we realized that there aren’t a lot of ways to make instants and sorceries matter. Because they never go onto the battlefield, there are less ways to interact with those two card types. Magecraft was the low-hanging fruit, which just cares about them being cast or copied. We said we’d look for other options, but magecraft was too obvious to not at least consider.
College Mascot Creature Tokens
(Might Do)
Another trick we used to make the “instants and sorceries matter” theme work was create more token-making spells than normal. These cards count as creatures but still up the as-fan of instants and sorceries. They also did a great job of helping differentiate the schools, as each school had its own unique creature token. We were interested in exploring other creature tokens and were pretty sure we wanted to have some, but it wasn’t a requirement.
Mystical Archive
(Must Do)
One of the biggest successes of Strixhaven was its bonus sheet of instants and sorceries, which all had new, flavorful art. We couldn’t imagine a return to Strixhaven without this popular feature. We did talk about the possibility of not doing it, but kept coming back to the fact that everyone would expect it, and its absence would be a big letdown to fans of Strixhaven.
That meant we had the following three categories:
Must Do
Instants and sorceries matter
Enemy-color factions
Mystical Archive
Might Do
Lessons and learn
Magecraft
College mascot creature tokens
Won’t Do
Hitting the Books
There were two major questions we had to answer.
How did we want to structure the set? Strixhaven: School of Mages did things differently from other faction sets. Did we want to repeat it?
We were doing an “instants and sorceries matter” set. What tools were we going to use to make it a viable theme?
The original Ravnica: City of Guilds was the first of the modern faction sets. In it, we gave each faction its own keyword that was only used by that faction. Strixhaven: School of Mages broke from that model. Instead of having a mechanic for each faction, it had a number of mechanics used by all the factions. The factions were differentiated not by the mechanics they used but how they used the shared mechanics in the set.
The Secrets of Strixhaven Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams spent a lot of time talking about whether we wanted to repeat that structure or use a more traditional faction structure. The Vision Design team decided to reuse Strixhaven: School of Mages’s structure. This decision changed in set design, which I will get into next week.
We spent a lot of time exploring other mechanics that cared about instants and sorceries but decided that magecraft did the best job of capturing what we wanted. We also spent a bunch of time talking about Lessons and learn. We wanted to try something different but were willing to explore the possibility of just using Lessons.
In the end, we were eager for a splashy mechanic that would enable an “instants and sorceries matter” theme that could go in all five factions. Though, it had to be something that each faction could use in different ways. Its ability to be contrasted between schools was important.
Before we continue our story, I want to restate something from the Strixhaven: School of Mages vision design handoff. I published this document with my commentary back in 2021 (Part 1 and Part 2).
Scrolls (A scroll is an artifact token. It can be sacrificed to cast a named instant or sorcery.)
Wild Scrivener
3GU
Creature — Human Druid
1/1
Flash
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield. Exile target instant or sorcery spell. Create a scroll token of the exiled spell.
T: Add one mana of any color.
Scrolls are artifact tokens that hold an instant or sorcery spell within them (much like the flavor of a scroll). You can sacrifice the artifact to cast the spell for its mana cost. The spell is then treated as if you had actually cast it, doing things like triggering spellcraft and allowing it to be copied or countered. Uncommon has a cycle of creatures that come with a scroll that is prefilled with an existing spell (all of which are fairly famous Magic spells). Rare has a two-color cycle and an artifact that allow you to create scrolls in various ways. The intent of scrolls is that it’s something splashy and new at a low as-fan and at higher rarities.
Of all the things that got removed during set design, this is the mechanic I was saddest to see leave. It’s super flavorful and playing in space that we really haven’t done much of outside of imprint. I like to believe that this concept led to the idea of the Mystical Archive, which is a great addition to the set. I’m going to keep this idea in my back pocket and see if I can find a future set where it fits well.
One of the things we get to do when we return to settings is revisit ideas we had last time that we didn’t get to do. For Strixhaven, that was scrolls. I was really enamored with the idea that certain cards had a spell baked into them. These could be instants and sorceries that you could cast to trigger magecraft and all the various mechanical things that cared about instants and sorceries. Both the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams for Secrets of Strixhaven were quite excited by the idea.
Our first attempt at what we called prepared spells (it was the name we handed off from vision design) were cards that had spells baked into them when you cast them. They functioned like exhaust abilities (meaning you could only do them once) but were actual spells that triggered magecraft. Our initial goal was to only do actual pre-existing Magic spells. But the more we worked with it, the more we realized that was too big of a constraint. Prepared spells had to be printed on the card, so we needed simple effects that weren’t overly wordy, and those aren’t as plentiful as you might imagine. We decided we could do some splashy reprinted spells at higher rarities, but the low-rarity prepared spells could do whatever we needed them to do.
The other thing we discovered as we designed prepared spells was that we needed to add hoops to getting them. Yes, some creatures could just enter and let you cast the spell, but some should make you jump through a hoop to get them. That allowed us to make much splashier prepared spells. Also, once we created a hoop, we could allow cards to reprepare their prepared spell, letting you cast the prepared spell multiple times. (You have to cast a prepared spell before a creature can become prepared again.) Since we controlled which creatures started prepared and which ones became prepared through game actions, we could control when you got to do a prepared spell once versus getting to do it repeatedly. That flexibility was important for making the mechanic work.
Both of my preview cards today have prepared spells, and both of them use iconic existing spells from the past. First up is Harmonized Trio.
▲ Click to Reveal Harmonized Trio
0052_MTGSOS_Main: Harmonized Trio
0317_MTGSOS_ExtRM: Harmonized Trio
Brainstorm was a common card in Ice Age, Magic’s sixth expansion. It was originally designed as a powered-down Ancestral Recall, but has gone on to be a staple in all the formats it’s allowed in. Harmonized Trio allows you to repeatedly cast Brainstorm but at a real cost (tapping three creatures).
My second preview card is Emeritus of Abundance.
▲ Click to Reveal Emeritus of Abundance
0145_MTGSOS_Main: Emeritus of Abundance
0339_MTGSOS_ExtRM: Emeritus of Abundance
Emeritus of Abundance is part of a mythic rare cycle of creatures with prepared spells that are iconic Limited Edition (Alpha) instants and sorceries. Regrowth was the very first card to let you get back any card from the graveyard. It was restricted for a while and sees play in many formats. Emeritus of Abundance gives you a Regrowth when you play it, and you can get more copies of it later in the game.
While prepared spells made it to print, there were a few other things that were handed off but didn’t make it into the final set.
Magecraft
Initially, we made generous use of magecraft. It showed up in every faction but in a way that matched the play pattern of that faction’s archetype. As I’ll talk about next week, magecraft went away but was replaced by a number of other mechanics that care about instants and sorceries being played.
Extra Credit
Extra credit was an ability that said, “If this wasn’t the first spell you cast this turn,” and gave you a bonus. One of the things we were interested in was finding other ways to reward you for playing spells. A common draft archetypes is “second spell matters,” where we reward you for casting a second spell. Extra credit was a tweak on this. Rather than just wanting you to cast two spells, extra credit wants you to cast it as anything other than the first spell. If you do, you get a bonus.
This is where we tried using Lessons. All the spells with extra credit were instants and sorceries with the subtype Lesson. There were no plans to include learn in the set, but we wanted Lessons to be compatible with Strixhaven: School of Mages. When we return to settings, we want to make sure cards from the return play well with cards from the original visit.
The other thing we liked about extra credit is that we enjoyed the flavor of trying to overachieve; it felt like a cool top-down school trope that we could capture through gameplay.
Drone Token
These tokens were 0/1 artifact creatures with “Sacrifice this creature: Add . Spend this mana only to cast an instant or sorcery spell.” Treasure has proven to be a popular addition to the game, but R&D often talks about whether we should have had Treasure produce colorless mana instead of any color of mana. As such, this led to us trying out a new artifact token that could be sacrificed for . Drones were inspired by Eldrazi Spawns tokens the core creature token in Rise of the Eldrazi. As they were designed primarily to help the blue-red Prismari college, their mana could only be used for instants and sorceries
Classes
Classes are an enchantment subtype that first showed up in Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms to represent various character classes from Dungeons & Dragons. Bloomburrow used them to represent different skills of the animalfolk. Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles used them to represent the different qualities of the various Turtles.
Using Classes to represent actual college classes seemed like a fun area to explore, so we designed a bunch in vision design. Sadly, they got knocked out to make room for other things in set design, but the Commander Design team did manage to include two in the Commander decks.
Class Dismissed
That’s all the time we have for today. Obviously, a lot changed between the vision design handoff and the final file. Next week, I will introduce the Set Design team and Commander Design team and walk through Secret of Strixhaven’s set design. As always, I’m eager for any feedback, be it comments on today’s article, any of the details I talked about today, 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, for part two.
Until then, may you find the Strixhaven school that speaks to you.