General (SOS) Secrets of Strixhaven

Nanonox

Nanonox

The way they seemed to juice these instant and sorcery payoffs, I will be tempted to support them properly. For that to mesh well with the artifact heavy structure of my current cube, cards that can bridge the gap between artifacts and instants and sorceries are going to be important.



This guy for example can let your artifact deck make a crap ton of mana for an X spell or something. Torrential Gearhulk lets you flashback an instant. Gleeful Demolition and Strike it Rich are centered around artifacts while being sorceries which is good for overlap.



And other Delirium (and adjacent) cards are going to like having that diversity in spells you cast (also a fun one to add to your Breach loop with Frantic Search).



Actual storm is a good way to have all your noncreatures work under the same umbrella.



Like storm, prowess is a great catchall mechanic (and friends).



Flurry and similar mechanics don't care what you are casting as long as you do it twice or more.



Artifact or instant and sorcery token makers will be valuable at cheating the amount of creatures you run. Likewise, creatures that happen to be artifact will be all the more important.

Any other bridges you can think of?
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT


I like the idea for the cycle! Each member grants instant and sorcery spells a unique returning mechanic. These cards definitely feel a lot more functional than their original counterparts from the first Strixhaven set, which don't work that well outside of Commander. By contrast, the new founder cycle feels balanced for 1v1 play, which is nice.

Unfortunately, I think the power level for these is a little low. I was hoping these would all be working in the Thundermaw Hellkite type of space as kind of a do-over for last year's fairly underwhelming Spirit Dragon cycle. Lorehold, the Historian is clearly the most playable of the cycle, existing at a tried-and-true rate for dragons. Quandrix, the Proof is in second place, although I think he is more limited in his applications since he costs so much to cast up front. Silverquill is third; I think the card is a little underwhelming but the design is clean. Prismari is fourth; I think the design has the "wow factor," but in practice seems semi-hard to use by virtue of costing 7 and then requiring you to storm off after the fact. Witherbloom, the Balancer is the fifth best in my opinion, the design is the least interesting, and it demands players to have a lot on board to do anything.

Overall, I like the concept for the cycle and the designs for Lorehold and Prismari, but I think they didn't quite get the balance right to make them all exciting. These are still leagues better than their original counterparts from all perspectives!
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

While I mostly agree with you, Train, I feel like Tanazir Quandrix is a reasonable card in normal Magic if you aren't too drunk on the powercreep sauce. A 4/4 flampler for {3}{G}{U} is a solid body, and turning your other creatures into 4/4s (or bigger) when you swing in feels like a cool finisher if your blue and green sections include a lot of little utility dorks. And hey, depending on your format the ETB might actually do something.

The other four need a specific enough deck that I don't think it's worth it to try to support them, but Tanazir's just a cool guy.

...

I feel like the new cycle falls into the :edh:trap of being expensive creatures that have to sit on the battlefield for a couple turns to not just be french vanilla?

I'd personally rank them {G/U} > {R/W} > {B/G} ={W/B} > {U/R}. Quandrix is pretty generically solid even if you aren't getting the "your spells have Cascade" benefit, Lorehold loses notional points because it's probably just going to be a (slightly) worse Thundermaw Hellkite unless you're playing it off curve, Witherbloom and Silverquill are essentially token payoffs that need to sit out for a few turns, and Prismari feels like it's specifically made for a weirdly finicky Sneak Attack or reanimator deck.

Honestly I kinda wish Prismari had been more like...

Prismari, the Inspiration - {2}{U}{R}
Legendary Creature - Elder Dragon
Flying
Instant cards in your hand have Splice onto Instant {U}{R}.
Sorcery cards in your hand have Splice onto Sorcery {U}{R}.
4/4

Sure, that card would be broken as hell, but something like that would work better mechanically with Opus and would have more of a "build your own creative masterpiece" vibe than "spam cheap spells to build Storm".
 
Humpty_Dumpty

Humpty_Dumpty

Interesting that the designers went back to cascade for Quandrix rather than the "fixed" discover.

I'm a bit disappointed that we aren't finding out about new Faculties at Strixhaven.
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

LadyMapi said:
While I mostly agree with you, Train, I feel like Tanazir Quandrix is a reasonable card in normal Magic if you aren't too drunk on the powercreep sauce. A 4/4 flampler for {3}{G}{U} is a solid body, and turning your other creatures into 4/4s (or bigger) when you swing in feels like a cool finisher if your blue and green sections include a lot of little utility dorks. And hey, depending on your format the ETB might actually do something.

The other four need a specific enough deck that I don't think it's worth it to try to support them, but Tanazir's just a cool guy.
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Tanazir always felt like he had too many words for a card that tends to eat Doom Blades fairly often. I feel like he loses the cool factor when a regular old Baneslayer Angel is has similar play patterns while also not being a short novel's worth of text.

But that's just me...
 
shamizy

shamizy

Pox is pretty sweet, but Prepared as a mechanic brings in memory tracking in paper that I'm just not going to expose my drafters to. It should be very fun for people to play with in Arena for the foreseeable future. This mechanic is basically that weird EDH offshoot where you could have a planeswalker commander and tie them to a "signature" spell card.

I'll definitely try these out in EDH at some point, but it feels wrong to me as a designer to offload this kind of additional complexity when it's not necessary.
 
Rusje

Rusje

shamizy said:
Pox is pretty sweet, but Prepared as a mechanic brings in memory tracking in paper that I'm just not going to expose my drafters to. It should be very fun for people to play with in Arena for the foreseeable future. This mechanic is basically that weird EDH offshoot where you could have a planeswalker commander and tie them to a "signature" spell card.

I'll definitely try these out in EDH at some point, but it feels wrong to me as a designer to offload this kind of additional complexity when it's not necessary.
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Just put a counter on the spell part if it is prepared or not? Or hide it with a piece of something if it is not prepared?
 
shamizy

shamizy

Rusje said:
Just put a counter on the spell part if it is prepared or not? Or hide it with a piece of something if it is not prepared?
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Personally just not something I'm interested in when +1/+1 counters are a thing in my draft environment.

It becomes way fiddly on a board state that's already complex with interactions and trinket artifacts to go through. Most of my players are typically seasoned veterans, but if people take time off or are new to Magic it's more of a hassle to explain mechanics that aren't clearly defined on a card. If this becomes a recurring thing that'll be different (like the Adventure mechanic or Ward ability), but I'd need more representation over the years before jumping in to it.
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Some neat cards from the Commander decks (it's kinda weird that they only made Classes for two of the colleges but whatever):


This feels like it hits the sweet spot of doing something incredibly powerful without being broken. What a cool Jackal Wizard.

shamizy said:
Pox is pretty sweet, but Prepared as a mechanic brings in memory tracking in paper that I'm just not going to expose my drafters to.
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I feel like Prepared is going to work best with cards like Naktamun Lorespinner where you're going to be both ready and able to cast the spell shortly after the creature becomes prepared. Stuff like Inspired Skypainter or Dirgur Focusmage probably isn't going to be worth the hassle in paper, though.


A weird but cool reanimator/clone guy.


Oh hey, green Ophiomancer! It seems like a good signal for Gx sac being a thing in a format, and if that doesn't come together it still does a serviceable enough job slowing down aggro.


Do we finally have enough pieces for the secret Pest archetype?!? (The answer is probably no.)


If you can look past the multiplayer wording, this seems like a neat Erratic Explosion variant.
 
T

The_Steve_Man

Velrun said:
What tf is this wording..

Sacrifice a creature, Discard a card.

I’m assuming it means ‘and discard a card.’

Right?

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The wording is consistent with how it's always been with things like this. Examples being things like cycling with Lorien Revealed or tapping a creature + paying mana with Grim Lavamancer. I'll admit the capitalization of Discard does seem weird, but it is consistent with other creatures with ward like Captain Howler, Sea Scourge.
 
EzPzJapanezy

EzPzJapanezy

Kinda can't help but chug my jug of Hater-ade for that Liliana.

The ward trigger is nasty, but idk how handy multi-casting Pox really is in this format? (and in most scenarios, a whole turn behind when an actual Pox would be played on curve) She doesn't produce any sort of tokens, doesn't draw any cards, hell they didn't even give her lifelink. Part of me would've loved the card if the creature portion was a bit more attuned to the aggro-Pox gameplan but prepared 'Smallpox' instead, more of a fun effect to let rip more than once anyways.

I will probably include her simply for redundancy at my size, but I'm not entirely happy about it. WCS her ward trigger is half a one-sided-Smallpox in disguise. Love the art at least.
 
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Nanonox

Nanonox

LadyMapi said:
60584e5b-4138-405b-bd02-612cf175184e.jpg

A weird but cool reanimator/clone guy.
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This is a cool design! Scrap Trawler and Emry look like a blast alongside it for example. Same with white recursion or escape/delve

It’s a cool one to use Phyrexian Dreadnaught with or Phlage and Kroxa at higher power.


LadyMapi said:
acca1fd4-6384-460e-905f-118f01aa76ed.jpg

This feels like it hits the sweet spot of doing something incredibly powerful without being broken. What a cool Jackal Wizard.
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This joins the ranks of cool callbacks like the uncastable suspend cards such as Wheel of fate.
 
TekLazar

TekLazar



The new charms are flipping sweet. They're perfect for a peasant power level band. I am already excited for Lorehold, but I think Witherbloom is the first of the Village Rites / Eviscerator's Insight variants to sacrifice permanents, so you can sacrifice clues, or roles, or lands, or whatever! (Actually, it's technically a little bit stronger than that because it's not an additional cost, so if your spell is countered, your whatever is not sacrificed. Truly an interaction that none of my players are going to understand.)
 
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